One of the things you’ve got to learn how to do is not to get focused on how you’ve been wronged by other people. You don’t want to go around getting revenge because that just keeps the bad kammic cycle going on and on and on.

"Forgiveness seems to be such a basic human activity that we forget that our ideas about forgiveness are picked up from our culture and our view of what’s going on in the world. If you want forgiveness to be a helpful part of the practice, you have to look at how your ideas of forgiveness are tied up with your views about the world.

Many of us in the West have a feeling that we’ve picked up from the culture, that there’s a plan for everything: The universe had a beginning point, it’s going to have an end point, there’s a story, and it’s going to come to closure. Now there are different ideas about what exactly that story is and where it’s headed, but just the idea that there is a beginning point and there is an end point, that there’s a purpose to the universe at large: That right there has a big impact on how we think about forgiveness. If there’s a beginning point, you can tally up who did what first: how many times you’ve been wronged, how many times you’ve wronged the other person, who owes a debt of forgiveness to whom. If the plan for all of this is that we’re going to become one loving community, we need to get back on good terms with everybody else. Especially if we’re going to be divided into two communities for eternity — those who are on loving terms and those who are not on loving terms — everyone would want to be on the loving-terms side. This is why we believe that forgiveness has to involve learning how to love the person you forgave.

Then there’s another view about the plan for all of this, which is that each person has his or her own independent inspiration from within and that we’re not in any position to judge anybody else. In a universe like that, forgiveness is inappropriate. How can we judge someone else’s behavior? Who are you to decide that you’re in a position to forgive somebody else when you can’t judge anyone’s behavior at all?

We see this not only in modern Western culture but also in the Mahayana. Several years back, a scholar who was working on an early Mahayana text got in touch with me and wanted to know where the principle of not judging others appeared in the Pali Canon, because apparently it’s all over the Mahayana: the idea that each bodhisattva has his or her own independent inspiration or path to follow, so no one can judge anyone else’s behavior or teachings. I looked around in the Canon and I couldn’t find it. There is actually a lot about judging people in the Pali Canon — what principles you should use, what principles you shouldn’t use — but the idea that you’re in no position to judge anybody else does not appear in the Buddha’s teachings at all.

In other words, you can judge when you’ve been wronged. Now, you may have some misperceptions about the other person’s intentions or about the actual long-term impact of that person’s actions, but there are times when you know you’ve been wronged. So what are you going to do about it?

You look at it in terms of the Buddha’s mundane right view. He says that this process of wandering on comes from an inconceivable beginning and there’s no way to make sense of it. He never comes down for sure on whether there was a beginning point or not, but either way you simply can’t conceive it. It’s too far back; it’s too bizarre. As for the endpoint, again, he doesn’t make any statements about whether there’s going to be an endpoint to all this. But his picture of how the universe goes through its cycles is pretty random. You get a lot of people improvising. There’s no big plan. There’s no one narrative about all this, which means that if you stop to ask yourself that question — who was the first person to do wrong, you or the other person — you don’t really know.

There’s a story of Somdet Toh, who was a famous monk in 19th century Thailand. He was abbot of a monastery right across the river from the Grand Palace. One evening, a young monk came in to complain about how another monk had hit him. Somdet Toh’s response was, “Well, you hit him before he hit you.” And the young monk said, “No, he came up and just hit me out of nowhere. I didn’t do anything to him.” And Somdet Toh kept saying, “No, you hit him before.” The young monk got really frustrated and went to complain to a monk higher up in the hierarchy, and Somdet Toh had to explain himself. He said, “Well, it must have been in some previous lifetime. The complaining monk hit the other monk first.” Of course, that might not have been the first time. It could have been just the latest installment of a long back and forth.

So there’s an inconceivable beginning and no real closure. Different people decide that they’ve had enough of the wandering-on and they figure out how to stop, but that doesn’t keep the other beings in the universe from continuing to wander on and on. There’s no real plan. As one of the chants we recite in the evening says, “There’s no one in charge.” There’s no overall narrative.

What there is, though, is the question: What kind of kamma do you want to create? If the answer is “skillful kamma,” then one of the things you’ve got to learn how to do is not to get focused on how you’ve been wronged by other people. You don’t want to go around getting revenge because that just keeps the bad kammic cycle going on and on and on."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Forgiveness" (Meditations6)