MR. ELLIS: SECOND THOUGHTS

FORGIVENESS

I was much troubled last week by the response of a valued online friend to the words I wrote last week in The Buddha Diaries about forgiveness and compassion. I was reflecting in the piece on the experience of molestation, as a child, and she was the victim of an offense so much more severe than the one I was recalling, that she is unable to this day to find compassion in her heart for her attacker, and continues to wish him great suffering even after many years.

Her response is completely understandable to me. It’s completely human. It set me to thinking about the relative gravity of offenses, and to what extent this might contribute to our ability to feel compassion. Are there crimes so hideous that they can never be forgiven? Are there people so vile in their actions that they are unworthy of compassion? From this point of view, I was merely diddled as a twelve-year old boy; my friend was raped by a stranger at the age of eighteen. There are those whose children have been brutally killed by psychopaths. Are they to exercise compassion? And what about punishment? Do we have the right to mete out punishment to those who commit harmful acts against us? Society, clearly must have some recourse; but individuals?

These are vexing questions. Moved by my friend’s anger, and wanting to better understand what light the teaching of the Buddha might shed on them, I brought my dilemma to our sitting group yesterday, Sunday. What, I had been trying to recall, had Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) had to say on the subject? I remembered that he had spoken once, in a dharma talk, about a distinction between forgiveness and some other concept, but I had forgotten the other side of the equation. It was reconciliation, I was reminded. I can do forgiveness by myself; reconciliation requires a coming together, an agreement, an action on the part of the other party in the grievance—some act of contrition, perhaps, a make-up, a commitment to change the harmful behavior in the future.

Compassion is not the same as forgiveness, and not the same as tolerance for the offense. I can be compassionate for the perpetrator of an act I am unable to forgive. Indeed, as I understand the Buddhist teachings in the matter, I am not empowered to forgive. The responsibility for absolution and redemption lies primarily with the perpetrator, not the victim. Compassion, though I project it outward toward others, or another person specifically, is about releasing myself from the suffering that results from the painful experience. Its benefits may touch others than myself, but are most clearly evident in my own heart and the way I live my life. It’s possible, otherwise, to become addicted to something I have no power to change and which can only bring me further suffering.

The difficulty in all this, as I see it—and I mentioned this in our discussion—is that the theory is much easier than the practice. We are, after all, humans, and what lodges in the heart, what we nurse there, in our most powerful organ, comes to feel like a part of us that would require surgery to remove. It’s a part of our identity, of who we think we are. (And perhaps, then, an opportunity to exercise that mantra I keep coming back to: This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am…)

Compassion—and I speak here, as always, strictly for myself—needs to become a matter of practice as much as a matter of choice. I might not readily choose it, if I consider the magnitude or the repugnance of the offense. But if I choose to adopt it simply as a habit and enact it every day at the start of my meditation sit, I find that I can do it without question or doubt. I no longer debate the worthiness of the recipient of my compassion and choose, instead, to heal the wound in my own heart.

Reading back over what I have written, I worry that the words might seem self-righteous or complacent. I’m far from intending my reflections as a sermon to others, because what I may seem to preach I find incredibly hard to practice for myself. For me, every act of writing is an effort to learn, and this one is no exception.