Hate never feels good. However justified a burning desire for vengeance may seem, and however much the cinematic world may glorify and romanticise it, in the real world it feels like toxic waste churning through your system. And what does it feel like to purge such a substance; to release the grudge or to resolve the issue without harming anyone? It is a huge relief; a bit like coming through and out of an illness.
The word for “ill-will” in Pāli is byāpāda, which probably comes from the word byādhi “sick”. Literally it means “upset” but in the sense of being physically afflicted with an illness. So as the English term also conveys in its very wording, ill-will in Pāli likens the experience of grudge baring or hatred to being diseased. This is also the analogy used in the Buddhist Tipitaka for someone harbouring ill-will; a sick person who can’t stomach their food - any food - as the symptoms of their illness won’t allow them to enjoy or digest it. The traditional Thai translation for byāpāda is interesting too: literally to “tie the heart [to something that causes it to] hurt; to think of getting revenge.”
While experiencing this “condition” myself once, I came by a talk on anger by a Thai nun. The opening sentence was disarmingly simple and hit home - maybe because of its simplicity - in a way that was unexpected: “The person in front of you is not what is making you suffer; it is [the quality of] hatred that is making you suffer”. She went on: “Please remember that suffering arises from our own wrong thinking. Really, hatred arises out of our own heart; the heart that is bogged down in ignorance. Or to put it another way, a heart that falls for its own mood.” The raw truth of those words just rang true. And they acted on me like a potent cure being streamed straight into the heart. This is called dhamma-osadha; the medicinal property of Dhamma.
This made me reminisce over a verse I came by in the Tipitaka many years ago. In it, the Buddha speaks about an “arrow in the heart” which is “so very hard to see”, and which makes us run in all directions. “Simply upon pulling it out, you don’t run, you don’t sink” he said. In another passage, the image of someone struck by an arrow - a poison arrow this time - comes up again. In this instance, the wounded victim is insisting on knowing every last detail about the arrow and the person who fired it before they will allow it to be extracted, rather than just allowing the surgeon to take it out. And so the victim dies with his host of unanswered questions about the origin of the dart still unanswered, the dart still embedded and seeping poison into his body.
The arrow represents the quality of craving and / or sorrow already there within the heart. But sometimes its like we’ve been hit by someone else’s arrow; we find ourselves the direct target of, or maybe within the blast zone of, someone else’s destructive behaviour, and of course we feel the impact. But then we carry that experience around for a very long time. We may even die still embittered by what happened, never having resolved it. But even when we’ve been hurt by someone else, a profoundly simple question can be asked: Where is the pain? Where is the arrow now? And based on that, where, or from who, does it need to be pulled from? Is it somewhere out there, with the assailant?
This is a confronting question because it points right back at the person suffering. But it helps us locate the true source of our grief. The other parties genuinely bad behavior notwithstanding, the arrow is still right here, and so the treatment must take place here. Chasing after the assailant who shot us will actually obstruct the healing process, increase the heart rate, pumping the poison around the body even more. Having been hit by a nasty act, the bad blood within is stirred up. We then cleave to the arrow, hold onto it and seek revenge, driven by the notion that finding the perpetrator and levelling the score will rid us of the distress we are feeling. But the first priority is to get that poison arrow out because the stark reality is that it is buried here and so it needs to be extracted here. Dealing with the other party is second priority.
There is a Thai saying about a single strand of hair in ones face, obstructing one’s view of an entire mountain. It is funny, sometimes just a few simple words can be the light breeze that blows that strand aside, letting the mountain come into view. “The person in front of you isn’t what is making you suffer… it is the quality of anger itself that is making you suffer.”