Stanley Khu
This article expands on the anthropological understanding of anger to include religious beliefs and practices that provide meaning to Chinese Indonesians facing continuous persecution and discrimination. In the political sense, such injustice should at least be justifiably answered with a display of anger. However, my Buddhist interlocutors invariably perceive anger negatively, reserving the justification for it only in the specific context of their doctrinal teacher-disciple relationship. To understand this ambiguity better, this article ethnographically explores the Tibetan Buddhist notion of anger and the way this notion presents a twofold understanding for the trainees: anger as a reflection of their ethical inadequacy and as the spiritual teacher’s skilful means of transmitting its transmuted form into teachings and/or blessings. I argue that attending to the ambiguity of anger in a religious tradition like Tibetan Buddhism will uncover its ethical potentiality, thus transcending its oppositional perception as either negative (therapeutically-spiritually) or positive (politically). © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Universitas Negeri Semarang (State University of Semarang), Semarang, Indonesia
