Transforming Suffering into the Path

Even if someone tries to cut off your head

When you haven’t done the slightest thing wrong,

Out of compassion take all his misdeeds

Upon yourself—

This is the practice of bodhisattvas.

Compassion for the Person Who Harms Us

If we haven’t done anything—at least nothing that we’re aware of—and somebody is taking incredible measures to deprive us of our life and happiness, what is our instant reaction? Anger, rage, fear. We may wail that their actions are unfair and uncalled for and possible ways to retaliate race through our mind. Is that a pleasant mental state? No. Is it a virtuous mental state that can motivate constructive actions? Not at all; in fact it’s just the opposite. In other words, we are experiencing the painful result of previously created negative karma and reacting in such a way that we are creating more negative karma that will lead to more suffering in the future.

Are there other alternatives to how we could think and feel in such a situation? Verse 13 proposes looking at the person who is harming us and feeling compassion. Why is compassion an appropriate response? Because the other person is in a tremendously confused and unhappy state. If we focus on him, not on ourselves, we see that he is suffering greatly and in his confusion he thinks that harming us will relieve him of his suffering. Of course it won’t; he’ll only create more negative karma to experience more suffering in the future. In this life as well, he could experience the misery involved in being arrested and imprisoned.

If we have compassion for him, wishing him to be free of suffering, then we’re not harming our own mind and we won’t do anything to cause him further misery. Not only do we wish him to be free of suffering, we also do the taking and giving meditation, imagining taking all his negative karma—all his misdeeds— upon ourselves and using them to smash our own self-centredness, visualised as a hard lump at our heart. After all, it is our own self-centredness that motivated us in a previous life or earlier this life to create the negative karma that is ripening in us being in this situation. Seeing that self-centred mind as our actual enemy, it makes sense to take what he doesn’t want—the negative karma of his misdeeds and its future suffering result—and use them to destroy what we don’t want—our self-centred mind that pretends to be our friend but consistently deceives us.

If we look at the situation through the perspective of karma, we see that if we had not created negative karma in the past, we wouldn’t be experiencing this result now. Thus, it’s inappropriate to blame all our fear and suffering on the other person when it’s our own self-centredness that is ultimately harming us. So rather than blame the other person, let’s have compassion for him, take his suffering upon ourselves through the taking and giving meditation, and use it to destroy our self-centredness.

His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama told a story about one of the Tibetan monks who was imprisoned by the Chinese communists for many years. The monk had not done anything wrong but was imprisoned because the communists wanted to crush Buddhadharma in Tibet. Years later, when this monk was finally released from prison, he left Tibet and went to see His Holiness in Dharamsala. His Holiness asked him, “What frightened you the most while you were imprisoned and tortured?” The monk replied, “I was afraid of losing my compassion for the guards.” Can you imagine that? He was afraid of relinquishing his compassion for the people who were torturing him. I was very moved when I heard that story. It’s clear that the monk’s compassion was what kept him alive for the duration of his imprisonment. Why? If you don’t have compassion for the person who’s harming you, then either you have hatred, which can kill you, or you just give up in despair, in which case you usually die. Instead, he felt compassion and lived.

Sometimes, we find it difficult to feel compassion for people who don’t harm us personally, let alone have compassion for people who harm us. I work with prisoners, and one of the inmates that I write to took one of the female guards hostage. It was all over the news in Portland. It was the first time a guard had been taken hostage in twenty years. I found out about the incident because somebody wrote to my website. Some of the inmates’ writings and poetry are on my website and this person wrote to me via the website. He was enraged; he could not understand why I would put the writings of a rapist and criminal on the website. In his eyes, this inmate was not fit to be considered a Buddhist. He said, “I’m a Buddhist and have concern for the image of Buddhism, especially if the media finds out that this hostage-taker was a Buddhist. I have compassion for the guard he took hostage and absolutely no compassion for him.”

I wrote back and said, “This inmate is a human being. He is suffering. The Dharma has been a real refuge for him. He has made progress in some ways although he has a long way to go. He still has the Buddha nature, and I will not judge or abandon him just because he made a mistake.” I had been corresponding with this prisoner for some time and knew he had a rough life and a great deal of internal suffering. His suffering, and his confusion about how to stop it, overwhelmed him and resulted in his terrifying the guard (who was released unharmed) and sabotaging his own happiness. I’m sure he hated himself after this episode and the internal scathing words he said to himself were probably worse that what the journalists said about him and how the authorities punished him. I think he has some mental illness that requires treatment, but the prison system focuses on punishing offenders, not on rehabilitating them or treating their mental difficulties.

Someone may think that my saying it’s suitable to feel compassion for this inmate is belittling the suffering of the guard whom he took hostage and the women whom he had raped (which was the reason he was in prison). That is not my intent. The suffering of those who were harmed is immense, but our hating the perpetrator doesn’t eliminate their misery. Hatred only breeds more hatred, and hatred in our heart causes us more suffering than it causes the person we hate.

What is my point in telling this story? That it is possible to have compassion for someone who has done actions that we find despicable. Furthermore, it is possible to feel compassion for those who perpetrate extreme harm on us. Somebody cutting off our head is pretty extreme. But think of how mad we get when somebody does even a minor thing we don’t like. For example, not saying “Good morning” to us. We become furious at anyone who does even the slightest little thing that we don’t like. So, if the circumstance of somebody wanting to cut off our head when we haven’t done anything wrong is a situation calling for compassion, then surely we should be even more forgiving and tolerant in situations where nobody has a bad intention towards us and, misinterpreting that person’s actions, we get angry. If we hold a grudge, who does the grudge hurt? It only hurts ourselves. It doesn’t hurt anybody else. Therefore compassion is a medicine for our own pain as well as a balm that soothes the external situation.

~Commentary by Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron