In the Buddhist parable of the empty boat, a man rowing across a river grows enraged when another boat crashes into his. His fury vanishes when he realizes the boat is empty. The lesson: his anger wasn’t caused by the collision, but by his interpretation of it. The boat merely revealed what was already within him. In life, many provocations are like empty boats—neutral until infused with our assumptions. Anger, then, is less about the world and more about the inner state we bring to it.