Buddhism and Forgiveness: How to Let Resentment Go

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

In Buddhism, forgiveness is something you do for your own heart. It does not mean condoning what was done, forgetting it, or forcing a reconciliation. It means releasing the resentment, hatred, and wish for revenge that you carry — because that burning, the teaching holds, harms you far more than it harms the one who wronged you. To forgive, in the Buddhist sense, is to set down a weight you have been carrying, whether or not the other person ever apologises.

Hatred Never Ends Hatred

The foundation is one of the most famous passages in all of Buddhism, from the opening verses of the Dhammapada:

“‘He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.’ Those who harbour such thoughts do not still their hatred… Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.” (Dhammapada 3–5)

The logic is simple and unflinching. Meeting hatred with hatred only feeds it; the cycle of injury and revenge has no end except in someone, finally, choosing to stop. Forgiveness is that choice — the refusal to keep the poison circulating, beginning with your own mind.

Forgiveness Frees You

Why does Buddhism frame forgiveness as self-interest rather than mere virtue? Because resentment is corrosive to the one who holds it. To nurse a grievance is to keep re-living the harm, again and again, long after the event is over — handing the person who hurt you, in effect, a permanent room in your mind, rent-free.

You may have heard this captured in a famous line: “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at another; you are the one who gets burned.” It is worth a brief honesty here — that exact saying is widely attributed to the Buddha but is not found in the early texts (a related image appears only in later commentary). Still, the insight it carries is thoroughly Buddhist: clinging to anger scorches the hand that holds it. Forgiveness is, before anything else, putting the coal down.

What Forgiveness Is Not

Much resistance to forgiveness comes from confusing it with things it is not. In Buddhism, to forgive is not:

• To condone. Releasing your hatred does not declare the harm acceptable. You can see clearly that something was wrong and refuse to be consumed by it.
• To forget. Wisdom learns from what happened; forgiveness simply removes the venom from the memory.
• To reconcile. You may forgive someone inwardly and still, wisely, keep your distance. Forgiveness is about your heart, not necessarily about resuming the relationship.
• To suppress. It is not pretending you feel fine. Genuine letting-go moves through honest feeling, not around it.

Hold those distinctions, and forgiveness stops looking like weakness or self-betrayal and starts looking like what it is: freedom.

How to Let Resentment Go

Buddhist practice offers concrete ways to soften a hardened heart:

• Understand the cause. The person who harmed you acted out of their own greed, hatred, or delusion — their own unhappiness. This is not an excuse, but it is an explanation, and seeing it can melt the hardest anger into something closer to pity. As the teaching on anger puts it, hurt people hurt people.
• Practise loving-kindness. Metta meditation is the classic tool — patiently extending goodwill, starting with those who are easy to love and, in time, including even the one who wronged you. You are not approving of them; you are refusing to let them turn your heart to stone.
• Trust in karma, not revenge. You do not have to be the agent of justice. The law of karma means that actions carry their own long consequences; you can set that burden down and tend instead to your own freedom.
• Refuse the “gift” of insult. In the Akkosa Sutta (SN 7.2), a man berates the Buddha furiously. The Buddha asks him: if you offer a gift and it is not accepted, to whom does it belong? To the giver, the man admits. “In the same way,” the Buddha replies, the abuse you give me, which I do not accept, remains with you. We are free to not accept the resentment others throw at us.

A Note on Deep Wounds

It is honest to add that none of this is easy, and that forgiveness after serious harm — abuse, betrayal, violence — can be the work of years, not an afternoon. The Buddha set a famously high standard in the Simile of the Saw (MN 21), teaching that one should keep a heart free of hatred even toward those who would harm one terribly — but he offered it as an aspiration to grow toward, not a stick to beat yourself with. If you cannot forgive yet, that is not a failure. Be gentle; start by simply wishing not to be ruled by hatred. And for the deepest wounds, this inner practice belongs alongside real human support and, where needed, skilled professional help — never instead of them.

Forgiveness, in the end, is the same movement as the whole path: the laying down of a burden we were never meant to carry. For more on that releasing, see letting go; for working with the anger beneath resentment, Buddhism and anger; and for the practice that makes forgiveness possible, loving-kindness meditation.