Dharma 101.1: Afflictive Emotions

We have all experienced anger, hatred, desire, jealousy and other such emotions many times throughout our lives. We often feel justified in our anger, for example, saying, “How dare they say that to me!” We spin an excited web in our minds about how stupid and unbelievable this other person is and plan various ways to tell them off or undermine their support among others. However, we rarely stop and notice that our own anger causes us suffering. It doesn’t feel good to be angry, yet we do it again and again. In the same vein, hatred, though it may give us some sense of purpose, is also suffering. Whatever we hate we want to destroy, but often cannot. If we try we may create new enemies in the process, or we may not have the means and so are consumed by unrequited hatred. Similarly, jealousy makes us feel inadequate and drives us to chase after shallow accomplishments in order to overcome this sense of failure. Desire is trickier. We think desire feels good because we can daydream about getting what we want, but if we can’t or don’t get it, it is suffering. If we get it, the joy in having it does not last, and we suffer. If we get it and then loose it, we must chase after it again, suffering it’s loss.

And yet we continue to reinforce our tendency to fall back on such responses to our experience, only leading to more suffering in the future. In the Dharma, we try to undo this process of developing such habits by accustoming our minds to respond with wisdom and compassion.

The first step is to notice when we indulge such afflictive emotions and remember that they are the cause of suffering. We should investigate how they are the cause of suffering. In the case of anger and hatred, for example, we should consider that these emotions are not caused by the actions and words of others, but by our own minds. If someone else had the power to put anger into our minds, they would have the power to do so consistently and to whatever degree they would like. However, we have all had the experience of suddenly not being bothered by some consistent action of another that usually really gets to us, or one day being really bothered by something that we hardly noticed before. This is proof that these emotions are a product of our own minds and not the result of someone else’s words or deeds.

In “The Way of the Bodhisattva” by Shantideva, it is written that our worst enemies are in fact our best friends. Our friends tell us what we want to hear, but our enemies teach us that which we still have to learn. Therefore, we should treasure our enemies as our friends and try to cultivate an awareness of their true Buddha-nature. The cultivation of this awareness is the cultivation of compassion and wisdom and will lead us to perfect, complete, precious enlightenment.

~Rinchen Gyatso
2003

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