One of the Four Practices that Bodhidharma teaches in his Outline of Practice is requiting injustice, or requiting animosity. “Requiting” is a word we don’t use in American English much but it’s a key to embodying wisdom and compassion. How to respond to animosity? What do we do when someone wrongs us? How do we respond from an open and caring view?
According to the law of cause and effect, we know that all conditions are the outcome of actions taken in the past. We don’t know when the fruits of our own will emerge or how. The web of interconnected arising is dense and filled with shadow, outside of our knowing. We can locate any harm that we experience within that matrix. When I feel hurt, I can bring to mind how in my own life I have acted out of ignorance, greed and a delusion and this has conditioned anything I now experience, either directly or indirectly.
You and I are not alone in this field of mind-created reality and the path of our individual lives is intricately tied to one another. So the practice is not to return harmful speech or actions with harmful speech or action but to regard the experience as an opportunity to redeem past unskillful actions of our own. To sow seeds of connection, understanding and healing is the Path. The outcomes of these seeds manifest in its own time.
