Chase Your Foes Away: Ambition, Anger, Hatred

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 25 pages

Anger is treated as one of three self-destroying states of mind, the other two being worldly love and delusion, and it is given a precise position in Bhagavan Das's scheme: at the mid-point of the Not-Self continuum, so that hate toward equals produces anger, hate toward superiors produces fear, and hate toward inferiors produces scorn. The definitions gathered around it come from four philosophers — Socrates calling anger the raging and seething of the soul, Aristotle the boiling of the blood around the heart, and Plato holding that though pain, fear and anger are given to men by necessity, those who conquer them live righteously and those conquered by them unrighteously.

Two images carry the practical teaching. The first is physiological and from the Timaeus: that in order to help men the gods protected the heart by surrounding it with the soft, cool thicket of the lungs, to chill the heat of anger. The second is the Pythagorean maxim — dig not fire with a sword, but by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger extinguished, and you yourself will not appear destitute of intellect. A long footnote gives the life of Bhagavan Das, born at Varanasi in 1869, who left government service for scholarship, founded the Central Hindu College with Annie Besant — which became the Benares Hindu University — and later the Kashi Vidya Pith.

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