pain from the master and negative karma…one in the same
July 24, 2007
i’ve been trying to come to terms with my hangup on the parable of the unmerciful servant
i read this quote by buddha on forgiveness:
Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
– buddha.
buddha has a reason for regarding anger to be unvirtuous.
however, i also came across this statement from a buddhist teacher regarding anger:
“Santideva offers an interesting argument for patience and against anger. When someone strikes us with a stick, do we become angry at the stick or the person weilding the stick? Both are necessary for pain to be inflicted, but we feel anger only for the agent of our pain, not the instrument. If we are directing our anger against the root cause of the pain, we should therefore direct our anger against anger.”
The story of Buddhism p. 78
so, according to this teacher, the way to destroy negative-karma-causing-anger is to use it against itself. According to the buddha, the way to be rid of anger is to forget thoughts of resentment/anger.
Maybe one could go on to say that to forget thougths of resentment we resent resentment? sort of like how people forget the terrible things that happened to them in their childhood b/c they resent such incidents?
The passage goes on:
”according to the law of karma, everything unpleasant that happens to us is a result of our past misdeeds. Therefore, the person who harms us is in fact only the unwitting conduit of our own past nonvirtue, returning in the form of feelings of pain. And as a result of harming us, the other person will himself or herself incur negative karma for which he or she will have to suffer in the future. If we respond in anger, we are both planting seeds for our own future suffering and causing further pain for the person who already will have to suffer for the harm they have done us.”
The Story of Buddhism p. 78
So, even in buddhism, what the parable of the unmerciful servant describes as torchure from the master (v. 34) exists in the form of negative karma.
