Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 65. I am your host Noah Rochetta, and today I'm talking about the Buddhist understanding of forgiveness.

About a month or two ago, I received a message on Facebook from a gentleman named Dax. I meant to respond in depth regarding the question he had. It was around the topic of forgiveness.

Specifically, this notion of feeling compelled to forgive didn't seem very useful or helpful. He wondered why some spiritual paths seemed to focus on this message of having to forgive.

Anyway, I didn't spend a long time replying to his message at the time because I told him that it had been on my radar to have a podcast episode dedicated specifically to the topic of forgiveness.

Several months later, I still hadn't had a chance to record this podcast. This has been in the works for quite some time now. I recently read an article on Tri-Sicle Magazine called Forgiveness is Not Buddhist. This motivated me to take up this topic and try to explain or address the Buddhist perspective on forgiveness.

In order to understand the Buddhist approach, first I want to explore the topic of forgiveness from the Western approach that most of us are familiar with. This is the way we view the concept of forgiveness here in our society and it's influenced and general by the Judeo-Christian understanding of forgiveness.

This is a form of forgiveness that is generally laid out in the language of debt. For example, think of the example of a bank loan. You go in and you get a loan from the bank and now you have this relationship established between you and the bank.

If the terms of the loan are met, eventually you pay it off and now you no longer owe them and that relationship changes again. Now you're not indebted to them.

For me growing up, there was a little video that I saw at church that was about a gentleman who borrows money but ultimately he has a bad gear as a farmer and he's not able to pay back his creditor and the creditor comes calling demanding justice.

This whole video is about how justice cannot be robbed. The creditor is owed, the debtor is stuck in a position where there's just no way to pay, then comes an intermediary.

This mediator steps in and assumes the debt justice is met for the creditor because he gets his money back and mercy is extended to the person who borrowed.

I remember this video was all about how mercy cannot rob justice. If you look at this from the Judeo-Christian background, what this is implying is Jesus, for example, is the one who steps in and assumes the debt, absolving us of that debt. In this sense, it ends the old relationship and it establishes an entirely new relationship.

The situation that we were in is that we need to be saved. Christ comes in and takes in this role as the Savior and establishes a new relationship between us and him now.

This sort of change happens due to that external source, that third party, the intermediary or the mediator.

This is problematic from the Buddhist perspective because the power is not with you. The power lies in that third party to come in and step in and save you.

This isn't a Buddhist concept, like I mentioned before, from the Buddhist perspective, we're looking at spending time looking inward and discovering everything that you're looking for is in you.

So I want to elaborate on this a little bit. Ken McCloud, who is the author of that article, Forgiveness is not Buddhist from Tri-Sycle Magazine, he says these various interpretations of forgiveness all overlook the fact that the meaning of forgiveness is grounded in the language of debt, in days of your and in some cultures not so your.

When I impugned your honor, I incurred an obligation to you, a debt that had to be paid somehow. From there the notion developed that when I do any kind of wrong to you or anyone else, I have incurred a debt to you or to society or to God.

When we view interactions with others in terms of debt, we are wittily or unwittingly reducing our relationships with others to transactions, human feeling, human understanding, human empathy, all go out the door.

IOU or UOMI now becomes the defining expression of the relationship.

He goes on to say American anthropologist David Graber writes in debt the first 5,000 years, there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence to make such relations seem moral than by reframing them in the language of debt.

Above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

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