I think many of us have experienced this: “I’ve been learning Buddhism for quite some time. Why do I still get angry so easily?”
When we lose our temper, we may feel disappointed with ourselves, or even wonder whether we have really made any progress at all.
But perhaps we are measuring progress in the wrong way.
After learning the Lamrim, it is natural to hope that we will become calmer and more patient. But learning the teachings does not mean our old habits disappear immediately. When we are triggered, our old reactions can still arise. The important question is not simply “Why am I still like this?”, but:
“What can this experience teach me?”
Instead of judging the experience as a failure, we can learn to review it skilfully.
What triggered my anger?
What was happening in my mind at that moment?
What did I fail to notice?
What could I do differently next time?
Our teacher often reminds us not to draw a quick conclusion from an experience. From the perspective of karma, every experience can become a cause for our future. We can look for the kindness and virtues of others, while also turning the light back onto our own mind and learning how to tame it.
So even an episode of anger can become useful. Perhaps we discover a particular trigger. Perhaps we notice how quickly our mind starts building a story around what happened. Perhaps we recognise our self-cherishing more clearly than before. And perhaps, simply because we now have the Lamrim as a reference point, we are able to reflect on the experience instead of blindly following the anger.
Shifu (Master Jih-Chang) has taught us that even failure can be transformed into a cause for success. I remember Shifu describing himself as a 常败将军, literally, “a general who kept losing.” The point was not that he never failed. It was that whenever he failed, he would get back up, learn from it, motivate himself and try again. And then try again.
That is the spirit we can adopt in our own practice.
It is a little like learning any skill. A person learning a new language will still mispronounce words. A runner will still have bad training days. A cook may still burn a dish. The mistake itself is not the end of the learning. The mistake tells us what to practise next.
So perhaps we don’t need to ask, “After learning Buddhism for so long, why am I still angry?”
We can gently ask instead:
“Because I encountered this anger today, what have I learned that I didn’t know before?”
And this is where 善巧总结, learning to reflect and review skilfully, becomes important.
We don’t simply look back and decide, “I failed again.” We learn to look back and ask: What happened? What did I learn? What was helpful? What needs to change? And what can I do differently the next time?
In this way, we are not merely reviewing the past. We are using the past to create better causes for the future.
Progress does not necessarily mean “I never get angry anymore.” Sometimes progress is that we notice the anger a little earlier, understand its cause a little more clearly, recover a little faster, or regret our words and try again instead of defending ourselves.
The goal is not to never fail. The practice is to learn how to 善巧总结, to reflect and review skilfully, so that even our failures become causes for the next step forward.
And perhaps, like Shifu, we simply keep getting up.
Try again. Then try again.