HHDL on Anger

I lifted the following from Michael Smith’s blog Kathmandu for You [link] [text in brown, quoting His Holiness the Dalai Lama] since it sounds like a message I, personally, need right about now. The Bodhisatvacaryavatara [wiki link] is a more-proper name for Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way Of Life which I quoted in the prior post in this blog. I think that Shantideva's text is a splendid coming together of Buddhism and Integral.

I have also provided the bits of the Bodhisatvacaryavatara – as translated at the Berzin Archives, titled, there, "Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior" – that HHDL comments on.

Here’s what Shantideva wrote in “4.28” – that is, chapter 4, section 28 – in the Bodhisatvacaryavatara:

(28) Although enemies, such as anger and craving,
Have neither legs nor arms,
Are neither brave nor wise,
How is it that they’ve made me like their slave?"

Here, HHDL's comment, quoted in Kathmandu for You:

Attachment appears to you like your best friend, bringing you desirable and conducive things and situations. Anger appears to you as your bodyguard, keeping unpleasant experiences away. THEY ARE TRULY YOUR ENEMY!" (4.28) They are what brings us suffering in the end.

Shantideva in "6.41" - chapter 6, section 41:

(41) Having set aside the actual (cause of my pain), a staff or the like,
If I become enraged with the person who wielded it,
Well he, in fact, was incited by anger, so he's secondary (too).
It would be more fitting to get enraged with his anger.

HHDL's comment:

Even though you actually get hit by a stick, you get angry at the wielder of that stick, because you perceive the stick as a secondary cause and the wielder as the primary cause of you getting hit. In the same way, we should be angry with anger itself, because the wielder is the secondary cause and the motivating cause of anger is the primary cause of you getting hit. Therefore BE ANGRY WITH HATRED. (6.41)

Shantideva in chapter 6, sections 107-108:

(107) Therefore, I shall be delighted with an enemy
Who's popped up like a treasure in my house,
Without having had to be acquired with fatigue,
Since he becomes my aide for bodhisattva behavior.
(108) It's because of its having been actualized through this one and me (having met)
That a fruit of patience (comes about);
(So,) let me award it first to him,
For he was, like this, the (earlier) cause of my patience.

HHDL's comment:

"We should be happy and thrilled to have enemies in our daily lives. Without enemies, we have no chance to practice patience. In fact, our perceived enemies are the very cause of patience, which is also essential to the path of awakening." (6.107-08). It is just like Jetsun Milarepa's Aunt and Uncle. They truly showed him the kindest gift of being so extremely terrible to him that he was compelled to follow a course of events that lead him to practicing meditation so diligently that he attained perfect enlightenment in that very life.

This is an admittedly goofy aside on my part ... but I am wondering if Rowlings had Milarepa in mind when she wrote Harry Potter. Harry certainly had a terrible aunt and uncle [and cousin] which were helpful to him in motivating him to be diligent in pursuit of becoming an outstanding wizard.

Ay, Rowlings likely was not thinking of Milarepa. It is a standard in fiction [eg, Dickens, Cinderella] and life [eg, MLK, Bill Clinton, Doestoyevski] to be highly motivated as a result of difficulties. But it is rare, Buddhism's gift, to find compassion after being hit by a stick.