Enemies at the Gate

How do you define someone as your enemy? How serious an offense the person should have committed against you to be convincingly convicted of as one - ranging from someone who casually directed a slighting remark at you to someone who seriously cheated on you?

Depending on your age, the proportion of all the people you have met in life whom you would have considered enemies no doubt varies at different points in time. Statistically, however, chances are that it is a small proportion; and if one is able to assign a "degree of animosity" out of a continual range of arbitrary scale to each known individual at any time in life and shape out the statistical distribution, chances are that it will be a highly skewed shape with a long tail end.

But the significance of the thought of enemies is not so much about the number but why you would classify them as enemies in the first place, however you define them. It is not so much about the person you consider as enemy but your own feeling about the person. So before you get perplexed and worked up about what to do with the person, you need to first address and arrest your feeling about the person, understand it and - given its negative impact by definition - rationalize and neutralize it, in effect, making the enemy disappears. Because even if the person does not become your friend as far as you are concerned, he is no more your enemy.

Of course one is capable of controlling his feelings to a large extent if he chooses to do so. One does not have to be a Buddhist to accept that everything in life is transient by nature and all feelings are fleeting - though acceptance of these facts may be the very first steps to enlightenment of the treasured wisdom.

But how could you possibly forgive those odd individuals of psychopathy towards the tail end of your statistical distribution of people you consider as enemies by continuously varying degrees? Even far from committing sins as absolutely unpardonable as murder, some people might have faulted and pained you so severely that you consider yourself scarred for life - out of abandonment, slander or treachery. Yes, perhaps it takes true Buddhas to forgive those people. Otherwise, for as much as you could make your enemies vanish by way of working on your own mind, why keep any enemy at all? Don't keep past enemies alive in thoughts; and, by way of good faith and kindness, don't let new enemies come near.