Student questions on translation points

Ken: As we’ve done in previous meetings, let’s take a look at any conceptual points or translation points that you’d like to inquire about. Randy?

Randy: In verse 20, I understand the opponent inside, which is one’s own anger. What’s the opponent outside? Is that someone else’s anger?

Ken: It’s anybody you’re fighting with. For me: insurance companies, computer support people, the cable guy … [Laughs]

Student: Voicemail.

Ken: Sometimes students [laughs]. That make sense to you?

Randy: The opponent makes sense. The subdue …

Ken: Well, yes. It’s interesting because Art sent me an email saying, “What’s the subdue business?” The word in Tibetan, in both cases it’s different forms of ‘dul ba (pron. dul wa), which is related to the word for discipline or to tame. You could say tame actually, but to render not harmful; it doesn’t necessarily carry the connotation that subdue tends to in English, which is to bring under your power. Though I suppose tame does have that idea as well.

Nava’s just given me this: to conquer and bring into subjection, that’s not it. To bring under control, especially by an exertion of the will, that’s probably closer to it. To bring under cultivation, definitely, it’s from the Latin—from the Middle English, but originally from the Latin—to lead under, which has actually the same route as seduce. Thank you. So, I’m certainly open to an alternative word. I don’t think we’ll use the word seduce. That was a joke if anybody was interested. [Laughs] Pardon?

Student: You used tame before.

Ken: I have a problem with tame. I get a picture of a master of ceremonies in the center of a circus with a whip. Tame—and I may be quite wrong—like you tame a horse; for some reason it carries for me an implied sense of force. Julia?

Julia: There’s a beautiful book called Bandoola about the man that introduced different methods of elephant taming into the plantations in Burma, where he used kindness and gentleness as reward system of training for elephants. So, that’s not force. That’s more encouragement in a direction.

Ken: Right. When I say force, I’m thinking of you’re bringing something under your will, which is …

Julia: Oh yeah.

Ken: Because you have the same verb being used to describe what buddhas do to sentient beings: sangs rgyas khis sems can thams cad ‘dul ba (pron. sangyé kyi sem chen tam chä dul ba). It’s the same word essentially, and it’s often translated as tame sentient beings. Well, I don’t want to be a tame sentient being. Thank you. [Laughs] Michelle?

Michelle: Well, I agree with you that it does have this kind of inherent quality of superiority. But along the lines of what Julia said, the first thing I think of with the word tame is the Little Prince, when the Little Prince meets the fox and the fox says, “You must tame me.” And then says something to the effect of, “And then we will be friends forever and ever.” But he instructs the little prince on how to do that.

Ken: Okay. Yeah.

Michelle: So, it is very much a case in which the being that is tamed does not give up his own power.

Ken: In that context, yes. Okay. John?

John: Yesterday morning I got halfway down the street to go way out past the 405, and realized that I didn’t have my wallet with me. And I turned around and came back because I don’t like to go off without a driver’s license. I couldn’t find it anywhere and I just broke down and had a total shit fit.

Ken: A temper tantrum.

John: A temper tantrum. Spoiled little boy couldn’t get what he wanted because he was delayed. At any rate, I realized that having come down from the retreat, I stopped at Whole Foods way out in Monrovia, I guess—wherever it is out there—and had left it there. [Laughter] What I realized from that was that I really was looking, still looking for pleasant things to happen for me, instead of accepting the challenge of not having it all my way. So, where was that? What would that anger be called?

Ken: Well, that’s the opponent inside, isn’t it?

John: Yeah.

Ken: Okay, so we have subdue, tame, maybe there are other possibilities. We can come back to that, but you’re clear about the meaning, are you Randy? Okay. And I want to come back to this verse and talk about its meaning at some depth, but I’d like to continue and make sure that all the translation or conceptual points are cleared up first. Any others in any of these three verses? Michelle?

Michelle: In verse 22, the word fixations. I always wonder about that word, where that comes from. In my other little translation here it uses the word duality, which seems different than fixation.

Ken: Yeah. What’s the whole translation you have there?

Michelle: Appearances are one’s own mind. From the beginning mind’s nature is free from the extremes of elaboration. Knowing this, not to engage the mind in subject-object duality is the bodhisattva’s practice.

Ken: I was curious if they put subject-object in there. I mean, if I want to be really fussy, subject-object duality is like a little redundancy. But the phrase in Tibetan is bzung ‘dzin (pron. zung dzin). Both words essentially mean to hold or take hold of. fbzung is to take hold of an object out there, or having taken hold of an object out there, you cling to a subject in here. So, the key point in bzung ‘dzin, it refers to this dual process of fixing an object out there as something real, and fixating something inside as something real. So, the actual word in Tibetan is to hold, to take hold of, and that’s why I used fixation. They translated bzung ‘dzin as subject-object duality. Nothing really wrong with that, except it loses that sense of fixating, which is why I put that in there.

Student: Is it the same as attachment then or similar to?

Ken: Well, in the larger picture, yes, but more precisely this fixating on subject-object is the basis of attachment. Okay. Deborah had a question.

Deborah: I have a little confusion over the first line of 22.

Ken: Whatever arises in experience is your own mind?

Deborah: Yes. Some of the other translations in the Dalai Lama’s commentary indicate that it’s merely what mind and delusion creates, but I’m also reminded of “my experience is true being.” The line I just don’t get: is experience not true being? Is this all in your mind? What’s going on here?

Ken: Yes. [Laughter]

Deborah: Thank you.

Ken: Okay. The Tibetan says: Whatever arises, whatever appears, that is one’s own mind. That’s what the Tibetan says literally. Now, whatever appears has a fairly wide range of meaning. Ordinarily, we think that our perspective is that things appear to the mind, right? And the basic Buddhist perspective here is that: no, nothing appears to the mind, whatever appears is the mind.

Probably some schools might say that—because they use the word sems (pron. sem) here, which is citta (pron. chita) in Sanskrit, it’s the word for mind—they mean the delusional mind. But to me that is reading something that isn’t really in the Tibetan. That would be like a particular tradition’s commentary on it. But the idea that whatever appears is the mind. That’s a very important point in Buddhism and I want to talk more about that when we start talking about reflection. That is what it means. Where do you want to go from …

Deborah: How does that relate to: “Give me energy to know that experience is pure being”?

Ken: There are various ways into this, but I’ll take one that is used all the time just to be safe. First, we come to understand that what arises as experience is mind. Secondly, then we look and say, “What is mind?” And when we look at mind, we see no thing there. It’s empty. And then we look at … “So, everything’s empty.” What’s that knowing? And that’s where you begin to get into pure being.

This is a verse that Bokar Rinpoche taught me a very long time ago, which I liked. That’s why I brought this along this evening:

After the awareness that there is nothing other than mind
(That means all experience is mind.)
Comes the understanding that mind too is nothing itself.
The intelligent know that these two understandings are not things.
And then not holding onto even this knowledge, they come to rest in the realm of totality.

Pure being. So, there are actually four levels of understanding there. And when it says in our prayers, “Give me energy to know mind, pure being,” it’s telescoping those four levels of understanding. Okay. Julia?

Julia: Yeah, I had a similar, well, a related question in verse 21. “Any object that you attach to”?

Ken: Yes.

Julia: So, objects … could you elaborate on objects?

Ken: Verse 21, right? I had to put in object there because it says: “Whatever you attach to.” Let’s see. gang la zhen chags skye bai’ dngos po rnams (pron. gang la zhen chag kyé wé ngö po nam). Here it says, all …

Student: Things?

Ken: Yeah, all things, all substances which produce attachment is a little more literal. So, I just turned the English around.

Julia: That would include thoughts, such as the one that these two understandings are not things?

Ken: Yeah, and those are very subtle levels. But basically any time you regard something, you experience something as other than mind, you’re going to do one of three things with it. You’re either going to be attracted to it, you’re going to be averse to it, or you’re going to be indifferent to it. And then you go from there. And this verse is referring to the process of attraction. And in order to be attracted to something, you have to regard it as something other than you.

Julia: Why?

Ken: You can’t be attracted to something you regard is you. If you experienced it as you, how can you at attracted to it? [Laughs] No, no, no, no … but if you look …

Student: Subject/object … [unclear] narcissist.

Ken: Exactly. You’re viewing yourself as something you’re intensely attracted to, but it’s that alienation from yourself which is the problem [laughs]. And so you’re trying to feed it all the time. Okay? Any other translation or conceptual points?

Student: Yes. So, 21 refers not just to sensual pleasures, but to anything to which you attach?

Ken: Well, this is what we’re going to go through when we go through a deeper level of meaning, because at the outer level it’s referring to sensual pleasures, but then you start cutting down the meaning to the deeper level. So,, it is anything which you’re attracted to. And yeah, I’ll just leave it there for now. Okay. Anything else then, Nava?

Nava: I don’t know if this is the right time to ask, but I kept wondering, why on 20 when we are dealing with anger, he says, “master it with loving-kindness and compassion.” Shantideva spends a whole chapter of patience on, I mean, half of it on anger. So, why does he choose here loving-kindness and compassion as an antidote for anger?

Ken: Instead of?

Nava: Specifically, very specifically here.

Ken: Instead of patience, or something like that?

Nava: Yeah, maybe patience.

Ken: You’re probably going to have to take that one up with Tokmé Zangpo. Buddhism is very full of methods, and many methods can be used for many different things. It’s not one method for this and one method for that. It’s very rich. I would speculate that Tokmé Zangpo is speaking out of his own experience. This is what he did with anger.

Find a method that works for you

Ken: In the three-year retreat, first three-year retreat, when we got to the part of the retreat on taking and sending—and Rinpoche gave us two months on taking and sending—I did two weeks on loving-kindness and two weeks on compassion. Just the straight traditional meditations that you find in Jewel Ornament of Liberation. And that was really pivotal for me. It’s really tough meditations, but they’ve really shifted something in me very deeply.

And I know that because I got a note from my wife, who was in the women’s retreat, saying, “People say you have changed a lot, and you’re much easier to live with now.” [Laughter] Nobody told me in the retreat, they’d all sent notes to the women’s retreat, “Thank god Ken’s been doing these meditations.” [Laughter] And then I did the last month on taking and sending, and I found that experience of really working with the four immeasurables changed my whole relationship with taking and sending. And because of that, almost everybody that I work with, I really encourage them, and direct them to do a very solid training in the four immeasurables before they do taking and sending.

In the second three-year retreat, when we got to this part of the retreat, our retreat director gave very, very different instructions on—actually what I felt was—a somewhat unrelated meditation to everybody. And, one day I was talking about this with him, and in a really good, nice bodhisattva way, I was arguing quite vociferously that he was screwing these people up by not having them do the four immeasurables.

And he listened to me very patiently. And he said at the end, “Ken, those meditations worked for you. They don’t work for me at all.” And if you read Dalai Lama, when he discusses the cultivating loving-kindness and compassion, he says, “These are the traditional meditations. Those don’t work for me at all. But here’s something that one of my teachers gave me; this one worked for me.”

So, one method doesn’t work for everybody. Tokmé Zangpo is saying—he’s speaking out of his experience—”This is how I came to work with anger. Other people can do it with very different techniques.” So, there isn’t just one right way of doing things. That’s why we have a multiplicity of techniques, because you need to find the ones which actually work for you.

It’s one of the reasons why, when I’m working with students, if they say, “This isn’t working, I’d rather do it this way.” We talk about it very seriously, and explore, and I’ll explore their experience. And if it seems to be working, I will go with what they feel is working for them, rather than saying, “Well, no, you have to do it this way.” I think that’s quite important. Does that help? Anything else?

Joe: Can I just go back to fixation again? Whenever I come across it, I sort of get a blank spot, I think because somewhere I think it’s a piece of jargon that isn’t in my language. Am I right in thinking what it actually means is something like a hardening around this idea of self and other or subject/object?

Ken: At this point, for us, it is so fast and so immediate we don’t even notice it. I mean, you look at that and you’ve already, even as it arises, you’ve seen it as something else. Right?

Now when we’re in retreat, or we’re meditating a lot, experience can shift, and the way we experience things can, and does, change. So, we actually experience whatever is arising. When we’re looking at it, we see, “I’m looking at my mind.” It’s a very different experience. And so that’s one step away from this fixation. But when you say it’s a hardening, yes, it is a hardening, but it’s just like that [finger snap]. And you can’t possibly get at this with the intellect. It’s far, far more powerful than the intellect. The intellect actually is almost a manifestation of this, because when a thought arises, you see it as a thought which is coming to your mind. You don’t experience the thought as your mind. You follow?

Joe: Yeah.

Ken: That’s how immediate it is. So, yes, it is a hardening, but what are you trying to understand here?

Joe: I’m trying to understand what the noun fixation, what process that indicates. I can understand. I experienced things as subject and object. Is that in itself the fixation?

Ken: That’s a manifestation of the fixation, yes.

Joe: Okay.

Ken: Yeah. The fact that you experience things as subject and object is de facto the fixation in operation. And when the mind grows quiet and clear, and that’s not too hard actually, then that fixation can release temporarily, and you’ll experience things in a different way. You won’t experience them as subject/object. And then when there’s a certain level of insight, then there’s a much deeper shift. And then for really trained people who are very proficient and trained very deeply, they experience the arising of experience the same way that we would experience a dream if we knew we were dreaming. So, it’s a very different way of experiencing the world. That make sense? Okay. Yes?

Student: What are some of the other methods to deal with anger besides the four immeasurables?

Ken: He is particularly interested. Okay. Well, let’s move to the reflection part, reflection and meditation part of this then.

Student: Can I ask a question before we do that? In your explanation to Joe just now, I would have thought that fixation is an outgrowth of the subject/object experience, not the cause of it.

Ken: No. It is the subject/object experience. That’s what Kate’s question was about. The bzung ‘dzin, it’s the fixing of subject/object. And it’s the operation of that framework in our experience that’s being referred to here.

Working with anger

Ken: Now, the first verse that we’re looking at is working with anger. I’m going to say seven or eight different methods of working with anger off the top of my head. There’re probably more, but that’ll probably be enough for our purposes this evening. Yes, Peri? [Unclear] all of which I failed yesterday.

I’m going to start at the top. Remember a few times a couple of weeks ago, we talked about three levels of working with things? So, the first level, which is the direct awareness, is that as anger arises, you experience it as clarity. Now, it’s not that as anger arises, you think, “Oh, this is the clear aspect of my mind.” That’s nothing.

It’s that you’ve trained so deeply that as anger arises, you experience it as clarity, which actually, I’ve had a couple of times. And it is really quite interesting because you feel the surge of energy and everything just becomes totally clear. And there isn’t any anger in you. And that’s basically the mahamudra/dzogchen level, and it comes from training very, very deeply in that.

The second level is to experience anger as something which brings energy into your mind, into your experience, and recognize that, or relate to that energy as just that arising of energy, seeing it as a manifestation of the awake aspect of mind. This is basically what you do with yidam meditation. I don’t want to go too much into that because it’s a little too complicated for this evening.

The third level—I’m going to give you four techniques at this level—is working with the emotional component. Now, the four techniques are based on the four ways of working: power, ecstasy, insight, and compassion. And each one works a little differently. The power technique, as the anger arises in you, you stand right in the experience of the anger arising, and you cut your involvement with the anger and its projections. What you cut it with is attention.

Now, if you want a little taste of that, imagine some incident that irritated you in the last few days or week or so. Let it come to mind, and say to yourself, “I’m angry and I’m glad.” And what happens? You find all of the force goes out of the anger, right? It’s cutting it.

The second technique at this level is opening—it’s the ecstatic technique—it’s opening to the experience of anger. So, you can take that same incident, and just feel every manifestation of that anger in you. How do you experience it in your body? How does it affect your breathing? What are all of the emotional sensations connected with it? What are the stories that it spins and propels in your mind? Now, when you do that, what happens to the anger? Okay?

The third technique is insight. You let the anger arise, and you look right at it. What is it? And when you look right at it, what do you see? Anybody?

Student: Nothing.

Ken: Nothing. You don’t see anything. If you train, there you know, the anger is no thing. And if you’re trained in that sufficiently, that releases right there.

The fourth technique is compassion. I’m going to do a slightly different take on this one. What is the function of anger in our lives?

Student: To protect us.

Ken: Right. So, you look at that anger and you say, “What are you doing?” And it says, “I’m protecting.” Right? Now, how do you feel about the anger?

Student: Grateful.

Ken: Thus loving-kindness and compassion come quite naturally for the suffering that is inherent in the anger. Now, what happens to the anger? It releases because it is accepted. And that letting go of control—so you’re no longer regarding anger as the enemy—is the essence of the loving-kindness compassion approach. This is at a deeper level than one usually takes it. But that’s how you can work with all four of them.

Now, if you can’t do any of those things, then you come to—I guess it’s—the seventh technique; I said we’ve got seven or eight here. And that is patience. Just, “This is happening. Can’t do anything about it, don’t like it. I’m not getting very far trying to transform it, or just let it release, or anything like that. I will just sit here and grin and bear it, and experience it”. So, you aren’t acting on it. Okay?

Student: What about, what am I trying to oppose? The popping out of the hell realm? What am I trying to oppose with that?

Ken: Yes, that’s another technique. That is primarily about cutting through, or releasing, the projections. That’s about releasing the projections, which come out of the anger. And as you do that, you step out of the realm, and you find yourself, “Well, there isn’t actually any need to oppose anything here.”

Student: And does that fall into one of the four ways of working?

Ken: Well, actually it has elements of all four of them, asking those three questions.

Student: And saying, “I’m angry and I’m glad,” feels like opening, which makes me think of ecstasy. But it’s more of a sharp opening.

Ken: Yeah. You see, when you say, “I’m angry and I’m glad,” you’re stepping right into the experience of anger. That’s why I say it’s a power approach, rather than just opening to the experience. You’re just stepping right into it. Bang. Done.

Student: It’s a sharp turn.

Ken: It’s just a step. As you train in this, you don’t need to say, “I am glad.” You can just step right into the experience. Randy?

Randy: Since I’ve been home from the retreat, I’ve stepped into many situations where anger has arisen in the past, and it didn’t arise. I mean, I haven’t thought it through intellectually or through these things. It just hasn’t arisen.

Ken: Good.

Randy: No, I understand. Good. But would I be going through this unconsciously in some way or … ?

Ken: It’s more likely that because of the work we did in the retreat, that you are bringing a higher level of attention. So, what normally would’ve triggered reactions is just being experienced, and that’s the result of regular meditation practice. And doing retreat takes that up a notch. So, that what would for some people be irritating and annoying, it’s just experienced as something, and you just work with it, because you’re letting go of things inside much faster than you were previously.

Randy: Is that a technique?

Ken: Let’s be clear here. When we say a technique, generally speaking, we don’t mean something that we pull out of the hat, or pull out of our bag of tricks, in the moment. We mean something that we train in, so that when the situations arise, it just happens. It doesn’t require remembering. And this is what makes this approach to practice level difficult for many people to appreciate because they want something that they can remember to do. Well, we never remember to do it, because the reactions are always in operation. What we have to do is train in this, so that when those situations are provoked, our training just clicks in.

Randy: Like in sports, muscle memory.

Ken: And you can think of this as mind memory, or whatever.

Peri: Not to get too far off on the track on this, Ken, but on the second one, on the ecstatic technique, where you just had us do that little drill. I just went spinning much more deeply off into the anger.

Ken: Yeah. Now, when you try any of those four techniques at that level, you’ll find that some will work for you, and others won’t, in particular situations. There’s a lot to depend on our individual configuration. I would suggest that as you open to the anger, you find yourself spinning more and more into the anger, there’s something you’re holding onto. And that might be an interesting thing for you to explore. There’s another level of holding, maybe not to do with this situation, maybe to do with something else, where there’s a basic posture of opposition.

So, as Peri was suggesting a few moments ago, when you find yourself feeling that anger that way, you could ask yourself those three questions. What am I opposing? Do I need to oppose this? Is opposing called for at all? And you may find that what you’re opposing is very different from the ostensible, or apparent, source of the anger.

And I remember working with one person who was very, very impatient with assistance. And we went over this very carefully when he had blown up for absolutely no reason, no substantial reason. And what came out was that whenever an assistant screwed up, it resonated with his own fear of being incompetent. And that was his opponent, and that’s what he couldn’t experience. So, everything was a projection after that. Steve wanted to ask a question.

Steve: Thanks. Anyone want to hear a number off my new CD? [Laughter] Oh sorry, wrong place. It says, “If you don’t subdue the opponent inside,” as opposed to an opponent inside, and I’m curious about that.

Ken: Well, yes, the opponent inside is your own anger.

Steve: Is this implying that of all the different reactivities … I mean there’s fear, there’s doubt, there’s other opponents, or is …?

Ken: Oh, he’s not using opponent in the sense that we’ve used opponents in other contexts. He’s just saying, you have this anger coming up, and if you don’t subdue that, then it doesn’t matter what you do out in the world, it doesn’t matter how much force you exert, you’re never going to be free.

Steve: So, it’s not elevating anger to a greater relevance in reactivities, or emotion—

Ken: No, it’s about anger. Yeah, that’s right. Julia?

Julia: When I did that little mental exercise, I found the anger went away, but I was left with a huge amount of energy in my body. So, what does one do with that?

Ken: Pour it into attention. That’s your reward. [Laughter]

Julia: It wants to run off and do other things like eat chocolate cookies or dig the garden or—

Ken: Well, you can do that if you want. But basically, the aim in that kind of transformation technique is yes, you flip it like that. All of that energy is available to you, which was ordinarily locked up in the anger, and now you can just rest and let that power your attention. That’s what all advanced meditation techniques in the Tibetan tradition do, is that they transform an emotional energy into attention, or release emotional energy from being locked into reactive emotions. If you don’t use it for attention, guess what happens to it? It decays into other habituated patterns, such as chocolate. [Laughter]

Julia: And gardening. Thank you.

Ken: Okay. Deborah?

Deborah: One way of dealing with it is when the experience comes up that you know would cause anger and you sense the gap.

Ken: Okay.

Deborah: And then you don’t react because you’re in the gap. Where does that fit in? And how would that be explained?

Ken: Well, you just explained it. And that’s coming from our work at the retreat, right? That stepping into that gap is basically, that’s almost at the level of the mahamudra/dzogchen techniques that I was describing. You sense it’s arising and you immediately step into what is opening right there, which is the gap. [Unclear from student] Good. And when you pick things up that early, they’re much easier to take care of, and the transformation happens more smoothly and is less disruptive, and so forth. And that’s an excellent way to practice.

Kate: I just want to clarify for myself that what it seems to me is that anger is always caused by opposing experience or fighting experience. So, therefore, anger is always a reactive pattern?

Ken: Yes. Anger is a reactive pattern, because in anger you see the object of anger as something other, and there may be a very, very good reason for it. Now at the Vajrayana level, there’s another way of looking at it, and that is that anger is the intelligence of the universe telling you that a boundary has been violated. And so now you can look, okay, where is the boundary being violated? And then you can seek to address that in the appropriate way. The comparable one for desire is that desire is the intelligence of the universe telling you that a connection has been broken. Suddenly, I want that. When the connection’s there, there isn’t any sense of desire. There’s just a flow of energy and response. But when it’s broken, then there’s that wanting.

Student: Along the lines of what Kate just said, isn’t there such a thing as righteous anger? It seems that I’ve read about that in some of my readings and an anger that comes up in response to the mistreatment of other beings, for example.

Ken: Well, you see other beings being mistreated, other people, whatever. What’s the first thing you feel?

Student: Compassion.

Ken: Right. First thing you feel is compassion. Now, when does the anger arise? This is important.

Student: Doesn’t it come up when you find an opportunity to deal with what’s causing the suffering?

Ken: I would say it arises when you realize in your position you can’t do anything about the cause of the suffering, so you now fall out of the compassion into anger. And then you try to defend it by calling it righteous anger.

There was a person down in Orange County back in the early 90s. And he was expressing his anger at the homeless people. And he was training with me, and taking and sending at the time. So, he was experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance, shall we say. I said, “Why are you angry with the homeless? They are the products of the system. If you want to help the homeless, why don’t you call the mayor? You’ve got influence here, and put pressure on him.” And moving from anger at the homeless, because they were disturbing his sense of what his community should look like, to actually taking action was way too big a step for him.

And so anger comes up because you feel impotent and you’re trying to control the situation. And then it’s defended as righteous anger, which is used as a justification for violence. It’s not ever. And once you go down that road, you’re going down the road of fundamentalism, terrorism, taking what is essentially compassion, turning it into an ideology where now the ends justifies the means. And compassion goes out the window, and you’re just trying to make the world conform to how you think it should be. Does this make sense to you? Is that too strong?

Student: I could just see a situation where someone’s doing something wrong.

Ken: You could see a situation?

Student: A situation arises where someone is harming a child, or a dog. And you are standing right there, and compassion arises for the dog or the child, and then anger at the person to move them away.

Ken: One of my students applied to work with abuse situations. The person that was going to admit her to the training said, “You walk into a room. You see a child bloodied and beaten, crying on the floor, and you see the mother with her hands on the sink, holding it. What do you do? My student said, “I’d go to the child.” The intake person said, “You’re not ready to do this yet. You go to the mother.” [Pause]

Student: Could you say a little bit more about the Vajrayana anger?

Ken: Vajra anger: rdo rje khro bo zhe sdang chod (pron. dorjé tro wo zhé dang chö). Yeah. Okay. The Vajrakilaya Tantra in the root tantra text is: zhe sdang rdo rje khro bo chod (pron. zhé dang dorjé tro wo chö); zhe sdang is the word for anger, rdo rje is the word for vajra. So, vajra anger. khro is another word for anger, and chod is the word for cut, so it is vajra anger cuts anger. Anybody think of another word for anger for me?

Student: Wrath.

Ken: Okay. We could say: vajra wrath cuts anger, better.

Now, Kongtrul, in his explanation of this, says that: “What is vajra anger? It is compassion. And what is compassion? Compassion is the clarity of mind itself,” or mind nature. He goes on to say that: “Compassion and anger are mutually incompatible in the same way that heat and cold are incompatible.” You can’t have something that’s both hot and cold. You can’t have both anger and compassion at the same time. This doesn’t mean getting angry. What it means is that as the situation arises, the energy that would normally go into anger, arises as the clarity of mind. You see exactly what needs to be done, and that is the manifestation of compassion.

So, in the example that I was just giving, you come into this abuse situation, and you see what needs to be done, which the mother is completely messed up because she was angry enough to hit her child. And she’s also now upset with the child. She’s totally alienated from everything. You get her present so that she can make peace with the child. But if you go to the child first, you increase the alienation of the mother, and you actually make the situation much more difficult to work with.

And this is really hard stuff, and I’m just using that as one example. When you encounter situations in which—well, this goes back to a discussion we were having in another context—in an oppressor/oppressed situation, it’s only going to stop when the oppressor stops. So, that’s where you need to direct the energy. It’s how you get the oppressor to stop? And from a Buddhist point of view—this is a little hard for people in our culture—the oppressed is reaping the effects of previous bad karma. The oppressor is creating bad karma. Who do you have more compassion for? You follow?

The oppressor’s at the beginning of the whole karmic process is creating a whole world for him or herself, which is going to be imbued with suffering for the oppressed. Even though it’s very, very unpleasant, it’s the end of the karmic process. And this is a very, very different way from the way that we normally view situations. But it’s very powerful.

Student: I have a much less profound anger question. So, my house is broken into during the retreat. And I come back. And I go to Home Depot, and I buy new hinges, and a much better quality strike plate, and floodlights with a motion detector. And my landlord comes over and installs them for me. And my landlord basically believes that his responsibility is to collect rent checks, and nothing else. And so I say, “Would you like to reimburse me now or would you like me to take it off the rent?”

And he says, “I’m not paying for this. I installed it. Why would I pay for the materials? And besides, the house was never broken into when I lived here.” Is there a place for righteous anger in this?

Ken: What would righteous anger accomplish?

Student: Given that the shovel that they used to break open the door was right there? [Laughs] I seriously considered using it.

Ken: I’m sure I can relate, but …

Student: No. Obviously it would not have accomplished anything. But it didn’t stop me from feeling both righteous and angry.

Ken: And I had a similar experience last night myself, and I didn’t handle it very well. I was very frustrated, and very angry, and I wasn’t living this stuff right at that moment. We get angry when we feel that we are weaker than what we are opposing. I love telling CEOs that. It takes them a little while to get to it. I said, “So, you feel weaker than your direct report?”

“No!” [Laughs] So, we have a very interesting discussion.

It’s basically, if you put it into the five elements, we feel weaker than what we’re opposing. We feel isolated, rejected. And so we get angry in order to get out of that experience. Now, what I have found very helpful when I’m in situations that are causing me frustration is: “What am I trying to accomplish here? What is the result that I actually want?” And that allows me to engage the situation completely. And when I engage the situation completely, I’m not angry. Because when you’re angry, you are necessarily regarding yourself as separate from the situation. The situation’s there, and I’m here. When you engage the situation completely, you’re no longer separate from it. And so now it just becomes a matter of working strategy. Susan.

Susan: I don’t know if this directly relates to what we’re talking about, but a couple of classes ago, when we were discussing taking and sending, and you had mentioned that sometimes it’s hard if there’s something inside of you that you don’t know it’s opposing you, but you’re not quite sure you can overcome it. It kind of relates to what we’re talking about now. An experience that I had a few weeks ago, my nephew was taken by surprise and attacked and brutalized. And I didn’t know how I could do taking and sending with the attacker because I wasn’t feeling much compassion.

I think I said at the time that I felt like I was sort of in two worlds, that one part of me kind of saw it, but the other part of me didn’t feel it. The other part wanted revenge or whatever. But then after hearing what you had to say, I realized that I was not regarding the attacker’s suffering as having the same value as my nephew’s suffering. And so once I saw that I needed to do that, it really did shift everything. And it also made me think of the line, “Rest in great equanimity without preference or prejudice,” because I definitely had preference and prejudice in that situation.

Working with desire

Ken: That’s right. Okay. So,, we’re talking about anger here. Let’s turn to desire. Anger in many ways is easier to work with than desire, because most of the time it is a less pleasurable feeling, and the results of anger are less pleasant. Desire can be quite difficult. So, he writes:

Sensual pleasures are like salty water:
The deeper you drink, the thirstier you become.

37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, Tokmé Zongpo, verse 21