Meditation from Master Virupa's lojong: using your anger to destroy other people's suffering.

download ♦ listen  

• Get your body settled and still. Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Watch the air as it flows out of and back into your body.
• Call to mind the last time you were really angry. Go back in your mind; relive the experience; try to elicit the same experience, just for the sake of meditative exploration.
• Now we are going to take this feeling of anger, or if you're having trouble feeling angry, you can come up with your own mental affliction specialty—we're going to take it and we're going to turn it into virtue.
• So call it up inside your heart. Focus on the feeling; get it clear in your body and your mind. Imagine that you are back in that same situation that triggered this mental affliction. And it's beyond you to try to suppress it in the moment that it arises in full force. So we turn it around and we use it.
• Imagine now that you are starting to take in the anger of every person around you, and as you experience the anger yourself you are burning up all their anger too.
• Pull it into you. Take on the anger of the whole world. Take it on yourself. Take it inside yourself and just burn it away.
• As you take on their anger you are taking on the results of their anger as well. All the karma of anger is getting burned up in your own anger. At this moment, all the karma of every being, all their anger is ripening on you now through your anger, and you are destroying it through the experience.
• You burn away every harsh environment, every sickness, every broken bone, every loud blaring noise, everything that comes from anger that you can imagine. The terrible suffering of the hells, being burned alive—it's all ripening, all burning away inside of you. All the killing, all the brutal slaying of animals, all the slaying of men, all of it burning up now inside of your own body, inside your own anger.
• And then burn up now the very root cause of the anger, burn up everybody's tendency to grasp to things as themselves. Inside of you now, let your anger destroy it, every single misperception that causes people pain. Don't lose your anger; it's the force that will destroy these things, it's the fire of this particular virtue.
• Now start to take on other pains as well, any kind of pain you can imagine, and throw it into the fire of your heart anger, and burn it away into nothing.
• There's a man. He lives in Iraq. He saw his country stolen and then he saw his son stolen, and he's in pain. Take it from him. Destroy it for him.
• There's a little girl in the back seat of a car whose best friend is her teddy. She's on a road trip with her parents and Teddy gets dropped out the window, and the parents won't go back, and she's in pain. Take it from her; destroy it for her.
• A woman and her daughter are going to the grocery store. The mother decides to wait in the car but as soon as her daughter goes in, a bomb goes off and her daughter is killed, and she's in pain. Take it from her; destroy it for her. Use your anger to eradicate her pain.
• Someone has woken up to find their bed empty and their lover gone, and they're in pain. Take it from them; use your anger to destroy it for them.
• How many people are sobbing right now in the world? Find them; help them; take their pain from them.