Say there were a cure for cancer or AIDS. We would regard that medicine as incredibly precious, extremely important, especially if we were suffering from one of those diseases. But even though such remedies could cure those fatal illnesses, it doesn’t mean that they could purify your negative karma. They couldn’t stop you from being reborn in the suffering lower realms—the hell, hungry ghost or animal realms. Practicing patience, however, does offer that kind of benefit. For example, the practice of patience makes for a happy, peaceful death, a death free from fear and worry. Practicing patience purifies, or counteracts, negative karma. When you practice patience, you don’t create negative karma. That means you are not creating the cause for a lower rebirth—patience protects you from that. In fact, the practice of patience creates only positive karma, the cause of good rebirths.

Anyway, in order to practice patience, you need an angry person. As the great Bodhisattva Shantideva pointed out in his teaching, the Bodhicharyavatara, the Buddha isn’t angry with you, so you can’t practice patience with him. And a doctor’s only thought is to help you, so there’s no opportunity there either. Similarly, your friends aren’t angry with you, so there’s no chance to practice patience with them. Therefore, if there’s nobody angry at you, there’s no opportunity to put into practice the teachings you’ve received from the Buddha and your gurus. That’s why the angry person is most kind, precious and indispensable in your life, and much more important than medicine for cancer or AIDS. We think those medicines are so valuable, but when you think about it this way, you can see how much more precious the angry person is. The benefits of practicing patience are infinite.

We always want in our life someone who loves us. We feel that this is important for our happiness. But you can see now that it’s much more important to have in our life someone who doesn’t love us, who’s angry at us, so that we can practice training our minds. As I mentioned before, if you don’t have such a person, if you don’t train your mind, then even if you do find a friend, there’s the danger that through lack of patience, you’ll turn your friend into an enemy.

Therefore, to maintain harmonious relationships with others, to keep your friends, you have to practice patience. To lead a happy and successful life, you almost have to train yourself like a soldier preparing for battle. Soldiers train before marching off to war. You need to do the same. Training your mind by practicing meditation on patience is the way to prepare yourself for the battles of daily life. Leaving aside the happiness of future lives or that of other sentient beings, even for the happiness of this life, you have to practice patience.

The power of positive thinking

So now, going back to what I was saying before, look at the indescribable benefits of seeing in a positive light those who don’t love you, those who are angry at you. Look at the profits you can reap—every happiness all the way up to enlightenment and the ability to bring every happiness to all sentient beings. The more clearly you understand this, the easier it will be to look positively at someone who is angry with you. In this way, your own anger does not arise and you generate a happy, peaceful, patient mind instead.

No matter how angry at you the other person gets, no matter how much the other person whines and complains, your patient mind never sees that person as an enemy, as someone to avoid, as someone to get away from, as irritating. Rather, you see that person as kind, precious. You feel, "She’s purifying my negative karma. All this criticism of me helps purify my negative karma of having criticized and harmed others. How kind she is to help me in this way."

By transforming your mind into patience like this, you get this immediate peace and happiness—that day, that minute, that second—and the long-term benefits as well. All this is due to the kindness of that angry person. If you do not practice patience, if you interpret what the angry person is doing with her body, speech and mind as negative, as harmful to yourself—your mind applies a negative label to the situation and you believe in that—your own anger will arise. That anger will make you see the angry person as negative, undesirable, someone you want to neither see nor help, someone you want to lash out at and hurt. When your mind is angry you see the other person in a completely different light, opposite to the way in which your patience perceives that person. Your anger makes her look repulsive.

The happiness and difficulties we experience every day come from our mind. Whatever we’re experiencing at any given moment is dependent upon the way we think, our concepts, our attitude. Our attitude determines how we feel.

For example, once in Tibet there were a couple of monks who returned to their monastery after a long and tiring journey. To welcome them back, their teacher offered them cold tea. One of the disciples thought, "How kind our teacher is. He knew we were hot and thirsty so he intentionally gave us tea that was cold." The other thought, "How mean and lazy. He couldn’t even give us hot tea," and got upset and angry. So, he destroyed himself. There was no benefit from the way he thought to either himself or his teacher. But, by having a positive view, the first student made himself and his teacher happy, made his mind peaceful and, since the tea had been offered by his guru, created much merit. The action—offering cold tea—was the same. What was different was the students’ interpretation of that action. One labeled it positive and was happy. The other labeled it negative and created a problem for himself.