De 德 (Virtue) and Nu 怒 (Anger) - part 2
Review of Part 1
According to ancient Daoist wisdom, every individual is made of Yin Qi and Yang Qi, and everyone carries both De 德/virtue (beneficial) and Nu 怒/anger (harmful) qualities and emotions in life. One of the primary benefits of Daoist cultivation practices is learning to transform our anger into virtue.
Each time I meditate with the oracle bone character for De, I easily tune into a tranquil state and through my third eye, can feel and see the connection between my body and nature. Through these meditative experiences, I have come to interpret the meaning of De as both the prenatal function of the body and the actions we take on a daily basis in order to follow the Dao.
In part 2 of this topic, I would like to focus on my understanding on Nu 怒 (anger) and share some of my experience in transforming Nu to De.
Nu 怒 — Anger
NuShiWuShangHuo ShaoHuiGongDeLin
怒是無上火 燒毀功德林
Anger is supreme Fire and may destroy all of the results of your cultivation practices
— an oral saying from Chinese inner cultivation traditions
Qi-friends often asked me, “Master Wu, do you ever get angry? It seems that you are always happy!” “Yes, of course I get angry sometimes,” I answer honestly. As many of you already know, anger, or Nu 怒, is associated with the function of the liver. Yes, we all born with this emotional feature of Nu, and I also have carried this emotion throughout my life.
The Chinese word Nu 怒 means rage, fury, passion; angry, roaring, or blame. You are able to easily transform any kind of anger if you have a healthy liver function. You can become easily irritated if your liver Fire is excess. You can readily feel angry or even depressed if your liver Qi is stagnant or if your liver YangQi is weak.
I still clearly remember that I was often angry as a teenager. One day, I heard the saying I shared at beginning of this writing from one of my masters and suddenly felt an awakening call from my deep within my heart. Over the past four decades, this saying still helps me remember to find my inner peace at those times I feel overcome by my anger.
Anger or Uplift?
In addition to the common meanings of anger or angry, many people do not realize that the same word, Nu 怒, also has the meaning of uplift or doing all one’s best. You might feel it is strange for one word to have both meanings, anger and uplifting. However, seasoned Chinese medicine or Daoist internal alchemy practitioners are familiar with the concept that both anger and an uplifting spirit are part of the spiritual function of the liver organ.
All anger rises, just like a flame, and like fire, we must deal with it cautiously. Otherwise, the fire could grow stronger and runs the risk of damaging or even destroying what we have spent time creating. Our body is finite in size, and is a container for our mental processes. Any unchecked rising emotion can quickly take up more and more space, thereby leaving less space for other emotions. Once anger rises, it can quickly turn into a strong anger fire and burn through the whole body, burning off other emotions, like compassion and virtue, which are our natural mechanisms for balancing anger. In those moments, the fire works to destroy the hard earned results of our cultivation practice - De 德 - our intrinsic great virtue.
It is vital to remember that we all have the ability to transform our anger emotion into an uplifting spirit.
XiangLong 降龍 — Taming the Dragon
In Daoist internal alchemy, the principle of transforming our anger into an uplifting spirit, or great compassion and humanity, is called XiangLong, or taming our dragon.
In Daoist tradition, each organ of the body has its associated spiritual animal. The spiritual animal of your liver is Long 龍, the Chinese dragon 🐉. If the dragon stays untamed, one will be ever quick to anger. If the dragon is weak, one will become easily depressed. If, on the other hand you have a well tamed and heathy dragon, you will have an uplifting spirit with great compassion for our shared humanity.
It is for this reason that we are always taming the dragon, i.e. transforming our anger or depressed energy into compassion through our cultivation practice. As you may suspect, there are many methods of taming the dragon. The most effective and powerful method that I have experienced for this is listening.
Ting 聽 — Listening
The original meaning of Chinese character Ting 聽 is listening or hearing. It also commonly means understand, obey, accept, or allow. The symbol of Ting is made by left radical Er 耳 for ear and right radical De 㥁, the same De 德 (virtue) that I discussed in the Part 1 of this article. The symbol Ting indicates that listening is the way to access our great virtue and holds the key to how we approach any kind of situation with an equanimous mind and heart.
For those of you who have studied Qigong with me, you will easily recall that in each of my classes, I always instruct you to “listen within” during your practice. This means listening to your own inner voices, listening to the external voices as the reverberate within you, listening to your body, and listening to your heart - these listening skills are a powerful way to activate the healing process that brings your physical, emotion and spiritual bodies back into healthy function.
In internal martial arts, it is essential that you learn to use your body to listen to the incoming force of your opponent. In this way, you are able to transform your opponent’s attacking energy into your own power,and to subdue your opponent with compassion rather than anger.
The same principle holds true in our relationships. We are able to deal with conflicts that arise between ourselves and our friends, family, and life partners if we practice our patient listening skills.
Throughout my life, it has become very clear that I have the choice to help turn a fighting confrontation into a peaceful interaction if I listen within and/or listen to others before reacting. Every time I ever let my anger get the best of me it is because I have forgotten to tame my dragon.
For example, several years ago, I noticed that I sometimes felt very angry with city drivers who did not stop for people in the pedestrian crosswalk. My anger towards this kind of driver grew after we moved from a small town to Stockholm, as suddenly there were many more drivers on the road who drove with a “rush” mentality.
One day, I was walking across the crosswalk near a large parking lot. As I reached the middle point, a person came shooting out of the parking lot in their car and made a sharp turn towards to me. The car nearly rammed into me. Of course, I was super angry at that moment and also felt that I had been very lucky not to have gotten hit. I quickly ran away from the dangerous spot.
As I kept walking, I started to feel the shock. Wow, a couple of minutes ago I could have easily died or been severely injured! Listening into the shock feeling, I felt my anger and meditated with it as I continued to walk. I realized that my anger could not change other people’s driving behavior and only made myself uncomfortable. I began to change my own attitude towards these kinds of drivers. Interestingly, from then on, I started growing compassionate feelings for those rushing drivers and find myself with a smile face when I encounter similar situations.
Throughout our lives, we will encounter unpleasant and even dangerous situations, ones that are out of our control and influence. Once we can be assured of our own safety in these times like these, we can start to learn to adapt our attitude so that we aren’t eaten up by our own angry reactions. No matter the external circumstances, we all have a choice to learn to control our internal reality by deciding anew which path we want to take - the one in which we are perpetually feeding our Nu (anger) or the one in which we slow down, listen within, and nurture our De (great compassion).