He abused me, mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me –
Harbouring such thoughts keeps hatred alive.
He abused me, mistreated me, defeated me, robbed me –
Releasing such thoughts banishes hatred for all time.
The Dhammapada
To forgive someone is commonly seen as sort of wiping a slate clean after being wronged. The idea is that, when someone wrongs you, you are owed something by them. Or, more often, that you owe them some kind of unpleasantness. And when you forgive them, you’re giving up that debt.
Revenge is based on the same sort of notion: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Gandhi noted that “an eye for an eye” meant everyone ends up blind.
So forgiveness is seen very much as an active thing, a deed, a decision you make. Having been wronged, you make up your mind to forgive them, and having done so, you are owed the forgiven party’s thanks. If they do not express their appreciation for your forgiving them, they’ve wronged you again, and you can forgive them again for bonus points.
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As taglines for movies go, there are worse.
The thing is, this attitude towards forgiveness actually reinforces the illusion of separation. You can only forgive someone in this way if you are separate from them – they’ve done something to you, you’re doing something back to them. Really, whether your response to being wronged is revenge or forgiveness, it’s still a response of one being to another.
And that’s fine, from one perspective. Forgiveness is a nice gift to give, and it can inspire the recipient to pass it on. Forgiveness given like this can end a cycle of retaliations. All good.
There’s another kind of forgiveness, though, that isn’t so much a choice. It comes from your perspective. If you see clearly that everyone’s actions are products of long chains of cause-and-effect, you realise that those actions are, in a sense, inevitable. And you see that if you had lived exactly their life until this point, with all of their experiences and genetics and circumstances, you would be acting in exactly the same way as they are.
With this perspective, a kind of forgiveness is inevitable. How can you blame them for something that is inevitable? How can you actively forgive someone for something that is inevitable? Instead what you have is understanding.
Of course, you may not know enough about someone to be able to explain their actions. Why they are acting like they are may be a complete mystery to you. But even then, you can realise that if you knew everything about them, you would not be able to help but forgive them. That can be enough.
In fact, when you see more deeply into the sources of your own suffering in life, you start to realise experientially that when we wrong people we are usually acting from a suffering mindstate. Happy people, free people, aware people do not try to hurt others. To harm another is the act of a suffering person.
So, if you realise that, you will in fact have compassion for those who wrong you.
Of course, you can’t fake this understanding. Usually when we’re wronged, we feel angry and we want revenge. The ego wants to protect itself. But we can act as if we saw clearly, until our practice deepens to the point that we do. We can refuse to take revenge, and we can observe that desire for revenge in ourselves and learn from it, watch it from all sides, trace its roots, and find that – like so many things – it dissolves away in the harsh light of awareness.
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