Righteous Anger and the Zen Master (excerpt from Guru I, Cabeza):

It was the Vietnam War era. A member of the Vietnamese RFPF forces (our allies the “Ruff Puffs”—so termed to connote their fighting prowess) had been observed, by a reporter, putting a bullet through the brain of a prisoner. “The Buddha will understand,” the Ruff Puff was quoted as saying. [Philip] Kapleau [Roshi of the Rochester Zen Center]: “Yes, the Buddha will understand! He will understand the man is a murderer! There is such a thing as righteous anger.”
    . . . I beg to differ.
    “All things are the primal Void,” we chanted three times a day.
    “All beings without number, we vow to liberate,” the first of the Four Vows, we chanted six times a day.
    The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, which includes “This One Pure Mind, the source of everything [my italics], shines forever and on all with the brilliance of its own perfection,” was on the top of Kapleau’s reading list.
    The Bodhisattva Kannon (Kuan Yin in Chinese) of Infinite Love and Compassion was held up as the ideal. There was a small room with a statue/altar—the Kannon room—with three sitting mats and cushions. I often sat there.
    The Bodhisattva of Compassion “saw the emptiness . . . and sundered the bonds that caused him suffering.”
    The Bodhisattva of Compassion “became enlightened by hearing all the cries of suffering in the world.”
    Tell me, dear reader, if all is One, and this One is Love, Beauty, and Truth, then where is there anything to be angry at?
    Anger, it is so clear to me now, is one of those “Endless blind passions we vow to uproot” (the second of the Four Vows) rooted in the drive for reproductive success. We are angry at, by reacting to the fear of, what threatens our reproductive success. That’s why Kapleau was “righteously” angry. The Ruff Puff, by invoking the Buddha, had lowered the status of Buddhists everywhere. So Kapleau: was he ever pissed about that! And on top of that was the fact that the vast majority of the potential “buyers” of his “product”—Zen Buddhist meditation—were antiwar students. (The dues-paying members supporting the Center and his book receipts were, as far as I know, his only income.) And who knows if the ones he already had might desert and join a Hindu ashram, or. . . .
    The hard sad truth is, everyone does everything for what he or she thinks is a very good reason (which is virtually always to try to help, however tortuously, their own reproductive success). Maybe the Ruff Puff had had his family killed by the Viet Cong, or maybe the hassle of caring for a prisoner was too much (I’m not excusing him, just hypothesizing reasons). No one thinks they are bad, at least while they are doing “bad” things. They may repent later, almost always because this improves their status or security in the eyes of others whom they may have harmed. Saddam, after being sentenced to death, has just—as I write—called for forgiveness. Right! (I.e., maybe the appeals court will overturn his conviction for having massacred thousands of Iraqis.) Do we get angry at a mountain lion when it catches a deer, and call it bad? But, if it killed your child (or dog) you might, and press for the extermination of the vermin. During the Middle Ages in Europe I doubt there were many who considered wolves the adorable creatures in need of protection we think they are now. They were killing people then. The big bad wolf. That’s different, you say? It’s natural? Then what about bands of chimps that patrol their borders and kill other chimps when they can. Are chimps “bad”? Certainly we’d all prefer to live in a world without killing, but it’s that imagined world that’s “unnatural.”
    And Saddam’s calling for “forgiveness”—we may call it hypocrisy, but it’s really his unremitting drive to achieve reproductive success however he can. Some evolutionary theorists believe the entire reason language evolved was not, as one might think, to convey information: rather misinformation. To deceive others (even monkeys and chimps deceive one another with vocalizations), just as a pitcher in baseball tries to deceive a batter. And we call it “bad” hypocrisy because it is bad for our reproductive success, if we are thus deceived.
    Getting back to anger, I’m not saying there may not be very good societal and/or personal reasons to prevent people from doing “bad” things. As others have noted, despite the overwhelming evidence that pours in—it seems daily—that behavior is rooted in the genes (and their interaction with the environment), it may well be in the best interests of society to act as if there were free will. Even if a potential thief does not have free will, if he knows for certain he will be caught and punished (in a way that he fears), he may be deterred from the crime.
    I myself am, unfortunately, for reasons I am convinced are in my genes, at times angry—though less than in the past. But I know there is ultimately no “righteous” reason for it. I know it is due to my own reaction to fear and I attempt, with albeit limited success, to abstain from that reaction. This has, for some reason, always been clear to me. . . .