As the Washington Post reports today, physicist Stephen
Hawking has identified humanity’s aggression as one of the greatest threats to
humanity itself. Quoth Hawking: “The human failing I would most like to correct
is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more
food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to
destroy us all.” (Likewise, he said about empathy that it’s the quality he
“would most like to magnify is empathy. It brings us together in a peaceful,
loving state.”)
Aggression is all too familiar to us all, of course, but it
has an especially notable place in Buddhist thought. Sometimes rendered simply
as “anger,” or “hate,” aggression is referred to as one of Buddhism’s “Three
Poisons,” along with passion (alternatively rendered as greed, or desire), and
ignorance (or, delusion). So it follows that there’s no shortage of Buddhist
wisdom on working with aggression.
Mitigating these poisons begins with us individually — so if
you’re interested in doing your part, don’t miss these articles on how to work
with anger:
via:
www.livebuddhism.com