Jun Po Roshi (Interview Archive)
Suppose we take apart how you understand your own reactions for a moment. Consider the possibility that anger, in the way people usually express it, isn't actually a feeling at all. It's more like an interjection, a violent response. When someone says I'm feeling angry, what they're describing most of the time is a reaction or a projection. You can grant that there's a bodily, visceral charge to it, sure, but you're also intervening, doing something. So the real question becomes: what feeling sits underneath that reaction?
Ask a person a few questions and they always arrive somewhere. Fear, usually. And what sits beneath the fear? A kind of grief, a dread. Something terrible might happen. Keep going down and you reach deep concern. I care about this. I'm afraid, and there's some sadness in me. From there the impulse is to protect: so I lash outward, or I turn it inward on myself, or I split off and disconnect. And at that point you can simply stop. Pause. Then ask what the feeling is telling you. Am I being insulted? Am I in danger? Is a bus about to hit me? What is the thing I actually need to do here?
What changes is your whole grasp of what emotion is and how you relate to it once it arises. After that shift takes hold, you go back through the situations in your life. Did your mother ever make you angry? Your father? The honest answer is no, they never made you angry. Those were reactions you chose, ways of intervening. Once you see that clearly, you can return to those memories and look again.
There's a line we use in my Zen tradition: quickly, send me to hell, I think I'm ready to go.
Erik: What do you mean by that?
Jun Po: Drop me into a situation where I'm provoked and let's find out whether compassion shows up or whether the hysterical, historical pattern fires off again. Insult me. This is the thing Christ pointed at when he said turn the other cheek. He wasn't telling anyone to become a masochist. He was saying: thank you, now what was that about? I'm furious. I care enormously. This matters to me. But I'm no longer violent, and I'm no longer a fool. Not idiot compassion, real compassion. Help me understand. What should we do? This is completely unacceptable, completely. So what do we do about it? I'm extremely angry, and I'm not violent. Could I be violent? Of course.
The Dalai Lama once put it perfectly. Someone asked him, don't you hate the Chinese, don't you feel rage and the urge to strike back at them? And he answered, how would that be useful? When I heard that, something in me went hallelujah.
Erik: Yeah.
Jun Po: I could act that way if it actually worked. But why would I, when it doesn't?