What Buddha Might Not Have Taught You About the Second Arrow

Feeling bad about feeling bad makes you feel bad (and so you feel bad)

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” — Baruch Spinoza

The Parable of the Second Arrow

According to the Buddha, any time we suffer misfortune, two arrows fly our way. The first arrow is the bad event itself, which certainly can (and often does) cause pain. The second arrow is our reaction to the bad event, the suffering we attach to our pain. This secondary pain, he tells us, is always self-inflicted.

What you might not have been told, however, is that there’s often a third arrow in response to that second arrow. Sometimes there’s even a fourth arrow in response to that one! In fact, every now and then, hundreds of them start raining down to the point that you end up feeling like Borromir from Lord of the Rings.

To give you an example, let’s say I step on my son’s toy lego (first arrow), but instead of accepting this pain, I react by getting angry (second arrow). But then, I get mad about the fact that I’m angry (third arrow). So now I’m really angry. As a result, I lash out at my children for failing to put their toys away, and also my wife, who I decide (because I’m über pissed) is too nice to our kids (fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh arrow).

Eventually, in a moment of ever-so-brief clarity, I realised that I was being unfair and regret shouting at my family (eighth arrow). But then, guess what? This makes me angry (ninth arrow). So now I’m mad about feeling guilty because I got angry, about my anger, because of my pain, and then taking it out on my family. I think I got that right.

Anyway, you get the point.

You see, there is suffering, and then there is suffering. The first kind of suffering, as Buddha taught us, is equal to pain times resistance. The second kind of suffering is equal to pain times resistance to the power of arrows fired.

Of course, the emotion doesn’t have to be anger. To use a real-life example (I swear I made the last one up) earlier this year, I started to feel sad because of the pandemic…