Anger is a Consuming Fire 憤怒是自焚之火

The section on “Anger is a Consuming Fire” from the book “Freedom from Anger” by the venerable Alubomulle Sumanasara appears to be very relevant to today’s angry youths in Hong Kong.

Anger has many negative consequences.
...... anger leads to unhappiness. That is easy enough to understand; being angry doesn’t feel good. People are unhappy when they carry anger inside. When you’re free of anger, the opposite is true — your heart feels light and clear. It’s a wonderful feeling; it’s what we know as happiness.
Love is the energy of creation, of building and raising things, while anger is the negative energy of rejection and destructiveness. Where does anger begin? Within your own body, and it begins to destroy the body from the instant it’s born.
If your body were aflame, you would burn whatever you touched. But what would happen even before that? You would burn yourself. In this sense, anger is like fire, which has the power to destroy other things but starts by destroying its original source. You may want to set fire to a pile of trash, but it is the match that is consumed by the fire first. You may not want it to be destroyed, as matches can be useful, but it’s hopeless to think that it will set the trash alight without first catching flame itself.