Letters to Enemies
Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022) was a
Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, writer, poet and peace activist. He founded the
school of Buddhism recognized as the Plum Village Tradition, which is
historically recognized as the main reference for committed Buddhism.
During the Vietnam
War, there was a lot of suffering and
people found themselves in a situation where they had become enemies of each
other. In such a situation, you have to find a way to survive and to help
others survive. We had to show people the way to act properly, because if you
don’t have peace within yourself, it is very difficult to work for peace. Our
thinking was: the other person is not our enemy; our enemies are
misunderstanding, discrimination, violence, hatred, and anger.
If you are filled with anger, you
create more suffering for yourself than for the other person. When you are
inhabited by the energy of anger, you want to punish, you want to destroy. That
is why those who are wise do not want to say anything or do anything while the
anger is still in them. So you try to bring peace into yourself first. When you
are calm, when you are lucid, you will see that the other person is a victim of
confusion, of hate, of violence transmitted by society, by parents, by friends,
by the environment. When you are able to see that, your anger is no longer
there.
Forgiveness will not be possible until
compassion is born in our heart. Even if you want to forgive, you cannot
forgive. In order to be compassionate, you have to understand why the other
person has done that to you and your people. You have to see that they are
victims of their own confusion, their own worldview, their own grieving, their
own discrimination, their own lack of understanding and compassion.
Suppose you are angry at your father.
Many people are angry at their father, and yet if they don’t do anything to
change it when they grow up, they will repeat exactly what their father did to
them. … When you are capable of visualizing your father as a five-year-old
boy – fragile, tender, full of wounds – you begin to understand and
feel compassion.
An act of compassion always brings
about transformation. If not right now, it will happen in the future. The
important thing is you don’t react with anger. You react with compassion, and
sooner or later you see the transformation in the other person.
Reference: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/enemy-lovers
