Forgiveness

There was a Buddhist teacher in another tradition one time who said that forgiveness is not Buddhist. By that, he meant that if someone has a karmic debt to you, forgiveness would have to mean erasing their debt. But you can’t erase other people’s karma. They’re going to reap the results of their karma.

But you can decide that you’re not going to be the debt collector. That’s what’s meant by forgiveness in a genuine Buddhist context, and that’s what’s meant by that phrase we chant every night: Sabbe sattā averā hontu. “May all beings be free from animosity.” Animosity here means two things: one, that you don’t have feelings of animosity toward others; and two, no one else has feelings of animosity toward you. That’s the ideal mind state, the ideal state to be in, where there are no old games where one side keeps trying to settle the score.

Think in terms of rebirth, karma, and the larger picture: If you’re engaged in a mud-slinging contest, you don’t know when the contest began. Who has slung more mud than the other side? Who is justified in slinging mud? Who’s not justified in slinging mud? You don’t know these things because you don’t know when the contest began. The only times when you could legitimately keep a score would be when there was a definite beginning point, and people kept track of both sides’ behavior. You could see who started the bad movements, or who reacted in an unskillful way to someone else’s actions. But here you don’t have anything like that at all.

What you do know is that the game is a bad game. The best thing to do is get out of it. And the best way to get out is to decide you’re just not going to continue playing that game. That’s what forgiveness means in this sense. You might have the right to throw a little mud back at the other person, but you’re not going to claim that right. You’re going to let it go—because, as I said, the game was a bad one to begin with.

Then you try to follow a way of living that doesn’t increase any more animosity. You have thoughts of goodwill for all beings. What does that mean in a case like this? It doesn’t mean that you’re going to like or love the other person. A lack of animosity simply means you’re not going to try to get back at the other person. But you do hope that the other person wises up. If that person is behaving in unskillful ways, you hope that they see the error of their ways, and that they’re willing and able to change their ways. If there’s anything you can do to help them in that direction, you’ll be happy to help. But your main activity here is to make sure that you don’t act on ill will.

They may still have some ill will for you, but you’re not going to respond in kind. They may think that they’ve won the game, and they may throw a little bit more mud to prove the point, but you realize that letting them do that is just a matter of allowing old karma to happen. It’s going to run out at some point, and then it’s no longer yours. That karma becomes theirs.

Then you reflect on the fact that you don’t want to have any animosity toward anybody at all when you die.

This is one of the Buddha’s first recommendations: Just keep reflecting on the fact that we’re all in the process of dying here, so what’s accomplished by throwing more mud? It’s like the Buddha’s vision of the fish in a dwindling river. They’re all fighting one another to get to the water, and the water’s running out. The things they do to one another in that fight are not all that skillful. They’re racking up more bad karma for themselves, yet they’re all going to die anyhow, even the so-called winners. So what’s accomplished by winning a game like that?

Of course, then you come back, and somebody may want to pick up the game again. So reflect that there’s a good reason to have goodwill, that you don’t want to pick up any games like that, and you want to have as your basic attitude, no matter what happens to you, that you’re not going to wish ill on anybody.

Remember, the Buddha said that if you see someone lying sick on the side of the road out in the desert, you’re not going to ask who they are or what their past is. You’re just going to feel really sorry for them for the fact that they’re sick and disabled. At the very least, your attitude would be, “May somebody help that person. If I can’t help that person, may somebody.” That’s the attitude you should have toward someone who has no good qualities at all. As for someone who does have some good qualities, you focus on those.

Here the Buddha’s image is of coming across a cow’s footprint in the desert. You’re walking along, hot, tired, trembling with thirst. You see water in the cow footprint, and you know that if you tried to scoop it up with your hand, the water would get muddy. So you go down on all fours and slurp up the clear water as best you can. It’s not a very dignified posture, but you get the water you need. In the same way, if someone has some good qualities, the Buddha says, focus on those. They’ll remind you that you want to have goodwill toward that person.

You may say, “Well, it’s beneath my dignity to focus on that person’s good qualities because they have so many bad qualities.” Well, are you going to drink their bad qualities? Scoop it up with your hand, be sloppy, get muddy water?

It’s a lot easier to live in this world with goodwill if you can think of the good qualities of other people. It seems more worth your while. And, of course, you remember that you’re the one who benefits from your goodwill most because you’re protecting yourself from creating any more animosity. Based on goodwill and the realization that you don’t want to create animosity, you don’t want to carry it around, you don’t want to die with lots of animosity. So take the precepts and be very careful to maintain the precepts in all situations.

You hear people saying, “Well, there are times when you have to put this or that precept aside.” It’s worse when you justify it in that way. If you realize that, “I put it aside simply out of a weakness,” there’s nothing really wrong with that attitude. The bad attitudes are the ones that say, “Well, you have to, for moral reasons, put the precept aside.” That, the Buddha said, is a shameless attitude. And when a person thinks that way, you can’t trust that person at all.

So you maintain the precepts in all situations because you’re giving yourself protection in all situations when you do. If you act on ill will, that becomes your bad karma again and it opens an area where you’re unprotected. You’re going to be stirring up more mud-slinging games. You’re better off making up your mind that you’re not going to do anything intentionally to harm other people. Then you’re protecting yourself on all sides from getting involved in more mud.

So remember the Buddha’s attitude of forgiveness: developing a mind of averā, free from animosity. You’re not erasing the other person’s karmic* *debt, but they can have that debt with somebody else. Somebody else can collect those debts. You don’t want to be the karmic debt collector, because it’s a miserable life.

In Thailand, some people who are fairly psychic sometimes will see a spirit following a person around. It turns out that in a previous lifetime, the person harmed that spirit in one way or another, and now the spirit wants to get revenge.

There was the case of a woman who came to the monastery one time and started shaking as she was meditating. Ajaan Fuang had another student, who was fairly psychic, check her out. She discovered that there were two spirits standing behind the woman, shaking her. It turns out that they had been her parents in a previous lifetime and she had killed them. She had gone to a really bad place in the meantime, but now that she was back to being a human being, the spirits of the parents were still there, still trying to collect their debts. They were afraid that she was going to get away.

You don’t want to have any karma like that, and you don’t want to be one of those spirits. Either way, it’s miserable. So may you be free from animosity. Don’t continue any bad games. If the other side wants to keep it up for a while, let the other person win, quote-unquote. But realize that it’s a quote-unquote kind of victory. You’re the one who wins in the best sense, because you’ve won out over yourself.

As the Buddha said, “Better than victory over a thousand other people is victory over one person: yourself.” That’s where the real victory is: in victory over your defilements. And it’s a victory with no animosity toward anyone at all. It’s the one karmically clean victory in the world.