The foolishness of people

 A lot of people come to me and say, ”We know anger is bad; it is poison, it burns, it is fire, it is hell, and yet we are not free from it.”

Then I tell them, ”It is a mistake on your part to think that you know it. You think you already know and yet you ask yourself, ’What should be done so that anger goes away?’ This is your mistake. In fact you do not know that anger is hell.”

Is it ever possible that a person would not leap out of anger once he knows it is hell?

Buddha has said this somewhere. A person whose life was full of troubles and anguish had approached him for advice, for a way out of his miseries. There was nothing but sorrow and affliction in his life. Buddha told him to give up those cares and miseries, to come out of them immediately: ”I will show you the way to be out of them,” he said.

The man said, ”Show me the way now, and then I will try, by and by, to follow your way.”

Then Buddha said, ”You are like a man whose house has caught fire and who says, ’Thank you very much for your advice; now I will gradually try to get myself out of the house.’” Buddha went on to say that it would have been better if the person had said, ”You are telling a lie – I do not see any fire.” But the man does not say so; he says, ”I believe you, I believe there is a fire, and by and by I will try to get out.”

Does anybody leave by and by, when the fire alarm sounds? He gets out immediately. He won’t stop even if the informant remains behind. One who knows there is fire jumps first and thinks afterwards, when he is out of the house. So Buddha said, ”You believe the fire is there, but you refuse to see it so you suffer unnecessarily. A person like you should not even trouble yourself to find out. You should not even try to test my advice. You have not even opened your eyes to see that there is fire all around you. You have admitted you are in difficulty and now you think, ’Fire is there, now I will get out of it, by and by – and you ask me to show you a way to get out!”

When somebody tells me, ”I know anger is bad and yet I cannot be free from it,” I say, ”It would be good if you could say, ’I do not know that anger is bad.’ What you really know is: ’Anger is good, and I am doing what is good. But I have heard from other people that anger is bad.’ It is what you have heard that you consider to be knowledge.”

Then what is true knowledge? You will have to know within yourself that anger is bad. So you will have to pass through it, you will have to endure the difficulty of the fire of anger, you will have to bear the anguish and pain caused by anger. When all your limits have been burnt by the flames of anger and when your life has become a great turmoil full of smoke, then it will not be necessary to go to anyone to ask whether anger is bad or not. Then it will not be necessary to seek out any method, any ritual, any remedy to escape from your anger. On knowing that anger is fire, you will be at once free from it. Such a knowing is vidya – true knowledge.