Psychology
What If the Person You're Angry At Was Once Your Mother? The Buddha and Marcus Aurelius on What Connects Us All
Full video
32 min100coins≈ $1.00
Unlock for 100 coinsPay once. Yours to keep.
One rainy night in Phnom Penh, a white car splashes Vuthy, a delivery rider, with mud, and he stays angry all night. The Buddha taught that it is not easy to find a being who has not once been your mother; mathematics, Marcus Aurelius, Hierocles and Indra's net reach a similar answer by other roads. At the end you find out who the woman in the white car really was.
Key takeaways
- In the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 15.14) the Buddha says it is not easy to find a being who, in the long round of rebirth, has not once been your mother.
- Even without rebirth, ancestry mathematics points the same way: 30 generations back you have room for over a billion ancestors, and a 2004 model in Nature suggests everyone alive shares ancestors from only a few thousand years ago.
- Marcus Aurelius told himself each morning that difficult people are kin, made for cooperation like hands and feet; Hierocles advised drawing the outer circles of people inward.
- A simple practice: pause one breath, remember this person also has a mother, and ask what happened to them today that you don't know.
- Loving-kindness is not weakness and does not mean letting people harm you: you can set boundaries and say no without hatred.
Was this video helpful?
Full video
32 min100coins≈ $1.00
Unlock for 100 coinsPay once. Yours to keep.
Full video chapters
Sources
Original from: Cypher original
Saṃyutta Nikāya 15 (Anamatagga Saṃyutta), SN 15.1, 15.3, 15.5, 15.6, 15.14–19, trans. Bhikkhu Sujato
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding (1988)
Up next
