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“considerable praise for anger in Islam.” But the Qur’an says power resides not in the ability to strike someone else but in the ability to stay cool under pressure. “Most hated to Allah is a person who is fiercely hostile and quarrelsome.”
    For the Stearnses, Buddhism is the only religion that prohibits anger absolutely. Although their conclusion isn’t quite right, it’s easy to see how they came to it. “Anger,” the Buddha said, “is a poison and an obstacle to enlightenment.” And Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, founder of Buddhism’s New Kadampa Tradition, writes in his book How to Solve Our Human Problems , “[A]nger is everyone’s principal enemy. . . . Anger never helps us. . . . All anger ever does is . . . bring nothing but unhappiness.”
    Given Buddhism’s supposed anti-anger stance, I find it particularly funny that I’ve recently gravitated to it. No doubt it appeals to my inner cholerophobe. I like the specificity with which Buddhist teachers seem to speak about rage. In psychological books, I’ve mostly found vague and conflicting definitions of the emotion, such as “anger is a negative phenomenological feeling state” or “anger is the emotion into which most others tend to pass.” Christa Reiser writes, “Often, there is no explicit definition of anger.” Buddhism, on the other hand, really seems to pin anger down to a dissection plate. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso defines anger as a product of a “deluded mind that focuses on an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities and wishes to harm it.”
    That harm didn’t even have to mean wishing you could wipe the snippy scowl off somebody’s face. It could simply mean wanting to criticize him. It could mean envisioning—just for a second—a scenario where he dies alone, penniless, forgotten, and riddled with regret so that he might know just what “emptiness” is.
    By August 2, I am deep into the habit of exaggerating the Lark’s bad qualities. “He’s just sociopathic,” I hear myself tell a friend on the phone. “Con artists have more empathy. Wild animals have more self-control.” And so I decide to try tonglen —a practice in Tibetan Buddhism that is also known as “sending and taking.”
    â€œTonglen practice helps cultivate fearlessness,” I’d once read in a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. “When you do this practice for some time, you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.”
    Tonglen is a meditation and an oft-prescribed remedy for anger. To perform it, you are supposed to sit comfortably. Close your eyes. Envision your enemy. Then, with every inhale, you imagine relieving him of some of his fear, his frustration and contentiousness. With every exhale, you pretend you’re sending him well-being, confidence, love, piece of mind.
    The Dalai Lama claims to do tonglen every day, giving special attention to the Chinese officials who torture and murder Tibetans. “I visualize them,” he says. “I draw their ignorance, prejudice, hatred, and pride into myself.”
    The point of the meditation isn’t to change the world so much as to change your perspective. The Dalai Lama goes on to add, “You cannot actually give away your happiness and take other’s suffering on yourself. But the practice will certainly increase your compassion.”
    Buddhistly speaking, compassion is the Holy Grail. It’s the no-fail antidote to rage.

    I decide to sit, pretzel-legged, on my bedroom floor. I nest one hand into the palm of the other the way I’ve read about in meditation books, and let my thumb tips lightly kiss. I try to tune out the sounds of the afternoon: a dog barking, a garden hose hitting the