Hey, y'all! Today's the day to go and find those perks! Well, the other day, let me put it this way. There was a conference a couple of days ago in which Meili was present. she was representing Buddhists or Christian representatives.

[01:10]

I'm not sure exactly what the conference was. It's going to happen in another month. It hasn't happened. Oh, it hasn't happened. Something happens. Something happens. And there was some confusion about whether or not the term forgiveness was the same for Buddhists as it was for Christians. And so, a lady from CBS called me. She said, there's some confusion about whether the meaning of forgiveness is the same for Buddhists or for Christians. And so, I had about ten minutes to think about this, in between the time Maile called me and the time the lady from CBS called me. I'm not an authority on this question, but my response was that there are two words, forgiveness and pardon, and although they're considered as synonyms in the dictionary, they really have different meaning, subtly different meaning.

[02:35]

And forgiveness does not have to be pardoned. Forgiveness is something that we give in order to free ourselves. in order to free ourself and free the other person so that you can come in, so that it has more to do with our own letting go of ill will and anger and attachment It's a way of setting free, actually. Forgiveness is a way of setting free both yourself and another.

[03:42]

Whereas, pardon is also a way of setting free, but you can forgive someone without pardoning them. In other words, I forgive you, but please don't come around anymore. I don't want to see you anymore. And if someone is a criminal and has a sentence, you may forgive the person in your heart, but they still have to serve their sentence. You're not going to pardon their punishment or whatever is due them in that sense. So this is the way I see forgiveness. Others may see it a different way. But I see forgiveness as on a more internal level.

[04:50]

Whereas pardon is more on an external level. And it has to do with, pardon has to do with maybe with the other person more. And forgiveness has to do with you or myself. I can forgive someone without even talking to them. I don't have to tell them. I can just do this in my own way without even saying anything. So, then the other question was, well, do you think that forgiving, you could forgive unconditionally for anything? And I said, well, technically yes, but actually, pretty hard.

[06:02]

There's probably, for almost everyone, it'd be pretty hard. There is a level where you wouldn't forgive somebody for something. But theoretically, you should be able to. So there's always the question, well, should you forgive Hitler? Joshua Sasaki Roshi gave a lecture, he said, you should be able to forgive Hitler, otherwise you're not a good Zen student. And that's a very hard koan to swallow. But it's possible, which doesn't mean that you have to pardon. I would never pardon, although I might forgive, which is the way of releasing me from my own ill-will.

[07:16]

Because when ill-will arises and we allow it to grow and take root, then we're caught by our own ill-will. We're caught by the ill will which we extend to the other. And both of us are caught in the same trap. It's a very difficult situation. Ill will, anger, rage, and so forth. These continually come up or flare up, but if we become attached to them, then we put ourselves into bondage. And forgiveness is a way to free ourselves from that bondage.

[08:25]

So, I don't know if that's different in Christianity or not. Probably the same. I think there may be technical differences, you know. I think that Christians tend to make more of a technical difference with something like that, whereas I don't think Buddhists do. I never... The term forgiveness probably comes up in Buddhism, but I don't think it's... I don't remember it as a kind of technical term. I think it's implied in Buddhism. In the Dhammapada, which is the oldest published record of Buddhist thought, in the very first chapter there are these lines, these One is, he abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me.

[09:38]

And those who harbor such thoughts, hatred will never cease. So forgiveness is implied in this statement. If we hang on to resentments, this is a statement about resentments. He abused me, he defeated me, he robbed me. These are resentments which are associated with anger. In those who harbor such thoughts, those thoughts may come up, but if we harbor them, in other words, embrace them and give them a place to fester, they never cease, they just continue, continue. And what happens is that we easily create a contentious attitude in ourself, which ill will can come up and take hold in us, kind of like a virus.

[10:45]

And then we look for objects with which to express the ill will. And you probably know people, maybe even yourself, who are looking for something to be angry at and create situations in which to express their anger. This is a big problem in our world. Then he says, he abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me. And those who did not harbor such thoughts, hatred will cease. And for never does hatred cease by hatred here below. Hatred ceases by love and this is an eternal law. So one who harbors love or gives it a safe, feels safe with love, can forgive more easily because they're more interested

[12:01]

in this precious quality than in a vengeance or retribution. Vengeance and retribution are a kind of false righteousness. So vengeance and retribution masquerade or we can use them as righteous indignation in order to express our own ill will. It's a very tricky situation and we get caught by it all the time. Just driving down the street and somebody pulls in front of you and your righteous indignation, mine does, I don't know about you, but my righteousness in these nations arises very quickly.

[13:06]

But I'm more interested in protecting my love and kindness, so I let it go. The world does not know that we must all come to an end here. But those who do know, their quarrels cease at once. I think this is an important point also, that when we see, when we're confronted and realize the shortness of our life, and that actually it's quite impermanent, we see how insignificant so much of our indignation is, so much of our quarreling and resentments.

[14:08]

And when we experience someone leaving this world, all the quarrel, all the contention that we had between us and them just seems so terribly insignificant. So I think it's important to remember that when we relate to each other. So I think forgiveness It should be happening in a kind of continuous way. We say a Buddhist monk, the life of a Buddhist monk is to continually give up. Continuously giving up, which means continuously laying down.

[15:21]

anger, ill will, resentments, and coming up fresh on each moment. One should have a fresh mind, be refreshed on each moment by laying down the burden of ill will and resentments and anger, which will come up again and again and again. The main thing is not to be attached to these emotions. Actually, this is our practice. So I'm wondering how you feel about this, if you have anything to say about it, Ross.

[16:37]

Well, I think that's a good point. So what does one do if one isn't able to see? Because we can see Buddha nature in our friends and people we care about, or kind of see some. The real challenge is the other. I remember some time ago hearing a story of Mahatma Gandhi. Yeah. Yes, I think that's right. Because, you know, it's like, can everybody be saved? This is, I think this is a question in Christianity. It's also a question in Buddhism. Salvation. And, you know, there was a question in the past.

[18:11]

about the achantika. The achantika is the person who is so subhuman that there's actually no salvation for this person as a human being. This person can never really, can this person ever really touch their buddha nature? the question was resolved that yes, all beings have buddhanature, whether they can touch it or not. So, someone like Mahagosyananda can, for him, for a person like him, it's a wonderful opportunity to talk to someone like Balpat. It's easy to talk to some nice Zen students and to see their Buddha, you know.

[19:26]

It'd be a great, wonderful challenge to see how you could just relate. have to be there finding some common ground where you may actually be, your outlooks and your goals and your manner may be 180 degrees apart. I've been thinking about that a lot this week, how you can get into that kind of, you find yourself going head to head

[20:31]

That's the circumstance. What help can you be in a situation where someone is really not your friend? Someone is bound to do you or people that you love or care for harm, and you find no common ground. Forgiveness in that circumstance Well, you do what you can. You know, we all do what we can. And in the end, you know, even Christ just did what he could. And with people who, you know, killed him, right? And he forgave them. So I think that's also a Buddhist attitude.

[21:41]

Al? Thich Nhat Hanh has a really powerful poem called, Call Me By My True Names, that I think addresses this question, talking about identifying with what's universal in all of us, and the things that people hate. I wish I could quote it, but I can't. I think probably most people have seen that poem. I think we know what you're talking about. Yeah. Maile? Well, thank you very much for coming on this subject. And I appreciate the distinction between forgiveness and pardon. I wonder, and what, well, what is the, I was asked this question, what is the impact on the perpetrator of my forgiveness? and my pardon. I somewhat wonder if any of us, if we really can pardon because a person's karma is set in motion and I have no, I can't affect your karma.

[22:58]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It's not the universe would give you your retribution, although it may not be apparent. We can pardon someone on a certain level, but your own karma is your retribution. or karmic consequence is your retribution, which you may not feel right away, but eventually you do. People get scared.

[24:00]

They say, well, if I pardon so-and-so, they'll just come at me again. Or, I mean, if I forgive you, you just come and attack me again, right? So, this is the way I keep my distance, is by not forgiving you. But that's a false separation, you know, because you're not released from it. So, you can be released, but still have a restraining order. Now I have a different part to that question. If you forgive me, you are released, is there an impact on me? Yeah, you are also, because I give you my compassion. So the compassion that I offer to you is a gift.

[25:02]

And you can do what you want with that. Susan? Well, I think that is a really helpful distinction that you're making between the external and the internal. And you were saying that you can forgive somebody without pardoning them, but I think it's also possible to pardon somebody without forgiving them, which is what I'm familiar with, and sort of can get into trouble where you think you're doing the external thing. You're saying, oh, it's okay, don't worry about it. come on back, over, or something. And then, in your heart, you're pretending you're forgiving them, but you're not really looking deeply enough to see that you actually haven't forgiven them, and then you run into a lot of trouble further down the line, because you're pardoning them without forgiving them. Well, this is one of the problems, you know, with the law, is you serve your time, and then you're out. You're pardoned, but you're not forgiven. This is a big problem in law. So, I think forgiveness is really valuable for criminals.

[26:17]

The pardon might be appropriate sometimes even without the forgiveness. And the forgiveness may be something people can work on later. Right, of course. The Bodhisattva vow that we just took, I vow to save all. I'd like you to say something about that. Okay. Oh, you'd like me to say something? Yeah, I would like you to say something. Well, what is salvation in Buddhism? And how do we save all sentient beings? The sixth ancestor says, it's not I, Huineng, who is going to save every single person individually. Saving sentient beings means delivering deliverance by letting go of the angry mind, letting go of the resentful mind, letting go of the lustful mind, letting go of the delusive mind,

[27:34]

So each one of these states of mind is a sentient being. So that's one way of thinking about saving sentient beings. Another way of thinking about sentient beings is like Shakyamuni Buddha. When he became enlightened and he saw the morning star, he said, I and all sentient beings are saved. sentient beings and myself are not separate, are one. Therefore, I have saved all sentient beings. But as we're speaking, thousands of people are being born, who we will never see. And thousands of people are dropping off. We'll never see. And this thing keeps revolving. So, does that mean that I'm going to have to know everybody in the world to save them?

[28:38]

No. I mean, that's not... There's one person to work on, and that's you. If you work on this person, this person is connected to all beings. And when you work on this person, the effect is experienced by all beings, maybe minutely. But if you work on this person and your influence extends to other people, then hopefully everyone will work on themselves. The interesting point of it, to me, is how in Christianity, if you accept Jesus or Christ, you are saved.

[29:41]

And I don't think that that's the same in Buddhism. It's not, except that in Pure Land Buddhism it is. Pure Land Buddhism is very much like that. By the vow of Amida Buddha, Amitabha, all you have to do is chant the name Amitabha Buddha and you will be through compassion of Amitabha Buddha's vow you will be reborn in the pure land because the understanding is that human beings are being who they are will never be perfect will never, cannot gain their own salvation by themselves. Too difficult. So, through Amitabha's vow, one, it's very much like Christ, one, through Amitabha's compassion is, one passes into the pure land.

[30:56]

And that's the salvation. So, you don't really have to do much. Whereas in Zen, you make some effort. So that's kind of the difference between the two. One is called self-power and the other is called other-power. Zen is called self-power because, you know, you work for your own salvation. Whereas in pure land, It's other power, but actually they're the same. When you come down to it, they're really not different. Although there are differences. The practice is different. But self-power and other power, when we talk about self-power, it sounds like ego. It's like giving up yourself. It's self-power. On the question of forgiveness, I've been thinking about it a lot lately, trying to sort it out.

[32:07]

I don't think I can really sort it out, but one element, it seems to me, is, you know, You know, one person seems to me in this idea of forgiveness and maybe pardon too, there's a person who has done something horrible. And it seems to me that it's not a complete thing unless there really is a truly sincere recognition on the part Otherwise, it seems to me that's the healing possibility in that. And unless there is the other person, there's got to be a recognition and an attempt to make some kind of amends.

[33:20]

It's called penance, I guess, in Christianity. Yes. It's easier to forgive someone who is contrite. But the whole thing is about healing, also. When you forgive and you're offering the person a chance to start again, you're clearing the ground. And let's start again. And the practical problem there, I think, is that one of fear of being caught again in the same situation, and it's whether you say, shouldn't really forget problems. Sometimes it's... But it's in different situations where we say, yeah, okay, you know, we'll just, you know, return to the situation and go on as if nothing had happened.

[34:21]

In other cases you can't. I mean, you just have to say, you know... I think that forget means let go. Thoroughly let go so that you can... But it confused me. I don't think it literally means forget. Maybe sometimes. There's that saying, forgiven but not forgotten. I think it's probably not going to be solved right away. Rebecca? Oh, behind the post. All right. I wanted to share something that was a profound lesson for me. It happened several years ago. I was in a blind day conference to study the group unconscious, which gets real weird. About two-thirds of the way through it, a minority man was in the shower by himself that morning.

[35:22]

And this was, the housing was in a secure building where nobody from the outside of this conference could come in. It was a security guard. So what happened was assumed to have happened from the membership of that conference. While he was in the shower, someone came in and defecated in his shaving kit. And when we had our first meeting that morning, everybody that was in the group, this man was very shaken. And he stood up and told what had happened. And he was quite frightened, and everybody was frightened, because it seemed such an extremely aggressive and hostile and denigrating act. And the fantasies were that, who is the Nazi among us? There was a great deal of righteousness and outrage, and we were going to find out either who was the Nazi or who was the crazy. And we were going to kill the Nazi and incarcerate the crazy. I mean, that was what was going on. And this went on for some time, maybe 45 minutes or an hour, and one of the men in the group was a Vietnamese man who couldn't speak very good English.

[36:33]

He was very soft-spoken. He had never really said much in his whole experience. And he stood up, which was an unusual thing for anyone to do, and he said very quietly, I could have done it. I didn't. And everyone in the room felt something just pass over the room, a kind of calmness, and I think an ownership, that every one of us, had we had the karma that this person had, could have done it. And I also, we never found out who did it, but I also think that our consciousness, that we all carry within us the potential to do that, had our lives been the same, I think that affected whoever did it. That's my fantasy. And, you know, I just think that we can get really righteous about thinking that we're so different and not look at the privilege of our lives that set us on a different path.

[37:33]

And that's what I think really forgiveness is about. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's sort of what Al was talking about. Yeah. Interesting that it was a Vietnamese person, because that's exactly the point. His family had suffered terribly, terribly in the war. And he was the one who spoke it. And I thought, well, he really knows. He really knows. Yes. Well, sort of related, I wanted to talk about children. I wanted to ask you about children. And I wanted to ask you, Mel, how do children learn forgiveness? You know, they often find themselves in very difficult, unequal situations. And they must return to them. And there's a drama like that going on in my family. So, that is my question. Well, I think they learned it from their parents.

[38:34]

Well, could you say more? Well, I think that they don't follow what you say. They follow what you do. But what they really learn is their observation of you. And so I think it behooves all of us to act correctly in order for our children to act correctly. What if a kid is in a situation where maybe one parent, in quotes, I mean, it gets very complex, you know, because this is our world of samsara and there's a step-parent involved and it's quite something. Well, I think that if there's no teaching in the family, you know, I think we have various propensities, you know.

[39:43]

I think that a lot of young children don't have much conscience until they grow older and get some beating up in life. And other small children have a conscience. It just depends on the individual. It really depends on the individual and what their propensities are. are just stubborn, some are very easy? I don't know what the answer to that is. I think you just have to take it on an individual basis and teach children about it. I guess to me there's something, because this is, again, in dealing with human beings there's an ongoing dynamic and it's sort of, it's difficult, it seems to me it's a bit like the Bodhisattva vows, like you, one makes, you know, over and over again, one is faced with this dilemma, and perhaps that's where the learning is, like there's an intentionality about it, but we're going to fall off, we're going to get angry, but we also need to release the feeling.

[41:05]

Yes. But we have to keep coming back over and over again to our intention. Right, right. I think maybe that's part of the teaching. It is. I think it is. And that's in itself is a kind of forgiveness. Self-forgiveness. In that you fall off and then you don't punish yourself. You let go of it. Letting go is a kind of forgiveness. And then you climb back up. And we do this all the time. We're doing it 10,000 times a day. Well, I guess I think maybe it's helpful in that kind of situation to, you know, depending on the kid's age, to verbalize some of this. Like when the kid is stuck in the center of an adult drama, really, with a lot of unresolved feelings. Yeah. But I think also, if we keep showing forgiveness to the child, that's important, then that's what they learn.

[42:09]

On New Year's Eve, we sit until after midnight, and then, as Joss was saying, we write down on a piece of paper things that we want to forgive or let go of, and then put them in the fire. It's a comment and a question. You were talking about righteous indignation. It seems to me at the prisons, it's not about pardon or forgiveness, or we're setting out kind of a system that's not about either of those, that it's about righteous indignation. And somebody was saying that we can't affect someone else's karma, but like we don't put our wallet out on the front seat when we come in here, if we set up a system or no system where people are, if we set up something where people are being treated being called criminals or being labeled and not sort of honoring their brood in nature.

[44:21]

We are contributing to that karma. And we are responsible for that too. Well, we are. So we have these prisons and then we punish, you know. And it's, you know, psychologically, in this day and age, we know that punishing the child by beating them is not the way to deal with them. And yet we throw these children, grown-up children, who are transgressors into this hole and beat them, right? And then we expect them, I don't know what we expect, we wish they would go away. But they don't. They come back out worse. So, big problem. Yes? We don't know. We're still in the caves. Neanderthal mentality, as far as dealing with transgressors.

[45:21]

And the biggest transgressors are not in the prisons. The biggest transgressors are in the corporations. And so we're beating the wrong people. But if we start beating up people in the corporations, we're going to beat ourselves. So we're afraid to do that. One more. Jerry? I guess I wanted to introduce the concept of self-forgiveness. I can't out-hear you. I guess I wanted to introduce the idea of self-forgiveness. Yes. And some of what makes us angry and indignant a lot of times is our own dark side stuff. that we see reflected in other people. Right. And that self-reflection and looking at our own self and coming to grips with our own evil side or dark side and letting that go and letting go the objectives we have against ourselves allows us to be a little bit more compassionate and open to others.

[46:29]

That's true. I mean, I, you know, we see this coming up in ourselves all the time and If we don't let go of it, if we don't forgive ourselves, then it really drives us crazy. But when we do, at least we have a clear space and we have the opportunity to start again. I think it's about time. So letting go of our own anger at ourselves is really important. Otherwise we get driven into neurotic patterns. And if we do have the ability to see what we do,

[47:39]

forgive ourselves, at least we're able to function and make effort to work with it. It leaves us open to working with whatever it is that's a problem.

[48:03]

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