You have tried to get rid of it. That is the shape your whole effort has taken — subtraction. You have treated your anger as something foreign that got into you, a fault to be deleted, and you have measured your progress by how much of it you managed to remove this week. The arithmetic never works. You take some out and it comes back with interest, and afterwards you decide the problem is that you did not try hard enough. Kṛṣṇa does not speak about your anger that way. When He describes a man of godly nature in Bhagavad-gītā 16.1-3, He does not tell Arjuna what such a man has stopped doing. He tells him what such a man possesses. And among those possessions, standing quietly between truthfulness and renunciation, is akrodha — freedom from anger, named as something you hold, not something you have failed to lose.
The Quality You Were Never Taught to Grow
Read the list again and notice what kind of list it is. Fearlessness stands at its head, and after fearlessness come purification of one's existence, the cultivation of spiritual knowledge, charity, self-control, the performance of sacrifice, study of the Vedas, austerity and simplicity — and the sentence keeps going in the very same voice through nonviolence and truthfulness and freedom from anger, through renunciation and tranquillity and aversion to faultfinding, through compassion for all living entities, freedom from covetousness, gentleness and modesty, down to steady determination, vigor, forgiveness, fortitude, cleanliness and freedom from envy. Kṛṣṇa calls the whole of it sampad, wealth. Not a rulebook and not a list of prohibitions — a fortune, an estate a man is born into. And in 16.4 He gives the opposite its own name and its own dignity: pride, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness and ignorance are the āsurī sampad, and observe that anger is not called a mistake there either. It is called a nature. Two natures, two inheritances, and in 16.5 He tells Arjuna that the divine one leads to liberation while the other binds, and then adds the line you must not read past. Mā śucaḥ. Do not worry. You are born of the divine nature. He does not tell Arjuna that Arjuna has no anger. He tells Arjuna where he belongs, and that is a different diagnosis from the one you have been working with.
abhayaṁ sattva-saṁśuddhir jñāna-yoga-vyavasthitiḥ dānaṁ damaś ca yajñaś ca svādhyāyas tapa ārjavam
— Bhagavad-gītā 16.1-3
Translation: Fearlessness; purification of one’s existence; cultivation of spiritual knowledge; charity; self-control; performance of sacrifice; study of the Vedas; austerity; simplicity; nonviolence; truthfulness; freedom from anger; renunciation; tranquillity; aversion to faultfinding; compassion for all living entities; freedom from covetousness; gentleness; modesty; steady determination; vigor; forgiveness; fortitude; cleanliness; and freedom from envy and from the passion for honor – these transcendental qualities, O son of Bharata, belong to godly men endowed with divine nature.
Purport: Mark the grammar. Dānam, charity. Damaḥ, self-control. Yajñaḥ, sacrifice. Svādhyāyaḥ, study of the Vedas. Tapaḥ, austerity. Ārjavam, simplicity. Then ahiṁsā, satyam, akrodhaḥ. Kṛṣṇa sets them all on one grammatical footing and never pauses to explain that this one is different in kind. In 16.1-3 akrodha has exactly the standing of dāna: a noun, a holding, something a man carries into the room with him. The language was perfectly capable of saying krodha-tyāga, the abandonment of anger, and Kṛṣṇa did not say it. The a- in akrodha is not a subtraction sign. It is the name of a substance that occupies the ground on which anger would otherwise stand. You do not clear darkness out of a room by carrying the darkness outside in buckets. You bring in a lamp, and the darkness was never the thing you were handling.
Anger Named Among the Qualities of Divine Nature
Every other item on that list has a practice attached to it, and you already know what the practices are. Charity is grown by giving, and Kṛṣṇa is exact about the kind of giving that grows it: in 17.20 charity in the mode of goodness is what is given as a matter of duty, at the proper place and time, to a worthy person, from whom you expect nothing in return. Truthfulness is grown by speaking, and in 17.15 He defines the austerity of speech as words that are truthful, beneficial and pleasing, and that do not agitate the man who hears them. Austerity is grown by voluntarily accepting a difficulty you were entirely free to refuse. Study is grown by study. And in 6.35, when Arjuna protests that the mind is restless and impossible to hold, Kṛṣṇa does not deny it — He gives him abhyāsa and vairāgya, practice and detachment, which is a cultivator's answer and not a policeman's. So put the obvious question to the list. If charity has giving and truth has speaking, what is the practice that grows akrodha? Not-getting-angry is not a practice. It is a result, and no man has ever performed a result. Hold on to 2.40 while you look for the real answer: on this path no endeavour is ever lost, nothing is ever diminished, and a little advancement protects you from the greatest fear.
“You cannot subtract anger. You can only grow the nature in which anger finds no soil — and a field is never cleared of weeds by pulling at weeds forever, it is cleared by being sown.”
Why Removing a Fault Never Works
A farmer who wants a clean field and does nothing but pull weeds will pull weeds until he dies. The soil is not idle and it is not neutral. It will grow whatever it is given, and if he gives it nothing it will grow whatever blew in over the fence. His only real remedy is to sow, because a sown field crowds out what he was fighting, and the fight ends without ever having been won. Kṛṣṇa states the same principle for you with no agriculture in it at all. In 2.59 He says a man may be restrained from the objects of the senses, but the taste for them remains, and the taste itself ceases only when he has tasted something higher. That is why your subtraction has failed, and understand clearly that the failure is not a verdict on you. Restraint reaches the act. It cannot reach the taste, and the taste is the root system, running under everything you resolved last month. The Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam puts it more bluntly still. In 1.2.19, when devotional service is firmly established, the effects of rajas and tamas — kāma and lobha among them — simply depart, and the heart, no longer pierced by them, is situated in sattva and becomes joyful. Notice who does the removing in that verse. Not you. You sow, and the weeds lose their ground.
tri-vidhaṁ narakasyedaṁ dvāraṁ nāśanam ātmanaḥ kāmaḥ krodhas tathā lobhas tasmād etat trayaṁ tyajet
— Bhagavad-gītā 16.21
Translation: There are three gates leading to this hell – lust, anger and greed. Every sane man should give these up, for they lead to the degradation of the soul.
Purport: Kṛṣṇa calls them dvāram, gates — kāma, krodha and lobha — and a gate is not a wound in a wall. A gate is an opening standing where nothing was built. He calls them nāśanam ātmanaḥ, ruinous to the self, and He says tyajet, give them up, and there is where every reader stops and starts pulling. Read it as a builder reads it instead. The three gates mark the three places in you where the divine nature has not yet been raised, and it matters that 16.21 comes after the catalogue and not before it: Kṛṣṇa first shows Arjuna what the finished structure looks like, and only then names the gaps. You do not close a gate by wrestling with the gate. You close it by finishing the wall. Anger is not an intruder who broke into your house. It is the doorway your house still has.
Cultivation as the Only Real Remedy
So here is the answer to the question left open earlier, and it is not the answer self-improvement would offer you. In 10.4-5 Kṛṣṇa runs through intelligence, knowledge, freedom from doubt and delusion, forgiveness, truthfulness, control of the senses, calmness of mind, nonviolence, equanimity, satisfaction, austerity and charity, and He closes the sentence with matta eva, from Me alone. Kṣamā and śamaḥ, forgiveness and calmness of mind, the two nearest neighbours akrodha has anywhere in the Gītā, stand there among the things He creates and distributes. That settles the question. Akrodha is not manufactured by you. It is received, and it is received by connection, which is why the qualities of 16.1-3 arrive together as a single nature rather than one at a time, the way a sunrise does not light one field first and another an hour later. This is also why 16.21 is not the sentence of despair it sounds like when it is read alone: Kṛṣṇa names the three gates to a man who is already building. And the connection He means is not an abstraction. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.2.17 says that Kṛṣṇa, seated within the heart, personally cleanses what is inauspicious there in the man who simply hears about Him, and 1.2.7 says that devotional service to Vāsudeva produces knowledge and detachment at once, with no separate campaign mounted for either.
So stop auditing your anger. The audit itself keeps your attention fixed on the weed. Put the same hour into what is sown instead: hear about Kṛṣṇa, chant His names, give something you will miss, speak one true sentence you had planned to soften. In 10.10 He promises that to those who serve Him constantly with love He personally gives the intelligence by which they come to Him, and in 9.22 He says that for those who worship Him with undivided attention He carries what they lack and preserves what they have. Read that as a sentence about your temper. Akrodha is among the things you lack, and He has said He will carry it. Keep 16.5 in your pocket: mā śucaḥ, do not worry, you are born of the divine nature. You are not repairing a defective man. You are sowing an empty field, and the field is yours.
From the Book
This article draws on the Anger chapter of Bhagavad Gita for Everyday Life, my forthcoming book applying Kṛṣṇa’s instruction to the specific afflictions of ordinary life. The chapter treats every verse the Gītā assigns to anger, verse by verse, with the word-by-word meaning and its application to work and family.
Go deeper now: The Steady Sage.
