The fire that turns inward

What does anger do to the one who carries it? And what, if anything, is it good for?

Anger is the most honest of feelings and the most untrustworthy of guides. It arrives before thought, often before the offense has even finished landing, and it convinces us — with the full force of the body — that we are right. The traditions gathered here do not deny that anger is real, or even, occasionally, righteous. But they share an uneasy intuition: that anger, more than most things we carry, changes the one who carries it. This chapter follows that intuition through five turns — what anger does to us, how it might be slowed, how it might be answered, how we keep from becoming what wounded us, and what, in the end, our anger says about who we are.

The fire that burns the one who lit it

The Dhammapada is blunt about it. "There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed."^[1] Of all the things that can devour a person, hatred is named alongside fire and flood — elemental, indifferent, total. And the Buddhist intuition is that the damage moves first inward. "If a man offend a harmless, pure, and innocent person, the evil falls back upon that fool, like light dust thrown up against the wind."^[2] The image is precise: anger thrown outward at someone who cannot or will not catch it doesn't disappear. It blows back into the eyes of the one who threw it.

Marcus Aurelius arrives at something similar by a different route. To hate a person, he writes, is to cut yourself off — "a branch is cut off by another, but he that hates and is averse, cuts himself off from his neighbour, and knows not that at the same time he divides himself from the whole body."^[3] The wronged person, in his telling, is not the one being severed. The hater is. Anger isolates before it does anything else.

There is also a quieter Buddhist observation that complicates any sense of "winning" an angry exchange: "Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented, is happy."^[4] Even when anger gets what it wanted, it tends to leave a residue — in the loser, and therefore eventually back in the winner. "He who, by causing pain to others, wishes to obtain pleasure for himself, he, entangled in the bonds of hatred, will never be free from hatred."^[5]

The slow-burning mind

If anger costs the angry person more than anyone, then the practical question becomes: how do you slow it down? Almost every tradition gathered here has the same answer, which is unsatisfyingly simple — pause.

The letter of James puts it in its sharpest form: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God."^[6] Ecclesiastes adds the diagnosis underneath: "Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools."^[7] Anger doesn't visit the fool; it lodges there.

The Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot offers what may be the most useful taxonomy ever written on the subject. There are four kinds of people: "Easy to become angry, and easy to be appeased: his gain disappears in his loss; Hard to become angry, and hard to be appeased: his loss disappears in his gain; Hard to become angry and easy to be appeased: a pious person; Easy to become angry and hard to be appeased: a wicked person."^[8] The schema refuses to flatten the question into "angry vs. not angry." What matters, it suggests, is the curve — how steeply you climb into rage and how readily you come down. The wicked person isn't the one who gets angry. It's the one who stays there.

Confucius adds a related discipline: "When he is angry, he thinks of the difficulties his anger may involve him in."^[9] Not "he suppresses the anger" — he thinks forward. He pictures the cost.

Marcus Aurelius, who seems to have struggled with this his whole life, gives advice that reads like a note to himself: "Whensoever by some present hard occurrences thou art constrained to be in some sort troubled and vexed, return unto thyself as soon as may be, and be not out of tune longer than thou must needs."^[10] The metaphor is musical. You will go out of tune. The question is only how quickly you come back.

And the Bhagavad Gita is candid about how often this has to happen: "as often as the heart breaks — wild and wavering — from control, so oft let him re-curb it, let him rein it back to the soul's governance."^[11] Not once. As often as it takes.

The image that may best capture what all these traditions are gesturing at comes from the Dhammapada: "He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins."^[12] There's a difference between gripping the reins and actually driving. Most of us, most of the time, are passengers in our own anger.

Meeting hostility with gentleness

What about when the anger is coming at you?

Proverbs offers the proverb everyone half-remembers: "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger."^[13] The Dhammapada says the same thing from the other side: "Do not speak harshly to anybody; those who are spoken to will answer thee in the same way. Angry speech is painful, blows for blows will touch thee."^[14] Hostility is a mirror. What you put into it tends to come back.

The Qur'an pushes this further than mere prudence. When Moses and Aaron are sent to confront Pharaoh — the tyrant, the slaver, the man with absolute earthly power against them — the instruction is startling: "Go ye to Pharaoh, for he hath burst all bounds: But speak ye to him with gentle speech; haply he will reflect or fear."^[15] Gentle speech to Pharaoh. Not because Pharaoh deserves it, but because gentle speech is the only thing that might possibly reach him. And elsewhere: "Turn aside evil with that which is better."^[16]

The Dhammapada arrives at a kind of summary line for this whole posture: "Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good; let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth!"^[17] And, earlier in the same text, the deep ground beneath the strategy: "Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule."^[18]

It is worth noticing that none of these passages claim it will work. Pharaoh, after all, does not relent. The soft answer is not promised to succeed; it is only the right thing to say.

Not becoming what hurt you

There is a further turn, sharper than gentleness, which several traditions arrive at independently. It is not about how to defuse the other person's anger. It is about what your own response says about you.

Marcus Aurelius writes one of the shortest and hardest sentences in his Meditations: "The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them."^[19] The revenge is not done to the wrongdoer. It is done in yourself, by refusing to be remade in their image.

The same emperor, looking back, names his grandfather Verus as the source of this discipline: "Of my grandfather Verus I have learned to be gentle and meek, and to refrain from all anger and passion."^[20] Gentleness, in this telling, is inherited — passed hand to hand, generation to generation, like a craft.

The Analects offer perhaps the most exacting standard in any of these texts. Of his favorite student Yan Hui, Confucius says: "He did not transfer his anger; he did not repeat a fault."^[21] He did not transfer his anger. Anger toward one person did not become curtness toward the next. The anger stayed in its own room.

The Bhagavad Gita praises the same quality in nearly poetic terms: "Who troubleth not his kind, And is not troubled by them; clear of wrath, Living too high for gladness, grief, or fear, That man I love!"^[22]

It would be easy to read all this as a counsel of passivity. But Marcus, again, offers a different frame: "We are all born to be fellow-workers, as the feet, the hands, and the eyelids; as the rows of the upper and under teeth: for such therefore to be in opposition, is against nature."^[23] Refusing to mirror cruelty is not weakness; in his picture, it is alignment with what humans were made for.

What anger reveals

Finally, several traditions suggest that how a person handles anger is among the truest indicators of their character — perhaps truer than what they say about themselves.

The Gita lists quickness to anger among the marks of a vile birth: "Deceitfulness, and arrogance, and pride, / Quickness to anger, harsh and evil speech, / And ignorance, to its own darkness blind, — / These be the signs, My Prince! of him whose birth / Is fated for the regions of the vile."^[24] Pirkei Avot's counsel is gentler but on the same axis: "Let the honor of your friend be as dear to you as your own; And be not easily provoked to anger; And repent one day before your death."^[25]

Confucius singles out a particular failure mode — the cold version of anger, dressed up as friendliness: "To conceal resentment against a person, and appear friendly with him — Tso Ch'iu-ming was ashamed of such conduct. I also am ashamed of it."^[26] Resentment behind a smile is, in his view, worse than open anger. And in small things too: "Want of forbearance in small matters confounds great plans."^[27] The way you handle a slight reveals how you will handle a crisis.

Perhaps the most useful diagnostic, though, comes from Marcus Aurelius, who notices the precise moment where anger is manufactured: "It is reported unto thee, that such a one speaketh ill of thee. Well; that he speaketh ill of thee, so much is reported. But that thou art hurt thereby, is not reported: that is the addition of opinion, which thou must exclude."^[28] The slight is a fact. The wound is an addition. Watching the moment we add the wound is, perhaps, where the work of anger begins.

And the Qur'an offers something none of the others quite do: an image of anger that is not someone else's, but our own — anger at God, or at our situation, and the eventual return from it. Of the prophet Jonah, who "went on his way in anger, and thought that we had no power over him," the verse continues: "But in the darkness he cried 'There is no God but thou: Glory be unto Thee! Verily, I have been one of the evil doers.' So we heard him and rescued him from misery."^[29] Even the prophet storms off. Even the prophet is brought back. The traditions are not naive about how hard this all is.

Questions for the reader

1. Think of the last time you were angry enough that it changed your face. What was the anger actually defending — and was the thing it defended worth the cost?
2. Pirkei Avot says the wicked person is "easy to become angry and hard to be appeased." On your worst days, which of the four kinds are you? On your best?
3. Marcus Aurelius says the best revenge is not to become like the one who hurt you. Is there someone whose cruelty you have, quietly, started to imitate?