I recently went to the traditional hospital in Thimphu to meet with a young doctor. A traditional hospital visit in Bhutan is the opposite of any doctor visit in the West. You don’t sit under fluorescent lights in a waiting room, filling out insurance forms. And when you see the doctor, you don’t recite a list of symptoms. Instead, you walk into a quiet office with big, carved furniture and rugs and comfortable, enveloping arm chairs, and you just sit down and chat. You might talk about the weather, your family, or this year’s apple crop. I asked the doctor if he was married (he’s not) and talked about our daughter in nursing school.
While chatting, the doctor gently takes your wrist and feels your pulses. He tilts his head, as if listening to something beyond your words, like a musician catching an undertone in the music, or a sommelier trying a new wine.
I’ve gone to these traditional hospital doctors for years, and they’re always right. One hundred per cent.
“Do you drink cold water or hot water?” the doctor asked.
“I like cold water with ice,” I answered.
“And vegetables?” he asked. “Raw or cooked?”
“I love salad,” I said.
He nodded, as if I’d given him a puzzle piece he needed. “Better to drink warm or room-temperature water. Your digestion is a bit slow. And as we get older, it’s harder to digest raw vegetables. Cook them a little.”
We went through a few more questions about my digestion that I’ll spare you. Then he said, seemingly out of nowhere, “Are you angry?”
“Yes!” I said. I surprised myself.
I am angry.
Not in a yelling, throwing things kind of way. I’m good at keeping calm when others are angry, as we’re taught in the Buddhist way. But underneath, there’s a slow burn—a low, steady heat that simmers beneath everything. And once I had admitted it out loud, I had to ask myself: where does it come from? What must I do about it?
Anger is ubiquitous
How can we not be angry? There’s war, injustice, greed, ignorance. Entire systems are built on cruelty. Turn on the news and it’s a veritable cornucopia of anger-inducing, heart-stopping injustices. The world is coming apart. Who isn’t furious? On a micro level somebody cuts you off in traffic, your neighbor’s dog barks all night, the Wi-Fi goes down right when you need it—it feels like things are conspiring to rile you.
I drive around Thimphu more aggressively than I should. My car is small but has enough power to dart in and out, and sometimes I let it. I yell and call people graphically unpleasant names in the car. I yell at people who can’t hear me, which is maybe better than yelling at them face-to-face. But not exactly skillful.
We know that anger, along with greed and ignorance is poison. Not in a moralizing way, but in a practical one: it corrodes the vessel that holds it. It’s like holding a hot coal, planning to throw it at someone else, but in the meantime it burns your own hand. Still, knowing this doesn’t make anger magically vanish.
The key is not to let anger drive the car. Use it as information. Not as a weapon. Anger can point the way, but love has to do the driving. It seems beyond obvious to counter anger with the least angry things: love, generosity, devotion, compassion.
Facing it down
The first step, and where I’m mostly at, is recognition. Not realizing or not copping to being angry just pushes it underground, where it seeps out sideways in sarcasm, passive-aggression, or illness. Anger ignored will erupt one way or the other.
So I dissect it. Where does this heat come from? Is it really about bad drivers? Probably not. What is its root? A lot of times the object of our anger isn’t the anger we express. Often it’s just hurt in disguise. Or fear. Or frustration. Sometimes it’s disappointment that the world isn’t the way we want it to be. There are ancient misdeeds, flung skewers of shish kebab, torn curtains, grief stomping around the room. The urge that got lost in the mail, refused funds, pigeonholed: it can pound forever.
The traditional doctor has the absolute right idea: you have to look at the whole system, not just the symptom. Anger is rarely about one moment; it’s about old energy backed up in the pipes.
Generosity is medicine
One of the best antidotes to anger is generosity. When we give—our time, our patience, our attention, even something as small as letting someone go ahead of us in line—the anger shifts. Generosity thwarts it, crushes it. The heart softens. You realize you don’t have to hoard your energy or defend yourself so fiercely.
Generosity is contagious. Someone is kind to you, and suddenly you’re holding the door for the next person. The chain reaction starts small but keeps going. The angrier I am the more generous I become.
Creative ways to move anger
Sometimes the energy of anger just needs to move. Yelling in the car might actually be one way. Singing loudly is another. Writing, painting, drawing—these, too, can siphon off the heat. My husband, Namgay, is a thangka painter. When we married, he offered to paint me a wedding thangka and asked which buddha I wanted. I said Dorje Drolo, Padmasambhava’s wrathful manifestation, who brought Buddhism to Bhutan in the eighth century. He rode on the back of Yeshi Tsogyal, who had changed herself into a tiger. They landed in the place that is now Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest, in Paro Valley.
“Oh no!” he said, laughing. “You can’t have Dorje Drolo for marriage.”
Oh yeah, I thought. Hold my beer.
Even then I understood that wrathful buddhas in Buddhist art aren’t villains; they are protectors. Their anger isn’t about ego. It’s fierce compassion, fire aimed at cutting through delusion.They are here to remind us of the things in us that keep us from being enlightened. I hope I can learn to use my anger like that, too—not to destroy but to illuminate.
Dharma as an invitation
When I’m really consumed with anger, meditation helps. Sitting with your mind without distraction, you start to see anger’s rise and fall. You see it’s not permanent. It passes.
When things get really dark for me I do tonglen—breathing in the suffering or delusion of others, breathing out relief and compassion. Visualizing offenders giving off thick black smoke and breathing it into my lungs and releasing the breath as pure white. It transforms anger into empathy. It sounds counterintuitive: why would you breathe in pain or evil? But it reverses the usual reflex of pushing discomfort away. Instead, you hold it gently, and in that holding it shifts. The truth is I haven’t done it in several years. I look at this as progress.
Anger and rockets
Namgay sometimes paints rockets. Between his traditional thangkas, he’ll paint one of these fantastic, surreal canvases: clouds, flowers, water, trees, in the Buddhist style, with a photorealist rocket streaking through. He has a connection to them from childhood: his teacher told him that Americans flew to the Moon in a rocket called Apollo 11 (his lucky number), and they walked on the Moon! Later in the US he saw the actual rocket, Apollo 11. It was a full circle moment for him as he says he had always wondered whether rockets were real. “I know now they are as real as the buddhas I paint.” Recently he painted a rocket exploding, a dragon hatching from the blast, arrows flying outward in every direction. Chaos. Violence. Anger, I thought.
“Not anger,” he explained. “The dragon is organic, deeper energy from the Earth, and stronger than the rocket which is manmade and volatile—maybe like anger. The arrows are choices that go in all directions—we just need to pick one and follow it.”
So. Authentic energy can break free when anger is understood rather than suppressed. The arrows become the antidote: they are choices, options for channeling that energy skillfully.
Related features from BDG
Buddha in a Teacup: Notes from a Non-Capitalist Life in Bhutan
Buddha in a Teacup: Metaphors
Buddha in a Teacup: Sip. Smile. Enlighten!
