Buddhist Hell and Salvation:

Reflections on Anger

Rev. Hyonjin Ozmo Piedmont

HELL

The Tibetan Wheel of Life demonstrates very graghically the interrelation between  our consciousness, the fifth skandha, and our experience of the world.  At its hub are three animals, the cock, the snake, and the pig.  These represent the kleshas, or mental habits inherited from past conditioning, or karma, in this and past lives, manifesting as greed, anger and delusion.  Being attached to these three tendencies in our minds, we create our experience both literally and psychologicall of our world.  This is represented in the Wheel of Life by six realms: human, Titan, animal, hungry ghost, heaven and hell.  These worlds are created by our consciousness manifesting as literal worlds we can become reborn in after this life, or as moment to moment psychological experiences that are constantly changing between one realm and another based on external conditions and internal states of mind.  The hell realm in particular manifests great pain and suffering due to the klesha of aversion manifesting as extreme anger, which can be subdivided into hatred, anxiety, fear, desperation, and worry. But these emotions and their consecuent experiences of hell are not permanent, but are rather temporary manifestations of the mind that when are released and purified, can be transformed into higher states of consciousness and ultimately the vehicles to our Enlightenment and complete liberation.  The point is that these realms are all caused by our desires and attachements, they are all imperfect and illusory, causing us great suffering, but yet teaching about our true nature and how to be free and at peace. How to understand hell, becoming aware of its causes and consecuences, and in turn, how to transform it into liberation, is the focus of this paper. 

The hell realm is the most terrible of the Six Realms.  One sees beings there that have a very short fuse, everything makes them angry and they respond with aggression, attacking all around them.  In so doing, they drive away anyone that shows them kindness and love, tending to seek out others that are also in the hell realm.  This anger and aggression becomes reinforced and strengthened continually due to attachment, resulting in one recreating the experience of hell again and again (O’Brien, 2012).  Besides anger, the hell realm is also marked by terror and claustrophobia.  It is a place partly of fire, related to torture, torment and pain, and partly of ice, where one is frozen. This is a place of much aggression, anger and abuse. The icy beings shove others away with their unfeeling coldness. In their tormented isolation, they then turn their aggression inward to become self-destructive (O’Brien, The Wheel, 2012) 

In the literal model, one is born in these realms as actual places or worlds as a result of one’s karma.  They are as real as this world is real, yet one understands that all is created by the mind, so all including this world is a dream.  It is as if one is dreaming, and while one is dreaming, the experience seems absolutely real.  From outside the dream, others can see you are dreaming, and when you awake, you know you were dreaming, by while asleep, it is real.  The hell realm is a kind of hallucination, a projection of the mind filled with self-deception and egocentrism.  Hell can be the result of murder of family, saints, or even buddhas, killing for pleasure or desire, or in the carrying out of some other crime. It can be the result of unwholesome actions, the lack of virtue, or the holding of wrong views. Interestingly enough, it may just be that one is so quarrelsome and annoying to others, that one merits a hell experience (The Thirty One Planes, 2012).  Great black birds chase the wrongdoers and pluck our their eyes; demons pull out their tongue and entrails, and they are forced to drink molten copper and suffer stabbings.  Improper sexual attitudes can lead to fire in the organs. There is a screaming hell for those that misuse intoxicants or sell drugs. Those who harbor false views or corrupt religion can also fall into hell.  The hells may be divided into 8, 10, or even 136 kinds, depending on the tradition.  The Tibetans limit themselves to just the hot hell, due to anger, and the cold hell, related to cold-heartedness. It is thought that to know about these lower realms scares us out of complacency as motivation to practice without wasting any more time (Khandro.Net, 2012).

For Buddhists, since there is no permanent separate self, it is understood that it is literally our bad habits taking rebirth in different realms.  Consciousness, which in itself is eternal, not dependent on anything, is never born nor dies, yet is colored by the habitual patterns of the 5 skandhas, that which we take ourselves to be: form, sensation, thought, mental impulses and consciousness identified with the other four skandhas.  One continues to experience things based on one’s habits of action. Due to one’s karma, seeds are created, or tendencies, that relate to the causes and conditions of everything we experience.  Our habits of acting and reacting are what create the seeds of conditions we experience in the future.  In the experience of rebirth into these different realms, the very same phenomenon is experienced differently by the lens of the perceived realm one is in.  In the hell realm, a lake is experienced as molten lava, so that when you drink it, it burns you inside.  The hell realm is experienced as the most physically painful, due to hatred and anger turning back on oneself, building a wall between oneself and others.  Everything is irritating and makes one angry.  However, the heat of this anger gets reflected back on us as we project the anger onto others and perceive the others as our enemy, which makes us fearful and anxious to escape our torcherers, causing us to fight harder with them, making us even angrier.  We are so busy fighting, we don’t know who we are fighting with, whether it is others or ourselves, and we are so busy fighting we feel we have no alternative but fight.  The possibility of an alternative to fighting never even occurs  to us (Class lecture 3 CBS 560).

In the hell realm, beings are being tortured by demons.  However, the fact that the God of the dead, Yama, is watching over this realm while holding up a mirror,

indicates that these beings are being tortured by themselves.  The hatred of this realm becomes a self-hatred inspired by one’s own regrets of past wrong deeds and the knowledge of one’s mistakes.  In general, Buddhism emphasizes that whatever emotion we feel toward others is what we are feeling towards ourselves.  Nevertheless, even in this hell realm, enlightenment is possible, with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas appearing to guide one our of hell if one so wishes, as well as the concept that negative emotions can be transmuted into positive ones through practice.

(Anderson, 166-167).

SALVATION THROUGH KSHTIGARBHA

Kshtigarbha is the Earth Store bodhisattva who has dedicated himself to helping those beings that have fallen into hell, showing them the means of escape, and comforting them while they are there.  Kshtigarbha is the protector of women, children, childbirth, small animals, insects, travelers, and lost causes.  His name “Ksti” in Sanskrit means earth, and the other part of the name, garbha, means womb.  So it seems that in calling upon this bodhisattva, one is returning to the womb of creation, or in other words, the essence, or Buddha Nature.  His name also implies that those negative thoughts that are hidden or stored in the recesses of our minds can be uncovered and released.  His name also implies the earth-treasure, in that there is unlimited potential and treasure in this earth that is waiting to reveal itself.  This very same earth also has the medicines to heal the ailing creatures it supports.  Kshtigarbha physically appears as a clean shaven monk who has left his home to pursue a religious life.  He is the only Bodhisattva represented in religious garb, so as to be identifiable by others in his role of guidance and comfort. In his right hand he holds a staff with six rings on it. This he shakes to warn small animals to get out of the way so as not to be trodden when he walks.  It is also used to awaken us from our trance of hell.  He holds a wish-fulfilling gem, the Chintamani, also seen as a pearl, which signifies the treasures he can bestow, or the pearl of great price, our Buddha essence, that he reveals within each one of us.  With his staff, he is always ready to force open the gates of hell and to show us the door to our liberation.  In fact, he informs us that no one is actually holding us nor forcing us to stay in hell.  That we are there by our own choosing, and we are both the gate keeper and the liberator.  We can walk out whenever we please, though we have been trapped there for so very long out of our ignorance, our regret, and our pain.  He is represented as a being of great compassion and protection.  He can appear in any form, male or female, to help others.  He represents great fearlessness, great love, and great optimism.  His story began when the Buddha worried that beings would in the future fall away from the Dharma and would be caught in the hell realms due to their ignorance.  Kshtigarbha vowed that as long as one being was left in Hell, he would not attain Buddhahood.  Instead, he would stay in hell working for their salvation, until it was emptied of all beings.  The Buddha praised Kshtigarbha for this great vow, which represents the Mahayana ideal of duty and responsibility for all beings, all deserving respect, kindness, and consideration, and out of compassion, we serve to help all beings escape the suffering of Samsara and to attain Nirvana and Enlightenment.  Kshtigarbha vows to save all beings from suffering and disasters, lending power to those that are weak or in danger. When one wants to call on Him, one recites his mantra “Om-Ha-Ha-Ha Vismaye Svaha” meaning “Om, Oh Wondrous One, Emancipation!”  The seed syllable, Ha, is identified with His essence, and in repeating it, we identify ourselves with Him.  Besides the bodhisattva vow as ideal to every Mahayana Buddhist practitioner, he also represents the Zen ideal of learning to sit in whatever realm one finds oneself in, engaged in training and practicing which leads to finding the way out of our suffering and delusions of hell.  If we are at hell’s gate, just remembering His name we are saved, meaning that if we remember who we really are, our Buddha Essence, then we are saved from our own attachments and desires that lead us into Hell.  All those who train are being led by the deepest sense of compassion for oneself and the world.  To be led out of suffering, we must see our suffering as a consequence of our own karma. To get out of hell, you have to want to let go of your own suffering, and to trust that there is a way out. We allow whatever there is to just arise, without turning away, turning back to the present, and not letting the clouds of emotions which cover our true nature to pull us off track. And when we are lost as weary travelers on the path of life, we can trust that there is always support and guidance to lead us back home again, our true union with the Divine.  No matter how many mistakes we have made, we can always return to our true nature in the present. (Bays, 2002; Sutra Earth Store Bodhisattva, 2003)

UNDERSTANDING ANGER

One can also look at these realms as situations or states of consciousness that everyone passes through again and again each day.  One can use the Wheel of Life and its representations of the six realms as a mindfulness practice in order to recognize recurrent life situations, and also as an opportunity to deal with them in new ways.  It is helpful to reflect on the primary cause of the experience of the hell realm being the consequence of anger. 

What is anger and how does it cause us to suffer? More importantly, how can we free ourselves from anger, transforming it into love and compassion? Anger is one of the three poisons, along with greed and delusion that causes us great suffering, or dissatisfaction in our lives. In the teachings of Zen, hell is a projection of our mind, one specifically made for our anger, resulting in the experience of life as a living hell. It is not a punishment for evil deeds, but rather it’s a mental filter that becomes projected onto the outside world, based on selfishness, aggression and frustration. It is the time when we are lost in a paranoia discriminating between a non-existent self and others as our enemies. We perceive the world as separate from us, creating prejudice against people as bad, ugly, or inferior. For this mental discrimination, we begin to think in a negative way, resulting in aggressive words or actions. It is the law of karma: what we think is what we create in the world, returning back to us the experiences we have created with our intentions manifested in our thoughts, speech and actions. Although the world is neither good nor bad, perfect as it is, the way we experience it is our own projection, an aspect of our mental habits, that is, the ego. However, the ego is not real, in the sense of a permanent thing, isolated, or unchanging. It's just a set of ideas forming habits of thinking. You can change these habits to experience life directly, without filters of discontent or dissatisfaction.
          What we do is what we get, the law of karma. When we are attached to thoughts of aggression, we project this aggression to the outside world. What we perceive is a hostile, aggressive, and threatening world is our hell. We suffered physically and emotionally because of this mental tendency. The more we experience the world like this, then the more our thoughts become negative, while in turn contributing to a world of negativity. There is no end to this inner circle of aggression manifesting in external aggression. Whatever it is, you can not remove the external threat through internal aggression. It only creates more aggression in general. Anger causes more anger everywhere. The more we try to kill the imaginary enemy, the more it grows. Thus, we create our own hell.
          We all experience difficult situations in our lives. The fact that a negative event comes out of nowhere, say an abusive childhood, is the result of negative intentions in another previous life, forming mental habits that carry from one life to another. When we are born, we have the opportunity to rectify the negative karma based on our thinking, giving us the opportunity to rectify the karma we created earlier by our aggressive intentions. If we were abusive in a past life, we are born receiving the same treatment in this life, enabling us to purify our karma and live in peace.  However, out of ignorance, we tend to perpetuate negative thoughts and ideas, creating new negative karma, creating a rebirth in a new life all over again, in order to face our same mental habits, which continue to cause suffering to ourselves and others. When we react with anger, greed, or confusion, the karmic cycle begins again and again, making a new life, a new body and a new personality. We are not bad for creating this chain of suffering. It is only because of ignorance. We feel insecure, thinking that we need more protection, forcing us to continuously strive to survive. What is needed to overcome this paranoia and selfishness is a radical intervention in our minds, which is located in Zen.
          According to Zen Master Seung Sahn (1999:69) there are four types of anger: attached, reflective, perceived, and loving anger. I have renamed them for clarity as instinctive anger, conscious anger, abstaining anger, and compassionate anger.  Instinctive anger is a reaction attached to our habitual and automatic emotions, based on past karma, with negative consequences in the present or the future. This form of anger is the most difficult, causing us much pain and suffering, and can take hours or days before we return to a calm mental balance. The conscious anger arises when we are aware of our instinctive anger, which happens when we practice mindfulness. When we are aware and reflective about our anger, it doesn’t last as long, and one can return to a calm and peaceful mind that can now help others. It is when we believe in ourselves one hundred percent, "Yes, I am willing!” trying to follow our Zen practice, letting go of anger, and returning to our inner peace. The third type of anger is abstaining anger. Although we are conscious of our anger inside, we do not show it externally, choosing instead to abstain from expressing it until calm returns to our inner mind. This is a difficult step of development requiring great effort and patience as a result of our ongoing spiritual practice. Finally, there is compassionate anger, anger that is expressed to help others, but we don’t feel angry inside, only love and compassion. It is the anger a mother expresses to her son, who is about to run into a street full of traffic, yelling "STOP!" This anger manifests in situations where it is the most appropriate response at that moment in order to support, teach, or save others from suffering, the ideal of the bodhisattva, who promises to save all sentient beings in the universe until all reach enlightenment. (Sahn,1999)

SELF-INDULGENCE

Pema Chodron, a renowned Buddhist monk, says that anger can be seductive, almost addictive, in that there is something delicious about finding fault with others.  We tend to protect our anger, feeding and justifying it. But anger is never justified.  We should try to practice patience and metta, or loving kindness toward all beings. So when we get angry, we shouldn’t act it out or hurt others, being careful not to hang on to it, thus making it grow.  This is done by first acknowledging it, observing ourselves, then understanding what caused it. Then we practice patience, waiting to act or speak, observing the reaction internally, and sitting in meditation with the heat and tension of the anger inside. In so doing, one quiets the inner chatter and blame.  One embraces the anger with patience and compassion for others and oneself. It takes great courage to not act and to observe the tendencies of fear and selfishness that are at the roots of the anger. Then through insight and mindfulness, we let it go (O’Brien, Anger and Buddhism, 2012). 

MINDFULNESS

Right mindfulness, the seventh step of the Buddha´s Eightfold Path, is where the mind is trained to remain in the present, being open, alive, and alert, contemplating the present event, suspending all judegements or interpretations as they occur or just barely registering them and them dropping them.  The task is to know whatever comes up as it occurs, coming back to the present moment again and again, staying in the present without slipping away into distracting thoughts.  Right awareness tries to perceive things directly, without the interference, judgements or criticisms, beyond liking or not liking based on any prior experience.  The normal functioning of the mind pulls us into different directions distorting our experience of the object with mental constructs and projections, what the Buddha called “elaborations.”  These elaborations block out the immediacy of the phenomena, distancing us from the object, instead of letting us know the object as it really is.  Through mindfulness, we can clear up the cognitive field, bringing to life the pure experience in its immediacy, revealing the object as it is before it has been overlayed with interpretations, biases, and distortions.  Mindfulness is less about doing something than it is about undoing, not thinking, not judgeing, not associating, not planning, not imagining, nor wishing, all modes of interference that takes us into future planning or remembering past events stimulated by the initial momentary experience of the object.  Mindfulness facilitates serenity, calm abiding, and insight by allowing us to become grounded and anchored to the present. It also leads to deeper concentration and wisdom, depending on how it is applied, either as shamanta, a type of calming meditation where one keeps the mind on an object until  serenity is achieved, or as vipassana, investigating the object to reveal its fundamental characteristics.  The point is to break the link between the stimulating object and the arising defilements, the kleshas.  Instead of responding through habit, we can respond with contemplation to understand the nature of experience.  We can learn to note our feelings without indentifying with them through bare attention, thereby severing the belief in an ego creating them.  One notes a continuous arising and subsiding of feelings as a stream of events, impermanent, fleeting, and without involvement or enjoyment. (Class Lecture, 2012)

THE TRIPLE AAA OF PRACTICE

I have used a neumonic device, inspired by the teachings of one of my teachers Rev. Master Meiten McGuire, which I like to call the triple AAA of spiritual practice, three letters that stand for: Abstain, Attend, and Analyze.  This includes an adage to stop one’s habitual reactions based on the defilements, considering that:  “I may be wrong” as a way to apply mindfulness to a situation, giving us a chance to observe these mental constructs going on, with all their  embellishments, thus seeing the filters and judgements arising, in order to break through them or release our attachment to them.  We start by considering the possibility that we may be distorting the actual experience or perception of the object or person due to our prior experiences and associations.  This gives us a moment to see clearly by applying mindfulness to allow those embellishments and judgement to diminish or become eliminated, thereby giving us the possibility to act from the heart or our Buddha Nature, inspiring us to let go of the ego defilements of greed, anger, and delusion. 

            When we are aware that defilements of the three poisons are arising, experienced as either greed, anger, or confusion, we first “Abstain” from acting on them, knowing that they will cause a problem if we do, since they are based on past mental egoic constructs that distort our perception of reality. Secondly, we Attend to what is arising, applying right mindfulness, watching the sensations of desire or aversion until they subside, applying the thought, “I may be wrong”, which gives us a moment to pause and reconsider what is arising as not necessarily true or accurate.  When through mindfulness we are able to detach from the sensation of desire or aversion or delusion, we can then return to an awareness of calm, the direct experience of Buddha Nature.  From there we open ourselves to a deeper guidance that directly perceives truth, the Buddha Mind, which we open ourselves to by asking the question, “What is it good to do right now?”, implying doing that which will cause the least amount of suffering for others and oneself. 

Finally, we Analyze what we did, by asking ourselves what we learned in this encounter, based on our understanding of the Buddha-Dharma, trying to see what worked well and how we could improve our response the next time this particular kind of experience or pattern arises in the future. 

            Application of this neumonic device has saved me innumerable times from committing negative karma that I would otherwise have had to pay with much suffering for myself and others in this and future lives had I reacted instinctively and unconsciously with aggression or anger.

FORGIVENESS

          Another important way of liberating ourselves from Hell is through forgiveness.  The Buddha once said, “Holding on to anger is like holding on to a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at someone else.  You are the one that gets burned.” (Buddha Quotes, 2012). When we hold on to anger, we are in hell and we suffer.  The Buddha advised that “When a man controls his anger it is like chariot under control, which is what we call a chariot driver. All else is just holding the reins.” (Curto, 2005, XVII, V. 222).  There is a folklore account of how the Buddha once reacted to anger:

The Buddha was sitting under a tree talking to his disciples when a man came and spit on his face. He wiped it off, and he asked the man, “What next? What do you want to say next?” The man was a little puzzled because he himself never expected that when you spit on somebody’s face, he will ask, “What next?” He had no such experience in his past. He had insulted people and they had become angry and they had reacted. Or if they were cowards and weaklings, they had smiled, trying to bribe the man. But Buddha was like neither, he was not angry nor in any way offended, nor in any way cowardly. But just matter-of-factly he said, “What next?” There was no reaction on his part.

Buddha’s disciples became angry, they reacted. His closest disciple, Ananda, said, “This is too much, and we cannot tolerate it. He has to be punished for it. Otherwise everybody will start doing things like this.”

Buddha said, “You keep silent. He has not offended me, but you are offending me. He is new, a stranger. He must have heard from people something about me, that this man is an atheist, a dangerous man who is throwing people off their track, a revolutionary, a corrupter. And he may have formed some idea, a notion of me. He has not spit on me; he has spit on his notion. He has spit on his idea of me because he does not know me at all, so how can he spit on me?

“If you think on it deeply,” Buddha said, “he has spit on his own mind. I am not part of it, and I can see that this poor man must have something else to say because this is a way of saying something. Spitting is a way of saying something. There are moments when you feel that language is impotent: in deep love, in intense anger, in hate, in prayer. There are intense moments when language is impotent. Then you have to do something. When you are angry, intensely angry, you hit the person, you spit on him, you are saying something. I can understand him. He must have something more to say, that’s why I’m asking, “What next?”

The man was even more puzzled! And Buddha said to his disciples, “I am more offended by you because you know me, and you have lived for years with me, and still you react.”

Puzzled, confused, the man returned home. He could not sleep the whole night. When you see a Buddha, it is difficult, impossible to sleep again the way you used to sleep before. Again and again he was haunted by the experience. He could not explain it to himself, what had happened. He was trembling all over and perspiring. He had never come across such a man; he shattered his whole mind and his whole pattern, his whole past.

The next morning he was back there. He threw himself at Buddha’s feet. Buddha asked him again, “What next? This, too, is a way of saying something that cannot be said in language. When you come and touch my feet, you are saying something that cannot be said ordinarily, for which all words are a little narrow; it cannot be contained in them.” Buddha said, “Look, Ananda, this man is again here, he is saying something. This man is a man of deep emotions.”

The man looked at Buddha and said, “Forgive me for what I did yesterday.”

Buddha said, “Forgive? But I am not the same man to whom you did it. The Ganges goes on flowing; it is never the same Ganges again. Every man is a river. The man you spit upon is no longer here. I look just like him, but I am not the same, much has happened in these twenty-four hours! The river has flowed so much. So I cannot forgive you because I have no grudge against you.”

“And you also are new. I can see you are not the same man who came yesterday because that man was angry and he spit, whereas you are bowing at my feet, touching my feet. How can you be the same man? You are not the same man, so let us forget about it. Those two people, the man who spit and the man on whom he spit, both are no more. Come closer. Let us talk of something else.” (You Are Truly Loved, 2012)

          Anger is an aspect of aversion, one of the three poisons of the mind. When life presents us with situations that provoke aversion, it is an opportunity to practice spiritually.  These sensations in themselves are not the problem, but rather, it is our attachment to them, which strengthens old unconscious habit patterns based on egotism and ignorance.  When that happens, we are out of control and our actions can cause pain and suffering.  In other words, we have lost the reins of our carriage of the mind.  Instead of training the body and the mind in how to guide the carriage in order to resolve a problem with insight, wisdom, and compassion, in fact, we are prisoners of our negative tendencies, which become repeated a million times due to our negative karma. 

On the other hand, when we can practice mindfulness, like a good carriage driver, we are in control of our reactions, abstaining from tendencies that take us off course, giving us the opportunity to guide the carriage back into the correct direction.  We should go neither in the direction of inactivity or denial, nor in the direction of uncontrolled emotions.  Upon noting the obstacle in the road, the situation demands that we act; our sensations attract our attention telling us that we should attend to something.   

From the perspective of Buddhism, forgiveness gives us the ability to let go of anger and resentment, without holding on to old wounds, allowing us to live in the present without holding on to memories of the past or projecting into the future.  If we hold on to anger, the first one we hurt is ourselves, thereby creating suffering toward others through violence and aggression.  The Dalai Lama of Tibet reminds us that violence only generates more violence, damaging our health and our bodies. 

With forgiveness, there are two levels here. On one level: forgiveness means that one should not develop feelings of revenge.  Since revenge hurts the other person, it is a form of violence. With violence, there is normally counter violence.  This then generates even more violence – the problem never ends.  This is one level. On another level: forgiveness means that one should not create feelings of anger toward one’s enemy.  Anger never solves anything.  Anger only brings feelings of discomfort to oneself.  Anger destroys one’s mental peace. You can’t feel happiiness while you are angry. I think that for this reason that we should forgive. With a tranquil mind, there is more mental peace, better health for the body. An agitated mind destroys our health; it is very bad for the body.  This is what I believe. (Lama, 2004, p. 234-235)

So, instead of creating more and more negativity, hurting ourselves and others, we should forgive, including our enemies, because even our thoughts create bad karma.  In fact, our enemies can teach us the most important lessons on how to love and forgive.  The personal physician to the Dalai Lama, Dr. Choedrak, was imprisoned in 1959 by the Chinese for twenty years.  He survived torture and abuse in a very healthy way by practicing four points of understanding: 1. Although he had to face great suffering and injustice, he could respond with love.  2. His captors were suffering in conditions equal to his, and due to the law of karma, they were going to suffer much more in the future, deserving his compassion for them due to their ignorance and confusion. 3. He had to learn to let go of his feelings of pride and self importance, since all beings have done the same in the past based on their ignorance. If his captors had known better, they would have acted differently. 4.  Hate and anger never end if we react with the same emotions. They only end when we are free of them, through love. (Goldstein, pp. 125-126)  As the Buddha said in the Dhammapada (Cap. 1, V. 5): “Hate is most certainly never ended through hate. It is ended though freedom from hate. That is the eternal law.” (Curto, p. 26).

The most important thing is to commit ourselves to forgive in order to let go of poisonous emotions and to free ourselves from suffering. One can use the recitation of a positive phrase to help in this respect, asking for forgiveness and forgiving others for the pain and hurt we have caused.  Joseph Goldstein (2002) recommends reciting this phrase aloud or in silence either before or after meditation as a continuous purification of the anger and resentment we hold inside, repeating: “If I have hurt or harmed anyone by my thoughts, words, or actions, I ask forgiveness.  And I freely forgive anyone who may have hurt or harmed me (p. 110-111).” 

TRANSFORMATION
          Zen gives us the tools to calm the mind and transform anger into compassion. This compassion is not found in the ego, thought, reason, or mental intelligence. It is found before the duality of thought, before discriminating thoughts divide the world into good and evil, likes and dislikes. Before this division, our nature has neither beginning nor end, is neither born nor dies, is unchanging while it continually manifests an infinity of changing forms and phenomena. This essence is the life force of all, what makes plants grow, the planets rotate, and our hearts to continually beat. It is both our divine nature and our everyday experience.  It is the Buddha Mind.  Zen practice is based on letting go of our attachments to dualistic thoughts. Ironically, we don’t practice Zen to achieve something, like happiness, peace or a vacation from anger. Instead, we practice Zen for the practice itself, a sense of non-duality.  We invariable start our practice imagining that we are the ones practicing; creating duality between our self doing something and the goal we seek to achieve. But eventually the mind begins to see its own mental states, its habits and hidden aspects of the personality. We can see the thoughts as they flow, without identifying with them. Without attempting to remove anything, we just observe our thoughts with calm awareness, seeing them arising from emptiness and then returning to emptiness (Sahn, 1997).  In fact, everything is empty. This emptiness is our Buddha Mind, an unlimited potential in everything, while all forms emerge from within this emptiness.  As it says in The Scripture of Great Wisdom: "Form is only emptiness, emptiness is all forms, there is, then, nothing more than this, for what is form is emptiness, and what is emptiness is form, the same is also true for all sensation, thought, activity, and consciousness.” These feelings, perceptions, mental impulses and consciousness make up what is known as ego, a set of mental habits connected to the form of this body. But in themselves, they are all empty. When we directly discover for ourselves the Truth through Zen, then enlightenment reveals itself with unlimited consequences, because enlightenment awakens our inner bodhisattva.  As we purify our own mind, we purify all minds. Practicing Zen, compassion arises naturally.  Practice is not just for ourselves, it is for everyone.  Thus, freeing ourselves from the anger, greed, and delusion, we free the whole universe from suffering.

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