Anger: the monk’s little story

My thanks to the author for letting me share this post. I immediately identified with this due to the feelings of anger and frustration that I am currently experiencing, which I find emotionally crippling. Mine is but a temporary setback and I know it; I’m working hard to set things straight and to restore my inner peace of mind. The Monk’s Little Story has motivated and energized me and I hope my blogger friends will also find inspiration in the tale.

The Little Story: To meditate alone with no interruptions, a monk decided to go to a nearby lake. He took a boat and moored it in the middle of the lake, closed his eyes and began meditating. After a few hours of uninterrupted solitude passed and he was in a deep meditative state, when suddenly, he felt the bump of another boat colliding with his own. His eyes were closed still, but he was agitated, and felt his anger rising.  By the time he opened his eyes, he was about to scream at the boatman who had so carelessly disturbed his meditation. On opening his eyes, however, he was startled to find that it was just another empty boat that probably got untethered and floated to the middle of the lake.

That moment the monk had a profound realization: all the anger was within him; it merely needed the bump of an external object to provoke it out of him. And that moment on, whenever he came across someone who irritated or provoked him to anger, he reminded himself that the other person was merely an empty boat; it is he who has the choice to react independent of the whatever the other person did.

Reblogged from https://madame-zenista.com/2017/02/23/anger-the-monks-little-story/