How Shall We Deal With Our Enemies

By Chris Wei Chen

In most religious teachings, we are taught that we shall forgive our enemies, because our enemies deserve the same right of defensiveness and their preciousness in life.  Do you feel OK? I do not. I feel quite uncomfortable and uneasy about this spiritual instruction because it does not persuade me, not to mention the hurts I got in my heart.

Even if we do need to forgive our enemies, it is not for the above reasons because it seems too dry and inhuman for me to follow.  Every time when I witness fierce conflicts among people or I am involved with serious conflicts by myself, I feel huge emotions for it. I sensed that there are too many energies flowing around me rushing to find an exit. But conflicts make the outlets of emotions hard to release, then fighting is escalated to the peaking point, resulting in serious harm in each participant's heart.

We shall never find an excuse for our enemies while blame self for the wrongness of fight. If we do not love self, how could we love others? Not to mention to forgive someone who hurts us. It is anti-human if the traditional explanation stands.  The exaggerated lofty morale that we shall forgive our enemies because all people are our relatives in previous incarnations does not truly depicts what Buddhism means. Why? If we forgive our enemy merely because they were part of ourselves, then we are still being selfish, although it is an extended selfishness. How can someone persuade another person not to be selfish by a logic that serves selfishness in a bigger dimension? 

We need to think out of the box to explore Buddhism's teaching on our relationship with our enemies. The key idea in forgiving our enemies from different religions, whether Christian or Buddhism, is to arouse our sense of true spiritual self, and generate empathy of inner self.  How to do this? As Buddhism pointed out, all people around us come to teach us a lesson we need very much in this lifetime. They work as a spiritual mirror to reflect who we were and what we need to become. If everything goes smoothly absent conflicts and enemies, we would never discover what we were lack of and what we need to learn. Forgiving others also helps us reconcile with self. The truth that all people are our relatives intends to bring our attention to our empathy, and the empathy means we have similar experiences and human natures with other people. To forgive them is to acknowledge a part of self, if we can exchange our views and positions with others'.  

If we can follow this, understand this, this wisdom liberates us from narrow-minded grievance against all our enemies. Our wisdom of seeing through our conflicts with others could lighten up our life and love hurdles, and speed up our personal growth. Isn't it a blessing? What a great blessing if you truly understand and agree with "forgiving your enemies". 

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