Being Provoked by Conditions

    I am bringing up Santideva a lot in my recent blog entries, partly because this is assigned writing book for a course in mindfulness and mental health. But there is another reason for this, and that is Santideva has an excellent style that put things very pithily. His writings are the kinds of things I can reflect on a great deal, even though the individual entries are quite small.   Reading each entry on a daily basis has been a kind of 'fortune cookie' experience for me, in the sense that each daily entry is a new thing for me to explore. I somehow wish that there were more books out there like this: small passages, no longer than 1-2 sentences per passage, which allow the reader to participate in the text by adding their own commentary and experiences. So far, the only similar texts I have come across with this format are Pascal's Pensees, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Dhammapada, and Master Sheng Yen's 108 Adages of Wisdom. Perhaps they are enough after all! 
   Santideva raises a very interesting theme on Line 22 of "The Perfection of Patience", and that is the theme of not taking 'unaware' things as having awareness. He remarks:

I am not angered at bile and the like even though they cause great suffering. Why be angry at sentient beings, who are also provoked to anger by conditions? (p.64)

The idea behind this small passage seems multilayered. One thing Santedeva suggests is that we hardly get angry at what we think of as inanimate. How many times has a person stubbed their toe on the bedpost and then tried to be angry with the bedpost all day? It's not so possible, is it? Yet, if a person is called a bad name by their neighbor, she or he is likely to be angry all day. What's the difference between these two situations? I think that in the first situation, we can easily see that the bedpost is a 'condition' that provokes the emotion. If I had been in a different location relative to the bedpost, it would not have harmed me. I reason, then, that a combination of different preconditions allowed the bedpost to hurt my body: proximity, relative light in the room, my own sleepy state of mind, etc.
    In the second situation where a person calls me a name, it's often harder for me to understand that that too is conditioned. I think : "well that person did it to me, because they hate me!" In this sentence, there is a strong sense of someone else who has awareness telling my awareness how bad I am. There is this assumption, then, that there are two different aware beings fighting with each other. Now, if I suddenly realized that the person talking to me were a puppet or a robot, I probably wouldn't be annoyed, because I am not feeling that the other were intentionally trying to harm me. But what if even a so-called intentional action by a person was also conditioned? If we even think about the case of a cold-blooded killer, even she or he is behaving from conditions of the mind: past memories, traumatic feelings, hatreds, assumptions, and beliefs. Aren't these all conditioned as well?
    I think Santideva's point is to say: if we could treat others as subject to conditions, we wouldn't have much reason to be angry with them. To use a biochemical model, all the bile in one's body creates certain conditions which affect emotions and overall outlook. If I don't attach that bile to a specific self who is deliberately trying to 'harm me' (another illusion), then I won't harbor any grudge toward another. The point is not to think that there is a single 'person' who is deliberately trying to thwart this 'person' called 'me'--but rather, to perhaps consider, what are the conditions impinging upon the situation? From a global, overarching perspective, what are the factors that make things as they are? This attitude is completely opposite to one of blame.


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