The Samsaric Mud Fight (extract)

"We could view samsara as a big mud fight. I splash mud on you. You splash mud on me. And then I splash mud on you back because you splashed mud on me. It goes back and forth like this and it never ends. So the idea of trying to straighten everybody out — or trying to settle the score — again makes no sense.

There’s that famous story of Somdet Toh. A junior monk came to see him once, complaining that another monk had hit him over the head for no reason at all. He hadn’t done anything to harm the other monk. The other monk was just a really bad guy who came up and hit him. And Somdet Toh said, “Well, you hit him first.” The junior monk replied, “No, no, he came up and hit me first. I didn’t do anything to him at all.” Somdet Toh kept insisting, “No, you hit him first.” And so the young monk went to complain to Somdet Toh’s superior, who must’ve been the supreme patriarch. He went to Somdet Toh to question him about this: “Why did you keep insisting that the innocent monk had hit the other monk first?” And Somdet Toh said “Well, it’s kamma. If this monk had never hit that other monk, maybe in some other lifetime, he wouldn’t have been hit back.”

The idea of settling scores makes sense if you have a clear beginning point and a clear endpoint. But when the beginning point, as the Buddha said, cannot be found, can’t even be conceived, how are you going to figure out what the score is? Where would you begin the tally?

This is a useful point to think about when old wrongs come up in your meditation. You start thinking about events in your past: people who abused you, people who did horrible things to you, or people who are still doing horrible things to you now. You have to ask yourself, “Well maybe I’ve done something to that person.” That doesn’t exonerate the other person. It simply means that the two of you have been entangled in this mud fight, back and forth, and you don’t know when it began. So the best thing is to say, “Okay, I’m just going to not continue the back and forth.” Wish the other person well. If reconciliation is possible, try for reconciliation. If it’s not, you go for forgiveness, because you realize that not every score is going to get settled, but you can pull out of the mud fight even when it seems like the other person is winning unfairly. In any mud fight, the question of who splashed more mud on the other person after a while becomes really irrelevant. It’s not the kind of score you want to keep, a score you want to settle. It’s a fight you want to get out of."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Samsaric Mud Fight" (Meditations8)

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