Who among us has not flared to sudden anger (perhaps accompanied by some indelicate international hand gestures), prompted perhaps by the actions of a rude driver yakking on his cell phone? Have we not all been roused to anger at news reports of child abuse or brutal murder or “ethnic cleansing”? That we are moved to anger by matters small and great, inconsequential and grave, is commonplace. Less common is knowing when, if ever, our anger is justified and what affects it has on our character.
And that being so, we should attend to Robert A. F. Thurman when he maintains that all anger is unjustified, merely adding to the total amount of evil in the world. Hearing him out, readers are likely to clarify at least a bit their own understanding of anger, whether or not they are persuaded by his central contention.
Anger is Thurman’s contribution to Oxford University Press’ series on the Seven Deadly Sins. A former Buddhist monk and a personal student of the Dalai Lama, Thurman holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Colombia University. But to understand and to be able to control anger is not merely an academic concern for Thurman. He confesses to having struggled with anger personally, and he believes that his felicity in this life and the next depends on successfully conquering anger.
Thurman’s contribution to Oxford’s series is part of a revival of interest in moral and intellectual virtues and the past masters of virtue ethics, including Aristotle, Plutarch, John Cassian, Evagrius of Pontus, Seneca, and Aquinas, among others. This revival has not, however, contributed much to cross-cultural analyses of central concepts of virtue and vice as they find expression, for example, in the moral outlooks of Confucianism, Buddhism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, Stoicism, and Nietzscheanism. Although virtue terms such as “compassion,” “generosity,” and “courage,” and vice terms such as “greed,” “folly,” and “anger” are common to various virtue traditions, they are seldom synonymous; they take on their distinctive conceptual shadings when set against differing metaphysical beliefs about human nature and the conditions for human flourishing. Unsurprisingly, the dramatic differences between Buddhist and Christian descriptions of the world and human nature are evident in their respective analyses of anger.
The first part of Thurman’s book discusses the growing problem of anger in contemporary Western culture, evident in road rage, outbursts of violence between players and spectators at sporting events, and in popular movies such as Kill Bill (which stars Thurman’s daughter, Uma). Here Thurman quickly surveys various Western accounts of anger—chiefly those of Aristotle, Seneca, and Jesus—in order to contrast them with the Buddhist view. Invariably, in Thurman’s telling, the Western views suffer by comparison. Of the God of Israel: “In the Jewish Bible, the angriest person around seems to be God himself.… He’s a real punisher.” Jesus fares somewhat better, if a distant second to Buddhist sages. The Sermon on the Mount earns Jesus the compliment of having discovered what Buddhists already knew for half a millennia, while the insights of Christian monastics are “reminiscent of the Buddhist Abhidharmic psychology.”
Thurman acknowledges that the East has its share of angry deities—Indra and Kali among them—and that Eastern cultures too succumb to delusional thinking leading to anger, but he nevertheless thinks they have surpassed the West in cultivating an “Inner Science psychology” that allows mastery over anger:
In short, to the astonishment of the Western, militarism-lens-tinted historians, in the East there is a record of a real, progressive demilitarization of societies that were once just as violent as the Europeans or Americans, and of the attainment of relatively higher levels of peacefulness.
Since Thurman doesn’t specify, we can only guess what countries he is talking about. North Korea? China? Vietnam? Burma? Cambodia? Japan? All of these nations and their cultures have been deeply influenced by Buddhism, yet none seems to fit Thurman’s description.
The second part of the book offers a running commentary on numerous passages of the Buddhist sage Shanideva, through which Thurman offers a sustained prescription for overcoming anger’s grip on one’s thoughts and behavior. Buddhist psychology, Thurman tells is, translates the Sanskrit dvesha as the compound “hate-anger,” which captures the more conceptual aspect of intense dislike along with the “energetic aggression” of anger. Thurman very briefly acknowledges that anger can be both good and bad depending on the objects or situations to which it is directed, but this acknowledgement isn’t put to work in later chapters, and indeed is contradicted elsewhere in the book. “Anger happens,” Thurman writes,
when irritation, annoyance, disapproval, and so forth suddenly burst into an irresistible impulse to respond in a harmful manner to the perceived source of those feelings. You are no longer the master of the mental, verbal, or bodily acts then committed. You have become the involuntary instrument of your anger.
Anger is likened to a “madness” or “insane fury.” Any degrees anger might be said to have are all beyond the boiling point, making the notion of “mild anger” oxymoronic. So defined, it is not surprising Thurman believes that “anger is inevitably destructive, never justified or useful.”
Let’s unpack the notion of anger to see how Christian and Buddhist concepts of anger differ.1 Anger consists chiefly of two parts: construing someone as having culpably injured or offended against you or things that matter to you, and an accompanying desire that the offender be punished for having so offended. Justifiable anger adds the requirements that you have correctly construed your circumstances, that your desire to see the offender punished is proportional to the gravity of the offense, and that you are in a position rightly to take offense.
Suppose as a parent you walk outside for the umpteenth time to tell your son and his friends not to conduct batting practice in front of the picture window. Minutes later you hear the shattering of glass and dash into the living room only to see kids, like so many illuminated cockroaches, skittering off in all directions, and your son standing there, bat in hand, guilt written all over his face. Your child’s having offended against you by blatantly ignoring your instructions, and your viewing him as a most worthy candidate for punishment, combine in the emotion of anger—in this case, justifiable anger.
Change either the structure of one’s concerns or the terms of one’s perceptual grasp of the situation, and one is no longer talking about anger. Your elderly neighbor across the street, relaxing on his front porch with a cold beer, watches the whole incident unfold. Far from being angry himself, he chuckles with mild amusement, relishing the fact that his own parenting days are behind him. While the neighbor’s take on what happened coincides with the parent’s, he’s not angry, for the structure of his concerns is not the same as the parent’s. It isn’t his kid; his orders weren’t ignored; nor will his pocketbook cover the cost of replacing the window. Similarly, imagine a perceptual shift: You hear the crash, anger rises quickly on the supposition that the kids are the culprits, but as you enter the living room, you see a dead duck lying on the living room floor, whose errant last flight ended badly for all. Almost instantly, you find that you are no longer angry, merely surprised, and also maybe even a little amused.
The physical accompaniments of anger are obvious. The veins in your neck pop out, your face flushes, your heart rate accelerates, and your blood pressure spikes. Paradigmatically, we feel our anger, though one mustn’t confuse anger with these bodily perturbations. These same bodily states, after all, might also accompany a roller coaster ride or the nail-biting climax of a playoff basketball game, but in neither case is one angry. Besides, if anger were identical to these bodily agitations, we could cure it with a couple of timely Valiums. But anger is not reducible to mere physical states. It is a spiritual problem. Moreover, one can sometimes be angry without feeling angry. One might retain a cool, brooding anger long after the physiological accompaniments are gone. Anger, contrary to Thurman, thus comes in degrees, from blind rage to a slow simmer, and lots of gradations in between.
Thurman’s contention that it is possible to eliminate anger completely from one’s personality follows from a Buddhist understanding of human identity. Anger, he tells us in chapter 5, is rooted in the delusional belief in a substantial self, a self that is enduring and distinct from other selves and the rest of the world. So deluded, we believe that others get in the way of our gratifying our desires, and thus we are angry with them. The central insight necessary for combating anger, Thurman suggests, is to realize that the self whose desires you are at pains to gratify, as well as the others who interpose themselves between you and your desires, don’t really exist!
Long before David Hume’s similar experience, the Buddha peered inward and failed to locate a substantial self, finding instead just a succession of discrete, transitory, conscious episodes giving the illusion of belonging to some underlying permanent self. Buddhists often liken the self to a candle’s flame. Although the identity of the flame appears to persist over time, in reality the gas molecules constituting the flame are constantly changing. And just as a dying taper might be used to light another with no physical transfer, so a stream of causally connected transitory conscious events might lead into a reincarnated existence, and so on, ad infinitum.
The opposite of anger is love, Thurman tells us, but one cannot turn instantaneously from anger to love. One must go through a series of intermediary strategies of self-management whereby one cultivates successively greater degrees of patience and, ultimately, forgiveness toward those that offend against you. Chapters on “tolerant patience,” “insightful patience,” and “forgiving patience” outline the progression.
Tolerant patience allows one to bear up well under frustrations, to view them as occasions to become inured to the world’s enticements. One must do more than merely endure, however, one must learn to reconstrue the circumstances that arouse anger. Again, the Buddha’s core insight proves crucial. One must, says Thurman,
see through the reified perception of free agency… and see things as the inconceivable network of impersonal causes and conditions. The network of interconnected things and processes lack any personalizable agency that intends you harm and so have no real target for your anger that you can consciously pick out as the ultimate source of your suffering and so realistically gain happiness by destroying.
In this view, each “mechanical phantom,” as Shantideva refers to persons, is but the inevitable outgrowth of inescapable karmic causes stretching back to previous lives.
Thurman anticipates the obvious rejoinder: Why should I bother disciplining anger if I and the one who offends against me are ultimately unreal? While neither of us exists “absolutely,” we do exist “relatively,” says Thurman. And while we don’t have substantial selves or souls, we do have “relative souls” that need to be tended pretty much as do real souls. Thurman doesn’t unpack the notion of a relative self and soul, but they might be thought of as analogous to an amputee’s “phantom limb”; while there really isn’t a leg, we nevertheless feel as though there is one, and it causes us to suffer, and thus must be tended to despite the absence of a real leg.
“Forgiving patience” arises out of the further realization that not only is there no difference between the self and the others who provoke our anger but that “they are merely the creation of our own negative actions in previous existences. We should be angry only with our own negative evolutionary actions.” The yahoo who just passed me on the road, horn blaring, aforementioned hand gestures in angry display, all because—or so he supposes—I am creeping along at the speed limit, is really angry because I mistreated him in a past life, not because I interfered with his getting to work on time. “So,” Thurman explains, “we not only are not to be angry with them,” those maddening others, “we should feel remorse that we affected them so negatively in the past, which conditioned their ending up in such a state as their present one. The deeper cause of his harmfulness toward you is your harmful actions and anger toward him in previous existences.”
But if my fellow-commuter’s anger is due to my having mistreated him in a past life, perhaps my anger in a previous life was conditioned by his having mistreated me still further back in evolutionary history. Just so. Hence I should take our confrontation as an occasion to practice transcendent virtue, returning love and forgiveness for hate: “Thus, an infinite vicious cycle of enmity and injury is ended… when the bodhisattva does not react to injury, but embraces the harming person with patience, love, acceptance, forgiveness, and even appreciation.”
At first glance, Thurman’s Buddhist treatment of anger appears to have many points in common with its Christian counterpart. Anger often disrupts human relationships, seriously harming those in whom it becomes habitual. Every Christian who squarely faces his own sinfulness will find the ground on which he condemns another a bit slippery. Virtually every occasion of my being angry at another can be correlated with my having offended someone else in similar ways. And so on. The doctrine of non-self, however, undermines much of the common ground.
It is metaphysically absurd for one non-entity to get angry with another non-entity.
For Christians, both divine and human anger consists of a person seeing another as having culpably offended against one, and as deserving of punishment. But if, in reality, neither offender nor offended exists, then anger (like other emotions, for that matter) isn’t a genuine part of one’s emotional personality, since there is no enduring personality to which it belongs. It is metaphysically absurd for one non-entity to get angry with another non-entity. Buddhist anger becomes some sort of odd emotional simulacrum of genuine anger that arises out of the transitory continuum of discrete mental episodes that Thurman calls a “relative self.” If the doctrine of non-self is true, anger is not real, but is swept away with a single metaphysical stroke.
Thurman is correct to think that emotions can be irrational. To be afraid of air travel while simultaneously believing it to be the safest form of transportation is to have an irrational emotion. But Christians deny that we necessarily err about the central terms of our construals when angry; there really are enduring persons who have offended against us. So whatever emotion Buddhists experience (in Thurman’s account) is not anger as conceived of by Christians, but rather some distant analogue thereof.
Christians who reflect on God’s anger over the infidelity of his people Israel—and Jesus’ scourging of the moneychangers in the temple—will probably dispute Thurman’s claim that anger is never justifiable. Christians thus adapt their concept of anger to these divine exemplars and, despite our sinfulness, strive, albeit imperfectly, to imitate them by ensuring that our anger is righteous. Thurman’s contrary view seems to lead to the implausible conclusion that the Jews in the concentration camps were really reaping their just deserts for having injured Hitler and his Nazi cohorts in a past life. Such an outlook depreciates both the true sufferer and his justifiable anger.
Thurman claims that Abhidharmic “clear science” psychology has superior resources for gaining mastery over anger. Christians, he says, “don’t try that hard to challenge anger, since they believe God models anger… and that it would be the sin of pride to think they could alter their own nature.” But Thurman’s summary of the Christian view is flawed. Yes, Christians admit that they need God’s help to conquer anger. And it’s true that Christians think forgiveness is available for sins of anger that one truly repents of. (How superior, to my mind, to the notion that every occasion of anger will cling to you in the next life as inescapable karmic debt.) But it is fatuous to claim that Christians generally fail to take anger seriously. Recall that just anger requires that the one who is angry is in an appropriate position to get angry, and on many occasions we are not suitably situated. It is simply not our job to judge and punish all the persons in the world who, for whatever reason, provoke us to anger. To think otherwise is to arrogate to ourselves a prerogative only God possesses, and this makes vicious anger a very serious matter indeed from a Christian perspective—hence, for example, St. Paul’s injunctions against this sin.
In sum, while Thurman’s book provides a useful opportunity both for cross-cultural analysis of central moral concepts and for introspection, it will be viewed by those who do not share his Buddhist assumptions as an idiosyncratic treatment of a traditional deadly sin. Unless one shares his doctrines of reincarnation and the unreality of the self, one cannot accept his analysis of anger, his account of how anger adversely affects us, or his remedy for conquering anger. For a detailed analysis of anger that more closely conforms to Western philosophical and religious assumptions, one must look elsewhere.
1. Here I am indebted to the work of Robert C. Roberts. See his Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 202 ff.
W. Jay Wood is professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author of Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous (InterVarsity).
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