We're often the ones who would like to see so-and-so get his just desserts, finding some satisfaction in that. That’s an attitude you’ve got to relinquish if you’re going to have goodwill all around. Otherwise, how are you going to help that person?

"Then there’s relinquishment. Here it’s a matter of thinking about situations where there’s someone you think deserves to suffer. They’ve acted in unskillful ways, and it seems wrong that they’re not meeting up with some sort of punishment. It seems that justice hasn’t been done.

You have to relinquish that kind of thinking. The ideal way for people who have been misbehaving to change their ways is for them to have a change of heart. Now, it may happen that they will meet up with the results of their bad kamma, but ideally they would be in a position where they had developed thoughts of goodwill themselves, learning to be virtuous and discerning. They would have developed their minds to the point where they're neither overcome by pleasure nor overcome by pain.

That would be the ideal situation—as in the case of Angulimala. The Buddha didn’t say to Angulimala, “Okay, come back after you’ve reaped the results of having killed so many people, then we’ll talk.” He saw that Angulimala had the potential, so he taught him and got results. There were a lot of people who were upset by the fact that Angulimala became a monk and was not going to be punished for those murders. They would throw things at him when he went out for alms.

When we hear the story, we usually identify with Angulimala, but often in our daily life, we’re actually playing the role of the people who throw things: the ones who would like to see so-and-so get his just desserts, finding some satisfaction in that. That’s an attitude you’ve got to relinquish if you’re going to have goodwill all around. Otherwise, how are you going to help that person?

So relinquishment is the third quality of a good determination."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Determined Goodwill" (Meditations11)

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