How Do We Practice When Someone Has Wronged Or Hurt Us?

In this talk, we explore how to work with the inevitable hurts that come to us in our lives. How do we practice when we feel someone has wronged or betrayed us? We examine how the sense of betrayal can continue to haunt us if we do not use skillful means to work with it.

Transcript

I'd like to talk tonight about something that's been very much on my mind,

Which is this question of how we deal with someone who has wronged us.

How we respond when we feel that we have been badly treated.

And as you can tell from the reading that I chose tonight,

From one of the readings,

It was from the Buddha who talked about not dwelling on someone robbed me,

Someone offended me,

That when we dwell we suffer.

But is it that simple?

And the reason this has been on my mind is that I was recently at a family reunion and it brought back a painful incident in my family's life where my father was wrongly maligned by his family members.

He ran a business and some family members worked with him but he was the head of the business.

And at one point a younger family member insisted that my father was mismanaging the whole thing.

Never mind that the business was actually doing better than it had ever done,

But this this family member,

This relative said that my father was running the business into the ground and that he needed to take over,

This younger person.

And there was some public shaming in this small business community because he made it very public.

It was of course well before social media but it was possible to spread rumors.

And it was deeply painful and my father's much revered older brother told my father he needed to resign,

To step away.

And my father didn't do anything.

He just kept putting one foot in front of the other.

He kept managing his business but from where I sat in my college-age indignation,

He wasn't fighting back.

And I was puzzled.

And it brought to mind a famous Zen story that's often told that points to these issues.

It's about Zen Master Hakuin who was a 17th century Chinese Zen teacher,

Much revered.

And the story goes that he was revered for living a very pure life as well as being a wise teacher.

But a girl in his village who lived nearby suddenly became pregnant.

And when her parents discovered this they pressed her to say who the father was and she refused and she refused and then finally she said that it was Hakuin,

The local Zen teacher who was the father.

The parents were furious and they stormed over to the monastery and they accused Hakuin of being the father and of course being quite immoral having this relationship with a young girl.

And all Hakuin said was,

Is that so?

After the child was born the family brought the child to Hakuin and he accepted the child.

And he raised the child.

He took very good care of the child even though he had completely lost his good reputation in his community.

And a year later the young mother couldn't stand the deception any longer and she confessed to her parents the truth which was that the father of the child was a young man who worked in the local market.

The mother and the father went back to Hakuin and asked his forgiveness and said they needed to get the child returned.

Hakuin gave up the child and all he said was,

Is that so?

Now this is a very hard story.

It was hard for me to listen to when I first heard it several years ago in a Dharma talk.

Because is this about not standing up against injustice?

Is this about nihilism?

Is this about the kind of passivity that sometimes meditative practices can be accused of?

Where we just remain chill about everything.

Nothing bothers us.

It's all one.

It's all the same.

What does this phrase,

Is that so,

Mean?

And of course the reason this story is told is because things are always happening to us in our lives that we don't want.

Things come to us that we don't want.

We lose things that we don't want to lose.

And one way that this story is often understood is just that Hakuin recognizes this is his karma.

His karma is to be accused of something he didn't do,

To lose his good reputation,

And to raise a little baby.

But what does it mean to meet our karma?

When somebody accuses us of something,

What would it even mean to meet that accusation skillfully?

Hakuin found himself with an infant on his hands.

And what did he do?

He put one foot in front of the other.

He fed it.

He took care of it.

As the story goes,

He got milk from his neighbors who took pity on the baby.

He did whatever a 17th century parent would do.

And of course he must have grown to love this warm little baby as it grew.

Having just spent a lot of time with a new grandson,

I can tell you how attached it is possible to get to these little beings.

So something aversive comes along.

He accepts it with the loss of his good name.

He grows to love this little creature who's left in his charge,

And then it's taken away from him,

And he accepts that too.

What does it mean to meet these things skillfully?

Well,

There are some principles that are core parts of our practice.

Principles like compassion and loving kindness.

Compassion.

Perhaps Hakuin had some compassion for a young girl who was absolutely bewildered about what to do.

And so afraid of her parents wrath.

Perhaps some compassion for parents whose lives had been turned upside down,

And whose own reputations had been tarnished in a small village.

Perhaps loving kindness.

What would be the kind response to an injustice?

Certainly one of the kindest responses would be to take care of a little baby who might otherwise be abandoned.

And the other core principle of our practice is cultivating sympathetic joy.

Joy for the happiness and success of others.

And how happy that young mother must have been to get her child back.

Could Hakuin take some joy in that?

All of these may be implied in Hakuin's simple response of,

Oh,

Is that so?

But as a young man,

I was furious at this injustice done to my father.

He would not badmouth anyone in his family.

He would not turn away from his family.

And in fact,

When I would come home from college,

He would ask me to go and visit the offending relatives,

Which I could barely bring myself to do.

What was my father doing?

And for a long time,

I thought it was sheer weakness,

Sheer unwillingness to confront an injustice.

But what I've come to realize is that my father was living by core values that he held.

He would say to me,

Family is family.

And that never changes.

And he was a person who deeply believed in non harming.

He was one of the kindest people I think I've ever met.

And his instinct was not to harm.

And now I've come to see how much that saved him from suffering.

I don't know about you,

But I have held grudges in my life.

And what I find is that it saps my energy,

That it causes me enormous suffering.

And that when I have been able to heal a rift,

When I have been able to let go of a sense of being wronged,

I'm the one who heals.

And what I've come to understand is that my father saw in the long term that that was how he wanted to live.

Many years later,

Those relatives came to my father and apologized.

But he had long since put away the sense of injustice.

I also wondered whether Hakuin and my father refrained from lashing out,

From fighting back,

Because they felt nothing.

Are we looking in this practice for the kind of equanimity where nothing ever bothers us?

But that's absolutely not what was going on with my father.

I don't have to speculate.

He was hurt deeply.

He felt this deeply.

But he held back those impulses,

Because his anger was less powerful than values that he cared about more.

I find this really important because in this story,

It's easy to see Hakuin as the ultimate equanimous Zen teacher,

Who's never ruffled by anything.

And of course,

We can interpret the story any way we want.

But I don't believe that's what was going on.

Because our practice asks us to feel everything,

To turn toward everything,

Including the sense of injustice,

The outrage,

To feel the hurts and the losses and the sadness.

But then to let those feelings settle and to come back to the things we hold most dear.

For many of us,

They're the bodhisattva precepts.

But to come back to those things we most care about,

So that we act in ways to do as little harm as possible.

Now,

Does that mean we don't act?

Well,

I just spent the afternoon at a protest demonstration,

So I'm not a person who would say we don't act.

That is not what this practice teaches.

But it teaches acting from a place of discernment,

Of holding on to those guiding principles.

Because we know over the long term that that's what sustains us.

So the Buddha was proposing something radical for his time.

He was saying,

Remember,

All of this will disappear.

And Wendy Nakao in our other readings said the same thing.

She said,

Let us vow to remember all that appears will disappear.

In the midst of uncertainty,

Let us sow love.

Here now I call to you,

Let us together live the great peace that we are.

Thank you.

Reviews

What an amazing story and lesson. I will save this. The message is meaningful to me and should be remembered. 🙏🙏🕊️

Powerful talk. Thank you, Robert🙏💕 What we feel we heal. As we deeply feel, we can respond like Hakuin… with an empowered, ‘Is that so?’