99°C (210.2°F)

40. 99도

40. 99°C (210.2°F)

I opened the door to let some air in, but the warm wind coming in only made me sweat.

It was summer. The upper floor was even hotter with the warmth of the sun on the roof, yet Ven. Damtawon of the New York temple got along well on such a sweltering summer day as if it was a just normal day.

I received word from Lee, a young friend who had shared some of my hardships back when I was managing the small store in Suwon. I can only imagine how much his concerns had eaten him up inside before he decided to confide in me, because the feelings he shared were both intense and sad.

He explained that in his attempts to calm a heart that continuously blazed with anger over people he despised, he had spent the last half a year drinking heavily every night.

At work, his colleagues routinely shamed Lee by openly talking about the small mistakes he made. I can guess how he must have felt in the face of such deliberate ostracism and open disregard.

But it still made me sigh deeply when I heard about how he responded to the abuse by drinking excessively and imagining killing the others in horrible ways. I was surprised, as his colleagues’ attitude toward him didn’t seem to fit with his personality and actions as I remembered them.

At first, I tried to gently move past this, explaining that it was part of practice to look the other way when people are nasty and that he had to shake them out of his mind. This was an interesting situation that many of us may have experienced, so I decided to use my own

experience with cultivation to give Lee the strength he needed to clear away some of the baggage he was carrying around. We ended up reaching a common purpose.

Since it was difficult for me to understand what kind of people were those who had such a stranglehold on Lee, I decided to focus on explaining to him how he could go about understanding the principle of the mind and applying methods to deal with his own mind.

Lee promised to adopt a fourfold approach.

First, he would try as much as possible to distance himself from the people who had this hold on his mind. As The Art of War says, the best approach when things aren’t going your way is to get away.

Second, he would stop drinking to deal with the anger he was carrying around. It might give him temporary relief, but it would ruin his health and his problems would multiply if he became addicted.

Third, he would count and record all the times that he experienced anger. Fourth, if he found himself imagining killing those people, he would write down in detail those feelings of anger and bloodlust. The third and fourth of these correspond to “mind-checking meditation” or “the practice of mindfulness.”

We perceive things through our sensory organs: our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. Emotions such as joy, anger, sadness, and pleasure arise as our ego becomes entangled with those sensations.

For example, Lee would get angry when he heard someone talking bad about him. So feelings and sensation function as a single mass, like hydrogen and oxygen coming together to make water.

Once, a person trembling with anger approached Sakyamuni Buddha and asked him what he should do. “Are you the anger?” the Buddha is said to have asked in reply. This is the right question.

While it differs from person to person in terms of intensity, emotions and sensations are merely things that arise and subside temporarily—they are not “us.” When we get caught up in identifying ourselves with those billowing waves of emotion, pain is the inevitable result. So I decided to share with Lee a way of removing the pain that he was suffering.

When he kept track of the number of times he experienced anger and wrote down his imagined retaliations, he was practicing perceiving his emotions of anger objectively and staying aware of them from moment to moment. This operates by the same principle as using electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.

In addition to the four promises, I also shared another principle with Lee for when his rage appeared poised to boil over—and that was to continue doing this for a long time. In addition, I promised to tell him what he should do at the next stage as things progressed.