How to Use the Teaching on Kamma (extract)

"For most of us, a lot of the interest in the stories coming up in our lives is about the injustices, the feeling that something hasn’t been settled, something hasn’t been brought to closure. But when you realize it’s part of a long, long, long mudslinging battle through the many lifetimes, it gets less and less and less interesting. Less and less worthy of anger.

Some people say, “That means you’re saying that the victim is responsible for his or her suffering.”

Well, what’s wrong with that? What’s really wrong with that is what people tend to make out of it, which is the belief that if someone did something bad in a previous lifetime, then they deserve to get what they’re getting now, so you don’t have any compassion for them. That’s the wrong response. As I said, everybody here in the human realm has some bad karma. If you reserve your compassion only for good people, who are you going to have compassion for? Only people who have no bad actions in their past? There would be nobody around to qualify for your compassion. The right attitude is to have compassion for people, knowing full well that they’re not totally innocent."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "How to Use the Teaching on Kamma"

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