Perfecting Patience

    In his chapter "The Perfection of Patience" in Way of the Bodhisattva, Santideva describes anger and impatience as things which only estrange a person from others. I take it that I have a great deal to learn from this chapter, because it can train me to become more patient and accepting of all situations around me. I think I would like to spend some time going through the concepts.
    Santideva's first task in this chapter is to show the disadvantages of impatience, as a spur toward the mindful cultivation of patience. How he does this is by showing how dreadfully isolating impatience can be. He remarks "the mind does not find peace, nor does it enjoy pleasure and joy, nor does it find sleep or fortitude when the thorn of hatred dwells in the heart." (p.61, line 3). He later goes on to suggest that friends and dependents fear an angry person (lines 4-5) and may even wish to harm that person. What I get from this passage is: anger and impatience only breeds the same anger and patience in others. Therefore, anger only ends up perpetuating one's misery when it isolates oneself from other beings. Not only this, but Santideva remarks on how anger can taint a person's virtue, even that merit which has been accumulated over a long period of time (line 1).
     Santideva's strategy in this chapter is very interesting. He essentially takes the notion of hatred and turns it upon itself. Rather than being angry or impatient toward a particular being, I reflect on how the true source of my misery is the anger itself. Thus, anger itself is come to be known as the source of problems, not any particular object. Interestingly, rather than abolish the aggressive, rejecting tendencies of anger, Santideva seems to exhort his practitioners to take this very same 'rejection' and use it to 'reject' the impatient attitude of rejection itself! Is this a contradiction? Maybe not so much, considering that rejection is only harmful when it reflects an attachment to certain states of being. For instance, if my rejecting behavior is related to wanting to seek the desirable object and avoid the undesirable, then this very state of rejection becomes a form of vexation and suffering. On the other hand, on can take this exact same rejecting attitude and turn it upon the tendency to reject itself, which thus becomes a formless practice in the sense that there is no object to reject.
     It is as though I were redirecting anger from an object to the mere reflection of an object. In the former case, there is some belief that I am fighting a tangible, permanent object outside of me--something with an enduring substance that lasts forever. But in the latter case, I start to realize that the true source of suffering is not any object, but rather the tendency to objectify, which is actually an intangible quality of volition or 'mental construction'. Then I can take the anger I feel toward the object and redirect it to my tendency to reject. I think that this 'redirected' anger feels much more manageable, because suddenly the 'object' of anger turns out to be an intangible tendency of mind, among many other conditions going into the illusion of a tangible object. It is as though, rather than fighting a dragon, a warrior were suddenly to realize that the 'dragon' is just a shadow on the wall constructed by the eye at a certain angle.

Santideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva (selected chapters only). Translated by V. Wallace and A. Wallace. Snow Lion, 1997.  Other translations by the Padmakara Translation Gorup.