Forgiveness Is Not Buddhist
Buddhist teachings do not advise asking
others to absolve us from our misdeeds. Instead, they outline a path to
purification that will change our relationship to reactive patterns.

In contemporary Buddhist settings, forgiveness is interpreted in several
ways. One is as a way of letting go of our expectations and
disappointments in others—in other words, letting go of our attachment
to a different past. Another interpretation is as an extension of
lovingkindness. In the Tibetan tradition, it is sometimes presented as
an extension of patience or of compassion. These are all key practices,
and they appear in virtually every Buddhist tradition, but to call them
forgiveness? Well, that may be unforgivable. As Idries Shah writes in Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition, when
you adopt the methods developed in another culture, those methods and
the ways of thinking associated with them eventually take over, and you
lose touch with your own understanding and training. In the same way, by
importing the foreign (to Buddhism) notion of forgiveness, contemporary
Buddhists are unwittingly importing a very different system of thought
and practice and undermining the powerful mystical practices in Buddhism
that may have inspired them in the first place.
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