Skillful Approaches to Anger – Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Want to learn skillful approaches to anger?
Led by meditation teacher Thanissaro Bhikkhu, this month’s Dharma Talk will discuss how to use the Buddha’s teaching on the three fabrications (sankhara)—bodily, verbal, and mental—to break down anger and replace it with a perspective that’s more conducive to dealing skillfully with the situation that provoked the anger to begin with.
“One of the Buddha’s most important insights was that what we experience in the present moment is not entirely caused by the past. Some of our experiences do come from past karma. But the important part is how we shape the raw material coming in from the past through our present intentions.
The Buddha calls this process of shaping sankhara fabrication. There are three kinds. There is a bodily fabrication, which is the in- and out-breath. There is a verbal fabrication, which the texts call directed thought and evaluation. It’s basically how you talk to yourself, the questions you ask and the judgments you pass on things. And then there’s a mental fabrication, which is felt as perceptions. Feelings here are not emotions; they are more feeling tones: a tone of pleasure, a tone of pain, or a tone of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you apply to things. If you were to compare verbal fabrication with perceptions, verbal fabrication would be full sentences or questions; perceptions are individual words or images.
The way you identify things is through these three processes. We shape the raw material coming in from the past and turn it into our experience of the present moment.”
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Watch the full Dharma Talk here: https://tricycle.org/dharmatalks/than...