I came across this beautifully written piece about the power of Forgiveness and Buddhism by Anh-Huong. Anh-Huong is a Buddhist teacher and author. She has taught Mindfulness Practices in workshops and retreats across the United States since 1988. In 1998 she and her husband founded the Mindfulness Practice Center of Fairfax where they offer daily practices, classes, and retreats on the art of mindful living.
My family escaped from Vietnam in a very small boat in 1979. We spent 10 months in a refugee camp in Malaysia before coming to the United States. It was said that half us boat people died at sea. The other half arrived to the shores in Southeast Asia, but even then
we were still not safe.
There were many young girls among the boat people who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many individual countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, the pirates continued to inflict much suffering on us refugees. When I was staying at Pulau Bidong Island, the biggest refugee camp in Malaysia at that time, I saw so many teen age girls and young women being carried from their boats into the camp upon their arrival. They were weeping, sometimes screaming with tremors. They had been raped by sea pirates. There was a story about a 12 year-old girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate who jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. There was another story of a father who was thrown into the ocean in the middle of the night because he was trying to stop the pirates from taking his teen-age daughter away from their fishing boat. There were so many heart-breaking stories like these.
When we see that our suffering, our hatred and our fear are organic, we don’t try to run away from them. Through the practice of calming, resting and deep looking taught by the Buddha, we can transform our loneliness, hate, fear and despair into elements of understanding which can nourish our compassion, happiness and well-being. We don’t feel the need to fight against our fear or anger anymore, because we see that our anger and fear are a genuine part of ourselves. So we try to handle them in the most tender,non-violent way. We take care of our anger and fear in the way that best gives them the chance to turn into understanding, love and compassion.
It’s so important to train ourselves to look in a non-dualistic way. We know from our own experience that if the other person is not happy, it’s very difficult for us to be happy.The other person may be our daughter, our partner, our friend, our mother, our son, our
father, or our neighbor. The other person may be the Christian community, the Jewish community, the Buddhist community, or the Islamic community. Because we know that safety and peace aren’t individual matters, we will naturally act for the collective good.
The practice of forgiveness is the practice of understanding and compassion. Understanding is the substance of true love and true compassion. If love is in our heart, every thought, word, and action can bring about a miracle.
