The Importance of Forgiveness

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It’s sometimes rare to get through a day without blaming others for something.

Blaming triggers anger and/or resentment, two stressful emotions.

Living blamelessly allows kindness and compassion to flourish.

I realized a few years ago that not a day went by without my blaming other people for something. I’d blame a friend or family member for something trivial they said or did. I’d blame people I’d never met (politicians come to mind). I could even blame total strangers—how loud they were talking, how tied they were to their smartphones.

And yet, the Buddha called not-blaming one of the keys to happiness. He called it “The Bliss of Blamelessness” (Ananya Sutta (AN 4.52). It’s a tall order to live without blaming, but when I read what he said, I thought, “If it will feel blissful, I’ll give it a try.”

One reason I’m working on this is because blaming means I’m in the throes of desire: the desire for the world and its people to conform to my liking. But that’s not going to happen. Clinging to my desires is the major source of suffering in my life. Suffering has a lot of synonyms: stress, unease, or, as I put it, dissatisfaction with the circumstances of my life. All these words and phrases express the anger and resentment that can arise when people don’t behave the way I want them to. Blaming them is not far behind, and that just intensifies my stress and........

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