Essay Writing of Buddhas’ Practice Incorporated (Issue 17)
The relationship between hatred and disease
Instructor：Bennie Spirit ，Shi Wuguang
Author: Wang Huaigu
March 16th, 2024
Abstract
The relationship between hatred and disease is a close cause and effect relationship. Hatred can cause both mental and physical illnesses. Hatred affects an individual’s mental health, including mental illnesses such as depression. Hatred can cause stroke, shock, heart disease, arterial blockage, high blood pressure, heart disease, stomach disease, insomnia, liver disease, skin disease, breast enlargement and other physical illnesses, and more likely to lead to a decline in immunity, and even prone to sudden death. Therefore, anger inevitably invites all kinds of physical and mental illnesses.
Keywords: hatred, mental illness, physical illness, immunity, physical and mental illnesses
Chapter 1 Introduction
As a pre-topic of the study, this chapter firstly clarifies the motivation and purpose of this study, then discusses the current status of the study from the literature review, and then makes a statement on the structure of the whole paper. Since I was a child, I have heard that “anger harms the liver”, but I didn’t know what it was, let alone the reason why, and only thought that it was a law of nature that everyone could not escape from and that it was normal. It was only after I grew up and learnt about Buddhism that I realized that the disease was related to hatred and other afflictions.
In view of the fact that “I must go to the root of the problem, I can’t pick the leaves and look for the branches”, in order to dispel the confusion in my mind, the author will, based on my own studies of sutras, theories, and medical and scientific knowledge, make a preliminary inquiry into the root cause of this disease, with a view to understanding more about the relationship between hatred and disease.
This article first defines hatred and illness, and then explores the two major aspects of mental and physical illness caused by hatred with the help of scientific and medical findings. Hatred leads to mental illnesses, including depression, increased irritation, increased hatred, increased criticism, hardening of the mind, and disturbance of the crowd and other mental illnesses.
Hatred can produce physical illnesses such as high blood pressure, heart disease, stomach disease, insomnia, liver disease, skin disease, breast enlargement, etc., and it is more likely to lead to a decline in immunity and even to sudden death. Finally, an important conclusion is drawn: Hatred can cause various physical and psychological diseases, and there is a definite causal relationship between Hatred and disease.
The whole text is divided into four chapters: Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Concept of hatred and disease; Chapter 3 Relationship between hatred and psychological disease; Chapter 4 Relationship between hatred and physical disease; Chapter 5 Conclusion.
Chapter 2 The Concept of Hatred and Disease
Let’s first understand what hatres is.
It is mentioned in Theory on Sutra of Questions of the Maitreya Bodhisattva, “Hatred is that one is hateful to other living beings and wishes to harm them, and is at odds with great kindness and compassion .”
When facing all living beings, if one has a nasty feeling in one’s heart, even to the extent of hurting the other person in actions and words, or taking the other person’s life in behavior, that is anger and the karma it causes in body and mouth, that is to say, it is a departure from the kind and compassionate mind.
The Sutra of Ten Unwholesome Karmic Paths also mentions, “What is hatred? It means to be angry with sentient beings, and to inflict damage and beat them.” From this, we can see that hatred is not only to be angry at sentient beings, but also to cause them to suffer, and even to beat them and so on.
This is also described in Volume 2 of the Sutra of the Precious Rain Preached by the Buddha :
What is the name of hatred? There are three kinds of hatred: the upper, the medium, and the lower. What is the upper hatred ? It means that those who are angry raise all kinds of hatred , create one karma in the five infinite evil karmas , or slander the right Dharma.
If one slanders the right Dharma, one’s sins are greater than those of the five infinite evil karmas , not as great as those of the Kala, and from these causes and conditions one is born into the hells. If one is born into human beings with a dark appearance, with eyes that are always red, who are violent and evil, and who always do harm, then from these causes and conditions one is born into the hells. This is called the upper hatred.
What is the medium hatred ? The angry person has committed an offence and is able to quickly repent and get rid of it ,it is called the medium anger. What is the lower hatred ? It is said that an angry person who, because of his anger, utters harsh words, says flirty words , and collects bad karma, and who, after a single moment , is able to repent and practice remediation. It is called the lower hatred .
The above paragraph classifies hatred in the upper, medium and lower categories, so that we can more clearly understand the true nature of the hatred vexation.
What is the definition of disease? According to the story “The King of Medicine of Man”, it says, “When the Buddha was practicing the Bodhisattva’s Way long ago, he was very eager to save the world. He saw that the people in the world of Yanfuti were suffering from serious heart diseases, like a pandemic. All over the world, the number of mental illnesses is ten thousand times greater than the number of physical illnesses.” The Volume 4 of the rough explanation of Brahma Sutra Bodhisattva Precepts says: “The four great elements are the body. There are four hundred and forty diseases.”
As you can see, illnesses can be divided into physical illnesses and mental illnesses. There are 440 kinds of physical illnesses, and mental illnesses are the vexation illnesses, which are divided into five major illnesses, namely, greed, anger, ignorance, arrogance, and doubt, and in detail, there are infinite dust and sand vexation illnesses.
Disease, like health, can be defined differently from different perspectives. What is the definition of disease? Disease is an abnormal process of life activity that occurs when the organism’s self-regulation is disturbed due to the damaging effects of certain causes. The most commonly used definition is “deviation from the normal form and function of the body”.
Chapter 3 The Relationship Between hatred and Mental Illness
Personally, I would like to argue this relationship between anger and illness from two main aspects: hatred can cause mental and physical illness. First of all, let’s recognise that hatred can cause all kinds of mental illnesses.
Hatred is bound to bring about very serious harm, corruption, illness and even death. The Sutra of Ten Good Karmas mentions the rewards of staying away from hatred : “If you stay away from hatred , you will attain the eight kinds of joyful mindfulness.” In contrast, there are eight kinds of painful mental illnesses that are caused by anger:
Firstly, it will cause increased hatred and annoyance. The second invites an increase in the mind of hatred . The third invokes the mind of increasing criticism. The fourth invokes a hard and curved mind. The fifth invokes the feeling of being a constant source of suffering. The sixth invokes the feeling of making people uneasy… Among them, the mind of increasing hatred , increasing hatred , increasing criticism, hardness and curving , always giving people suffering, and making people uneasy are the various mental illnesses caused by hatred .
Frequent hatred and temper tantrums make one prone to depression. This is because people who are easily angered and lose their temper are surrounded by friends and family members who have their hearts broken and naturally drift away. Loss of friends, there is no place to say what is in your heart, there is no conversation with the proper situation, and if there is pressure in them, they can only be solved by themselves, becoming more and more lonely. Over time, they will become silent and reticent, prone to psychological problems and depression.
From this it can be seen that hatred can cause many kinds of mental illnesses.
Chapter 4 The Relationship Between hatred and Physical Diseases
Hatred not only causes sickness in the mind, also causes various physical illnesses. People may wonder, “Can the evil thought of hatred really make us physically ill?
The Volume 49 of the Avatamsaka Sutra says:
At that time, Bodhisattva of Universal Benevolence resumed telling the Bodhisattva masses: “Disciples of the Buddha! I do not see a single dharma as a great fault, such as those Bodhisattvas who are angry with other Bodhisattvas. Why is that? Disciples of the Buddha! If Bodhisattvas get angry with other Bodhisattvas , they will have achieved a million obstacles. What are the million obstacles? They are: the obstacle of not seeing Bodhi; the obstacle of not hearing the Dharma; the obstacle of being born in an impure world; the obstacle of being born in all kinds of evils; the obstacle of being born in all kinds of difficulties; and the obstacle of being afflicted with many diseases……”
Among them, the obstacle of many diseases proves that hatred and rage can cause many kinds of diseases, which constitute obstacles to life, career, and cultivation.
Nowadays, many medical researches have proved that the mind does affect the body. The body and the psyche are originally interrelated; if the psyche is always happy, the body will naturally feel lighter; if the mind is full of hatred and other afflictions, the toxins produced by hatred and other afflictions will cause the physiology and the body to be adversely affected. Some people lose their temper, which may cause a stroke or shock. Therefore, as soon as you lose your temper, your physiology will immediately have a negative reaction, which is a disease just that ordinary people don’t realize .
People who are angry and have the most violent temper are most likely to suffer from heart disease. A study of 1,300 people aged 62 years on average, after seven years of observation shows that the most irritable people are three times more likely to suffer from heart disease than those who are least irritable. The study, led by Dr Ichiro Kawasaki, Assistant Professor of Health and Social Behaviour at the Harvard School of Public Health, was published in the 1 November 1996 issue of the journal Circulation.
Patients who were most likely to be angry had the highest chance of having clogged arteries. Researchers at United Memorial Hospital in Baltimore and Loyola University Maryland interviewed 41 patients who underwent vascular styling procedures to unblock arteries. The most hostile patients (known as Type A hostile personalities) were 2.5 times more likely than the other patients to need another angioplasty within a year.
The researchers defined “type A hostile personality” as having type A personality traits with irritability, which is typically annoying and difficult to get along with. Other studies of Type A hostile personalities have shown that people with these personality traits have higher levels of adrenaline and stress-induced hormones in their blood, making them prone to vasoconstriction. Researchers claim that dipping arteries in stress-induced hormones accelerates the formation of new blockages. Hostility increases hypoxia in the heart muscle.
On 20 November 1996, a personal health column in the New York Times reported that learning to control anger is the best medicine for the heart. This is because each episode of anger or hostility triggers a cascade of physiological responses in the body, such as increased heart rate, higher blood pressure, constriction of the coronary arteries, and thickening of the blood.
In a heart attack, such a reaction reduces the flow of blood back to the heart and causes a lack of oxygen to the heart muscle. If a blood clot blocks a coronary artery or the lack of oxygen makes the heart beat irregularly, a heart attack can result. Sometimes the lack of oxygen is noticed and the patient gets angina. Chest pain usually causes the patient to stop moving or behaving and seek a doctor. However, sometimes there are no signs of cardiac hypoxia and the patient will continue dangerous movements or behaviours.
In addition, according to research, most people who often have hatred are prone to high blood pressure, heart disease, stomach disease , insomnia, schizophrenia, and other illnesses.
Also, modern medical research shows that hatred , anger will make people short of breath, the number of red blood cells in the blood increase dramatically, blood accelerated than normal condensation, tachycardia, which will not only damage the cardiovascular system, but also affect the health of the liver. Survey results show that people who are irritable are six times more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease and eight times more likely to suffer from liver disease than the average person.
If people have frequent tantrums, the skins are getting worse. Carefully observe the people around you who love to lose their temper, it is found that their skin condition is generally not very good. This is actually because when a person is angry, the flow of blood in the body becomes faster, and at this time, the blood contains a large number of toxins, which, after being transported to all corners of the body, affect the health of our skin, leading to hyperpigmentation and rough skin.
At the same time, hatred also has a certain harm to the liver, affecting the normal detoxification function of the liver, toxins in the body stagnation, the phenomenon manifested in the face is dull, dark yellow, easy to make the oil effluent, pimples and acne increasing, etc., the skin deterioration.
Frequent temper is easy to sudden death. In the time of violent hatred , the blood of the whole body will quickly gather in our brain, and the speed of blood flow is accelerated. And the brain can not adapt to this abnormal blood flow, easy to cause the phenomenon of cerebral blood vessel rupture, induce cerebral infarction, and even lead to sudden death.
Frequent temper tantrums are more likely to lead to a decline in immunity. Look at some people who love to be angry, when they lose their temper, they seem to be very powerful, in fact, they may be very easy to get sick. Because people are often angry, the body’s immune cells are adversely affected, resulting in a decline in immunity, the resistance to some diseases weakened, more likely to be infested by disease.
Often getting angry is also easy to get stomach problems. When we are angry, we often feel unable to eat, or indigestion after eating, in fact, the principle is that, in the rage, the body’s gastric acid secretion becomes more, damage to the gastric mucosa, easy to cause gastric mucosal bleeding, erosion, easy to generate gastric ulcers triggering gastric diseases.
Often getting angry is also easy to get breast enlargement. Often getting angry for women’s health hazards is very big, more typical hazard is to harm the health of the mammary gland, resulting in breast hyperplasia.
To sum up, hatred can lead to all kinds of terrible physical diseases.
Chapter 5 Conclusion
Where there is hatred , there will be all sorts of terrible physical and mental illnesses. Where there is the cause of hatred , there must be the effect of physical and mental illnesses.
References
I. Ancient Texts (in chronological order by dynasty):
1[Yuanwei]Translated by Bodhi Liuzhi, Theory on Sutra of Questions of the Maitreya Bodhisattva , vol. 26, Da Zheng Zang,.
2 [Tang] Translated by Richeng and others: The Sutra on the Ten Unwholesome Karmic Paths, Volume 17, Da Zheng Zang,.
3 [Tang] Translated by Dharma Liuji: Volume 2 of the Sutra of the Precious Rain Preached by the Buddha,vol. 16,Da Zheng Zang,.
II. OTHERS
1 Web name: Medical Encyclopedia, Web Address: https://www.yixue.com/%e7%97%85%e7%90%86%e7%94%9f%e7%90%86%e5%ad%a6/%e7%96%be%e7%97%85%e7%9a%84%e6%a6%82%e5%bf%b5 ,Date of retrieval: 16 March 2024.
2 Web name: Medical Encyclopedia: Web Address: http://www.a-hospital.com/w/%E7%96%BE%E7%97%85%E7%9A%84%E6%A6%82%E5%BF%B5, Date of retrieval: 16 March 2024.
3 Web name: Buddha’s Disciples Library，Web Address: http://www.fodizi.tw/qt/qita/14748.html, Date of retrieval:16 March 2024.
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