Someone in an online community asked:<\/p>\n
A hypothetical question for all of you:<\/p>\n You’re the Buddhist ruler of an Autocracy. Laws need to be made regarding civil order. Laws are upheld with the threat of punishment.<\/p>\n In your society, is nobody ever to be punished? Does being a Buddhist mean never reprimanding anyone?<\/em><\/p>\n Certainly not “never reprimanding.”\u00a0 I mean, active forgiveness–telling someone that they are forgiven–involves some level of reprimanding, of calling the wrong action wrong.\u00a0 “You hurt me, but I forgive you.”\u00a0 It’s not the same as “Don’t worry about it, you never did anything wrong.”<\/p>\n In an ideal Buddhist state, there would be a lot less baggage to the concept of punishment.\u00a0 Sometimes I think of punishment and I remember when I used to work at a video rental store.\u00a0 I’d say as nicely as possible, “I see in your record that you kept your last movie an extra day.\u00a0 There’s a one-dollar charge for that.”\u00a0 Some people would feel affronted by that, reading into that one-dollar charge the accusation: “You failed to return your video on time.\u00a0 You’re a bad person, and you’re being punished for it.”\u00a0 I never found a way to get some people to accept that there’s nothing wrong with keeping a rental another day and paying for it.<\/p>\n I also think we bring baggage to the legal system, like we want an authority figure to say, “You’re right and he’s wrong.”\u00a0 A Buddhist answer often requires two sides to reach an understanding, that neither side is inherently right or wrong.<\/p>\n So a Buddhist justice system would be a lot more focused on restitution and rehabilitation.\u00a0 Recognizing that something wrong has happened in the past, we look for ways to encourage more right actions in the future.<\/p>\n Forgiveness, to me, means that I don’t think anyone’s a bad person.\u00a0 If I caught you stealing money out of my wallet, I’d forgive you, but that doesn’t mean you can keep the money.\u00a0 If you stole my car and wrecked it, I’d forgive you, but I’d ask you to help me get my car fixed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Someone in an online community asked: A hypothetical question for all of you: You’re the Buddhist ruler of an Autocracy. Laws need to be made regarding civil order. Laws are upheld with the threat of punishment. In your society, is nobody ever to be punished? Does being a Buddhist mean never reprimanding anyone? Certainly not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zenbija.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}