Stopping At Hell's Gate

Claude AnShin Thomas, a Vietnam veteran and founder of the Zaltho Foundation, in his autobiography, At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, offers a practice for addressing anger. Scarred by his service in Vietnam, Thomas, after meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, began to practice Zen Buddhism. In his work, he addressed anger as one of the seeds in our consciousness and offers a six-step process for addressing anger as habit energy: Study→Stop→Recognize→Embrace→Gain Insight→Transform. In this essay, I look at the problem of anger in Western and in Buddhist thought and turn to Thomas's movement through anger to nonviolence, emphasizing that it is through practice that we learn to transform anger so that we can stop before entering Hell's Gate.