Why Should I Chant for Someone Who Has Hurt Me?
I have received comments from people who have been wronged or betrayed by someone and are having a hard time chanting for their happiness. They feel that
what this person did was so reprehensible that they can’t chant for their happiness. Why would leaders advise you to chant for the happiness of someone who has hurt
you?
We all know that the causes that we make with our thinking, and actions are creating a future effect that we will experience when the time is right. If you are
living a life full of anger and resentment, what do you think you are creating for a future effect in your own life?
The purpose of moving forward when someone hurts you is to free you from these kinds of future effects. The purpose of letting go and moving on is not to condone the behavior, but to free you so that you not only don’t create future effects but don’t have all that energy bound up and blocked, which can’t be used
for the rest of your life. If those blockages it remain deeply enough and long enough they can lead to illness.
Obstacles and Problems Are the Dirt to Grow the Seed of Buddhahood
As you know each of us has the seed of Buddhahood planted within, but it requires “dirt” in order to sprout. The obstacles and challenges we face in our lives are the dirt which allows us to grow. This is why our lives are our curriculum and there are no mistakes about what we need to grow. When someone wrongs you, this is the perfect
opportunity to do your human revolution. This curriculum might not be something you would prefer. Actually the obstacles and problems we require to grow into
Buddhahood are usually not what we would want, but rather what we need.
It’s as though our potential Buddhahood is like the lotus flower. To take that analogy further, for that flower to grow it needs to have its roots sunk deep into
the mid and slime of a Lotus pond. Our roots are sunk deep into the muck and dirt of the everyday world with all its problems. If the Lotus flower started to hate its
pond and tried to leave and go to a cleaner place, what would happen to it? It would never bloom. It’s like that with us. If we try to avoid our problems we
can’t do the work necessary to become Buddhas. We have to stay in the dirt and muck of everyday life and use it to do our human revolution.
When dealing with a difficult situation or someone who has hurt you, sit down in front of the Gohonzon and ask. “What I am supposed to learn through this experience?” When you base your life on sincere Daimoku to the Gohonzon and take your answers about what to do to overcome the difficulty from the ideas you get from your daimoku, then you can change your destiny and overcome your karma.
Some Stories
Here are a couple of stories. They come from The Power of the Heart a video on forgiveness.
The first was a mother whose daughter was in the hospital and through malpractice and negligence went into a coma for a year and died. Of course initially the mother carried a lot of blame, resentment against the doctor and the hospital.
But rather than hold onto that, in order to deal with it, she decided to write a book instead and through the process cleansed all her anger and resentment. She came to see that no one had intentionally hurt her daughter and was able to let her anger and blame go and move on.
Then there was a young woman, Imacula Ilibagiza from Ruwanda. She went through the genocide in Africa and her family, two brothers, her grandmother and grandfather and friends were killed by the Hootsies, who had been paid by the government to kill the Tootsies. She and six other woman had to spend three months hiding in a bathroom expecting every day to found and killed. The only thing that saved that group of women was a big wooden closet that was pulled in front of the bathroom door. She heard one of the Hootsies boast he had killed 399 people.
After that experience she was consumed by hatred and anger. It twisted her mouth and her whole body hurt. It was impossible for her to say the words “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. Some things just seemed too big and too awful to be able to let go.
Trying to come to terms with what had happened, she examined the lives of Gandhi, Mandala, and Mother Theresa, all of whom had suffered, and saw what their lives had become, when they had chosen love rather than hatred. Then she looked at Hitler and others who had chosen hate and saw what their lives had become.
She realized she had a choice between love or hate, so she prayed for help in being able to let go the anger and hatred that were twisting her body and her life. She wanted to be like Mandala who believed that people could change. She wanted to leave the bathroom behind.
When she did that gratitude took over her life. She was grateful for everything. The love and appreciation were overwhelming.
She didn’t know if her ability to let it go would hold if she was faced with the perpetrator of the killings of her family. She went to the prison and saw a man who was shaking and clearly in hell. She reached out to him and told him she forgave him. She had freed herself from the prison of hatred entirely.
This is why our leaders ask us to chant for the happiness of people who have hurt us. As long as we carry the anger and resentment around, we can’t be really happy. It’s like picking up a hot coal and expecting the other person to be hurt.
Letting go is a process and doesn’t happen overnight. It takes daily work, patience, and the willingness for it to happen.
Sometimes it is hard to let go of being a victim. Other people commiserate and side with you and there can be satisfaction in that. There is the satisfaction of being righteous. But there is also a big price.
Summary:
Today we discussed why it is important to your life to chant for the happiness of people who have made you suffer. It doesn’t happen overnight and is a process, but with patience and daily work it can be done. The result is the ability to live a happy life as you have done your human revolution.
Comments: I love hearing your and your ideas for topics. Please keep them coming. I try to answer everyone and you can answer one another.
Transcript Download: Forgiveness or
Why Should I chant for Someone Who Has Hurt Me?
Ty for this important guidance .
Recently I understood that one aspect of chanting for your enemy’s or opposer’s happiness is to enable both to rise to a higher life state, from which a good, detached understanding and resolution can arise. When you’re able to do that, to experience freedom from bad feelings, people either change or disappear entirely from your view. However in this process it is fundamental to respect and love yourself completely. The slightest doubt that you deserve to be disrespected because you did something bad or are undeserving, makes it impossible to change the situation, because it is actually you saying that you deserve to have the worst treatment from others. And this respect for yourself must be UNCONDITIONAL, regardless of what you’re doing,who you are, what you have done.
I think what you are saying is an example of oneness of self and the environment. Chanting about the situation will change the life state of the person chanting, so the goal can be achieved.
Thank you for this guidance.
I have three things, all of which happened after many years of practice. It’s as if my Life Force
needed a certain grounding first, in Nichiren’s teachings on the Lotus Sutra in concert with fellow practitioners in the Soka Gakkai.
My younger sisters apportioned to themselves all of our parents furniture, crests, beloved objects I had grown up with, as the eldest, and even all the pictures of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. I was left out of decision-making, and not one will even allow me to get copies made of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. No matter how hard I work to forgive and to chant for the ringleader:s happiness, I cannot seem to let this go! How can it be that I cannot have even pictures of our parents?? I have not been able to sleep at night for 20 yrs, over this and 2 other, unrelated things…I must listen, hard, to books on tape. When I chant, I find myself crying bitterly. This is not me, but I am afraid, has become me. Chanting seems to bring it all into my head– it is hard for my husband, who also practices, to see me like that. I cannot seem to “push through” the intense pain.
If you look at my video, A Buddhist View on How to Deal with difficult People, ou will find thoughts on how to handle this. Hope its helpfu.
Margaret
I really appreciate this topic as it’s what we need to do to grow & do our human revolution. I appreciate your examples and by the way, it’s Imaculée Ilibagiza from Rwanda and the genocide was between the Hutu & Tutsi tribes in 1994. One of her role models was (Nelson) Mandela. I have heard many of her talks about working to forgive her abusers – a remarkable woman who is a prime example of human revolution & changing poison into medicine.