TLDR: Hate does not disappear when we reject or suppress it. When we guard against hate without understanding it, it often reappears as judgment, righteousness, or fear. Through befriending ourselves and understanding suffering through the Four Noble Truths, hate can be transformed into wisdom and unconditional love.

The title must seem controversial. Why would anyone want to love anything that is unpleasant?

As Buddhists, we are told to guard our minds against the three roots of unwholesome qualities: greed, hatred, and delusion. It makes sense to guard against greed since greed causes us to become more insatiable. But guarding against hate might also increase hate.

You must be thinking: “WHAT?!”

First, let us explore what happens when we guard our minds against hate.

The Cost of Rejecting Hate

In guarding against hate, we may naturally repress or suppress this unpleasant quality inside our hearts. Just because we bury hate deep inside our hearts does not mean we are free from it. It is still very much present in us.

Instead of consciously working with hate, which is the real meaning of guarding, we may repress the feeling when it arises, thinking that it is bad and should be rejected. As a result, it may manifest in various ways. One of these is an increased feeling of righteousness, which we then use to judge others.

Being judgmental and divisive towards others whom we view as different, including those of other religions or different Buddhist sects, is still an expression of hate. It is fine to discuss points of difference, but to tell another that other doctrines are wrong, while preventing them from finding out on their own and doing so with indignation, requires an investigation of our hearts.

When Hate Is Truly Absent

I remember reading somewhere that says if we truly are free from unskilful emotions, we would no longer recognise them in ourselves or in others.

Sounds strange?

Well, not really. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha said, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love.”

In the second aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path, right thought, which encompasses the brahmavihāras, the four facets of unconditional or unbiased love, is presented as the antidote to hate. Hate can be replaced by love. Another way to see it is this: hate is also love, but distorted or one-sided. Hate really means we love something other than what we have now. But love’s true nature is all-encompassing, uniting, and not divisive.

How Hate Arises in Our Minds

There is a saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” It is true. When we experience illness, health looks better, and with loss, gain looks better. In whatever position we have in life, if we were to make comparisons, the other person, place, or circumstance always looks better.

I personally experienced this when I was gravely ill in my mid-thirties. I am grateful to have lived. But at the time, I wished I could be healthy in my youth like all those who came to see me in the hospital.

I wondered why I had to suffer while everyone in my age group was healthy and robust. But the pandemic, and the recent death of one of my friends, younger than I am, who had visited me in the hospital, made me realise how unpredictable everything is. So many have died, when I thought my life was more vulnerable than others’.

There is really no point in wishing or hoping to be other than what we have, because we do not really know anything. Wishing or hoping to be otherwise creates further stress, such as fear.

Fear as the Hidden Face of Hate

Fear is the root of envy, jealousy, anxiety, panic, and all stress. We fear, or hate, something, and wish for something else. “Fear is the main emotion that causes all suffering,” my online American dharma teacher said. He often asked us to share with one another how we could apply compassion to our fears.

When I first began Buddhist meditation seriously, I had pain in my legs within twenty minutes of sitting. But I came upon Lama Yeshe’s book on meditation. He said to send love to painful feelings in our legs during sitting meditation. I did what he said, and when I opened my eyes, I had sat for nearly an hour without pain.

I related this story to a friend who was marginally interested in sitting meditation. She asked, “How do you send love to the painful feelings in your legs?” It was intuitive to me then. It did not occur to me that it would be difficult, or that it would require thinking to send love to a painful part of the body. The pain was not so excruciating that love could not reach it.

Befriending Ourselves First

At that point in my life, I had sufficiently befriended myself. It is not possible to love ourselves, or to send love to painful feelings in our motionless legs during meditation, if we have not made friends with ourselves.

Being friends with ourselves means being at ease with ourselves. This is different from feeling confident because of the status, wealth, or position we have accumulated. I understood then, through the law of attraction, that whatever we think creates situations that can bring us pain and suffering or happiness.

Although I had that insight, I still did not have the deeper insight of the Four Noble Truths. Though others’ opinions about me did not bother me at all, including my station in life based on career, education, wealth, and power, I was unable to think positively when suffering struck, such as during an anxiety disorder.

How impossible it is to think positive thoughts when fear strikes.

Searching for the Truth Beneath Suffering

My life has been a long journey of discovering the truth within, through the suffering of illness, the lack of love and understanding from others, loss of loved ones, and anxiety disorders. Thus, it is impossible to unpack it all in one post.

But first, what is this truth that I am seeking? I wanted to know why suffering seems inevitable in life. What are we here for? To live with some happy moments, and then to die from pain and stress? Is that all there is to life?

In one of my posts, I expressed that through my search, I discovered that we all do have a spiritual life. It is not a belief, and it is not an opinion. The Buddha provided a vast number of discourses and ways to help us discover our inner selves, and not to merely live from this material outer self of what we call life. This inner life reveals our capacity to love unconditionally. It is free, and it is wise.

Unconditional love is love that already exists in us, without the need for any conditions to arise. This makes loving ourselves and others at the same time possible.

How to Learn to Love Ourselves

It can be hard to send love to ourselves if we have difficult relationships with our families, or if we never really felt loved or secure. How can we learn to love or be compassionate towards ourselves, especially if we grew up in families that were unloving or had high expectations?

To learn to do that is to cultivate wisdom, which is to understand suffering through The Four Noble Truths.

The Four Noble Truths look simple on the surface, but their profundity is immense, and thus they cannot be fully explored in one post. To summarise, the Four Noble Truths encourage us to see the first two truths in our experience: what causes us stress, such as not getting what we want, being separated from what we like, and being with what we dislike, and realising that this is due to our wanting to control our experience. Then, we experiment with abandoning control and experiencing well-being through acceptance and compassion towards our predicament.

This abandonment of control does not come with the snap of a finger, but from developing the mind through the Noble Eightfold Path, which is akin to psychological training to investigate one’s own mind.

Seeing Our Own Role in Suffering

It is only by looking at our suffering through the lens of the Four Noble Truths that we can truly see that we are the cause of our own unhappiness.

For instance, I long had communication problems with my late father. He did not know how to show concern and had expressed in numerous episodes that I was not his favourite child. For many years, I wished I had some parental love like others did. It was through sitting meditation one day that I looked at the suffering I held in my heart, the longing to be loved and understood by my father, the only living parent I had.

I realised it was this wanting, and not getting what I wanted, that had caused the anguish in my heart. This dissatisfaction was behind the actions I took, such as retorting in anger and doing certain things in the hope of gaining appreciation. I also saw that my father was suffering, and he did not know how to take care of his own suffering, thus allowing it to flow to me.

Understanding our suffering is the very first step towards wanting to make changes in our inner world, because we have finally seen the truth. Compassion, not blame, arises in our hearts for having caused our own selfish misery.

Since I saw how I caused myself suffering, I stopped hoping for something different and felt freed. I was able to communicate with more compassion towards my father, which was the result of having applied compassion to my pain. Our pains are all the same, the result of our own selfish wants that cause misery.

Opening the Door to the Inner Life

Having the breakthrough of seeing my suffering, and being kind to myself by no longer hoping for something other than what is, and by not having expectations of others, was not the end of this spiritual search. It was only the opening of a door.

As Saint Teresa of Avila shared, there are seven mansions and many doors to the interior castle, which is the spirit or consciousness. The innermost mansion is where the king, our heart, not the physical heart, sits. The further we can step into this inner castle, which she likened to a diamond or a crystal, the safer we are from the predators, which are discursive thoughts and negative feelings that bind our psyche to fabrications or illusions. The king does not receive anyone casually, thus we need to show our sincerity through devotion, meditation and the development of virtue.

The purpose of this life is truly to discover what we really are, beyond this limited material self that is prone to selfishness for survival’s sake.

Choosing Compassion in an Uncertain World

With anxieties and uncertainties increasing in an uncertain world shaped by climate change, vulnerable economies, and geopolitics, we may feel there is very little we can do to change our outer circumstances. We cannot even reverse old age, sickness, and death.

But we all have an inner life of boundless compassion that can offer peace to ourselves and to those around us. Instead of spending our time scrolling social media feeds, engaging endlessly in social activities, or being absorbed in work, there are opportunities now, between life and death, to step into this inner castle of our lives and to learn to live from love and wisdom, which is what our world badly needs.

Wise Steps:

1. Notice hate without rejecting it
When feelings of aversion, judgment, or irritation arise, pause and observe them rather than pushing them away. Guarding the mind means working with these emotions gently, not suppressing them.

2. Look for fear beneath hate
Explore what fear or longing may be present beneath feelings of hate or resistance. Ask what you are wishing to avoid, or what you are hoping would be different.

3. Practise sending kindness to discomfort
Whether emotional or physical, meet discomfort with kindness rather than aversion. Even a small gesture of goodwill towards pain can soften resistance and create space.

4. Cultivate friendship with yourself
Learn to be at ease with yourself beyond status, roles, or achievements. Befriending hate begins with befriending oneself, especially the parts that feel vulnerable or afraid.

5. Reflect on suffering through the Four Noble Truths
Use moments of stress and dissatisfaction to see how craving and control create suffering. From this understanding, compassion arises naturally, for yourself and for others.