How do different traditions teach about anger?

Jewish, Buddhist, and Stoic sources converge on treating anger as dangerous, but each diagnoses the danger differently. Jewish wisdom literature treats anger primarily as foolishness that damages the angry person as much as anyone else: Ecclesiastes 7:9 warns, "Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools," and Pirkei Avot 2:10 counsels, "Do not be easily provoked to anger." Psalm 37:8 pairs the warning with a consequence: "Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil." The frame here is largely moral-practical: anger clouds judgment and leads to bad outcomes, so restraint is wisdom. Buddhist teaching goes further into the mechanics of the emotion itself, treating anger as a mental state built from craving and aversion that can be observed and dismantled through mindfulness rather than simply suppressed. Patience (kshanti in Sanskrit) is formally one of the ten paramitas (perfections) in Theravada practice and one of six central virtues in Mahayana Buddhism, understood as the direct antidote to anger - not gritted-teeth endurance, but a trained capacity to meet frustration without the mind seizing on it and escalating. Stoicism, most fully in Seneca's treatise De Ira ("On Anger"), takes a third angle: anger is not an unavoidable reaction to being wronged but a judgment - the belief that one has suffered an injury that must be answered - and since judgments are within our control, Seneca argues anger can be prevented by refusing to assent to the initial impression that a wrong demands retaliation. Where Jewish wisdom counsels restraint as prudence and Buddhism trains attention to loosen anger's grip, Stoicism attacks anger at the root by disputing the belief that provokes it in the first place - three different strategies converging on the same practical goal of not being ruled by the emotion.