Buddhist answers to common questions

Lam Shenphen Zangpo answers basic questions that every Bhutanese man, woman, and child on the street wants to know.
I get angry easily. How can Buddhism help overcome this?Well, basically anger is an expression or our insecurity based on wrong view. Let’s take a concrete situation as an example. Someone walks into our office and complains. Our immediate reaction is to become defensive, which often develops into anger. This is a common everyday occurrence in offices throughout the world.Now it is said that when the Buddha was sitting under the bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, he was attacked by the armies of Mara, which represent the poisons of our own minds. As the arrows of Mara’s soldiers fell towards the Buddha, they changed into flowers. This transformation is symbolic of ignorance being changed into wisdom.
In the context of our office situation, how can we transform the arrows of complaints into flowers of wisdom?
Well, first we should investigate what is being hurt. For an arrow to penetrate, there must be a solid target. In this case, that solid target is our own self-image. We have all developed a sense that we are somehow perfect and don’t make mistakes. Then, suddenly a person enters our space and points out an error. This situation forces us to acknowledge a side of us we want to keep hidden – that we make mistakes and are not perfect.
This is the point where we can let the arrows penetrate and react with anger or transform them into flowers. In the former case, we blame the intruder and try to blast him away. In the latter case, we examine the self-image, and in so doing we realize that it is just that – a self-created image. There is no solid substance. When we look at it in this way, the image softens and dissolves. Like the wide-open sky, there is nothing for the arrows to penetrate. At this point, we can turn to the person complaining and deal with the situation calmly. If they are correct, then we just apologize and make the necessary adjustments. If they are wrong, we explain this to them in a non-judgemental way.
So, next time anger arises, we can say to ourselves, “Ok, what is it that is being hurt. What aspect of me am I afraid to recognize”? It doesn’t imply that we become complacent. It just means that we are no longer disturbed by the situation. As the Buddha said, holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. We are the ones who get burned. In addition, we also lose an excellent opportunity to develop wisdom and free our minds of the narrow constraints of attachment to a self and all the emotions that arise with that wrong view.