Very bad.īut is this true? The Dalai Lama suggests there’s far more subtlety involved when it comes to emotions, including anger. Or you may have been told that if you’re angry, you’re not in the natural of mind. Or you may have come to believe that compassion means patience, tolerance, and forgiveness and doesn’t include anger at all. Or you may have spent years in a spiritual or religious organization where you were taught that anger-even a single moment of anger-should always be avoided or you’ll go directly to hell. But you may have been raised to believe that anger is always bad and you should never feel it. Within this, it is also possible to distinguish between two sub-categories: those emotional states that are destructive in themselves, such as greed, hatred, or malice and those states, such as attachment, anger, or fear, which only become destructive when their intensity is disproportionate to the situation in which they arise.” “Generally, we can define destructive emotions as those states which undermine our well-being by creating inner turmoil, thereby undermining self-control and depriving us of mental freedom. “So the important point to bear in mind is that these feelings are not destructive in themselves they become destructive only when their intensity is out of promotion to the situation, or when they arise in situations that do not call for them.” All emotions have destructive and non-destructive sides. Emotions aren’t harmful in and of themselves. It’s natural for feelings, including anger, to arise. For example, he says “…anger helps us repel forces that are detrimental to our survival and well-being.” The Dalai Lama explains that all emotions have an evolutionary purpose and a biological dimension – in other words, they’re natural responses to circumstances that appear in our lives.
But from a Buddhist perspective, mental states that involve an emotional dimension are seen, instead, as either beneficial or harmful. In the West, we see emotions as either pleasurable or painful and relate to them accordingly.
Can anger be a healthy response to unjust situations like the abuse that has occurred in Rigpa and Shambhala? Or should it be avoided at all costs? Let’s look at the Dalai Lama’s view on compassionate anger.
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