Scientists Discover It Is Wise to Forgive Others

When other people ill-treat you, will you laugh it off or find a chance to take revenge? Recent research carried out by Harvard University has discovered that revenge not only doesn't bring any benefit to the person himself, but also does no good to the team or group, which also means that it is wise to forgive others.

Martin Nowak was the team leader of the research. The report was published in Natural magazine on March 20th, 2008. The experiment looked into the relationship of interests between individuals and teams/groups as well as influence between individuals. The report concluded that one needs to damage some of his own interests to punish or take revenge on others, which will cause harm to himself.

David Rand was one of the co-authors. He stated that when one takes revenge on another, the negative chain reaction will continue, thus harming everyone. In fact, a successful person does not choose to do that.

Nowak said that the discovery tells us that successful people are those who don't flare up during conflicts. On the contrary, people who take revenge don't do any good to themselves or others.

Our traditional Chinese culture regards forgiveness as a virtue. From the Wu Emperor in the Liang dynasty, or Lincoln in the western world, they were all honest to others and never cared about their own feelings of gratitude or resentment. Therefore they had many distinguished men around them and readily accepted their good advice.

From another aspect, we can see that God gives everyone a chance and observes how we lead our lives. When we treat others in an evil way, it will bring a negative impact to society. If everyone does that, what would be the end result? On the contrary, if you can just laugh it away or don't care about it at all, others will admire your broad mind and even be moved by that. Wouldn't society then become better and better?

The most precious goodness and virtue in one's life do not change because of what other people do to you. However, the true mind and state of a person is shown when one reacts to those kinds of things. Therefore the final destination of a person is not decided by others but himself.

Falun Gong teaches Truthfulness-Goodness-Forbearance, some people say that truthfulness and goodness are easy to understand, but find it hard to uphold a mind of forbearance. They also can't see the benefits of holding forbearance towards others? I hope people will gain some insight from this discovery.