PureInsight | June 30, 2003
[Series note: People encounter and befriend one another because of predestined relationships. With that in mind, one cannot talk about predestined relationships without talking about reincarnation. In this series, we will introduce stories of incarnations from ancient Chinese historical books. Hopefully, these stories will inspire us all to treat everyone we meet with kindness. ]
[PureInsight.org] Yamamoto is half Japanese and half German. He was born with a strong tendency to fight and argue with others. Whenever he got into a heated argument with others and seemed to be losing the argument, in the heat of the moment, he would literally run toward a wall and knock himself unconscious. Whenever he was about to fly into a rage, people would immediately stop arguing with him because nobody wanted to go through the trouble of taking him to a hospital, looking for doctors and calling the police. As time went on, he felt that nobody could hold a candle to him.
One day he found a woman who had a completely different personality. She didn't seem to have any opinion of her own. It took her at least an hour just to decide which color socks she should wear. They somehow decided to get married. They made an interesting couple. One of them was manic, and the other one was depressive. One was always noisy and the other kept silent all day long. Their neighbors never knew what would happen with the two of them. In the beginning, the neighbors would hear weird sounds from their home and they would call the police. But when the police arrived, the couple looked like they were perfectly fine. In their city, making a false police report was subject to a fine. Their neighbors thought that if they did not make a report to the police, they were afraid that the couple would do something terrible and make everyone suffer a disaster together. But on the other hand, they would get fined if they kept on making false police reports. They all decided to get as far away from the couple as possible and moved away. The couple became the only residents on the whole block, and their behavior became even less restrained.
One afternoon, Yamamoto took a drive. Not far from his house, he saw an old man crossing the road. It was too late for Yamamoto to step on the brakes and he knocked down the old man. He went to check if the old man was all right, but unfortunately the old man was dead. Since nobody was around, in a panic, he quickly drove away. The next day he spotted an article in the local newspaper, saying that an old man had been killed in a hit and run car accident. In the beginning, Yamamoto felt a little bit uneasy, but he was not compassionate enough to give himself up to the police. A few days passed, and the case was forgotten. Yamamoto congratulated himself and thought it was over.
One night during his sleep he heard the sound of crying, "Oh, here you are! I finally found you!" Yamamoto woke up in a cold sweat. He convinced himself that it was just a dream.
Before long his wife gave birth to a boy. When Yamamoto looked at the new baby, he found a mark on his face. The mark looked strangely familiar, as if he had seen it somewhere else.
Suddenly, he remembered the old man whom he killed with his car. The old man had the same mark on his face that his newborn boy showed. Yamamoto again became so scared that he started to sweat profusely. But then he convinced himself that it was just a coincidence.
He did not realize that his real enemy had arrived. From the day of his son's birth, his life was never the same.
Because of the child, Yamamoto got injured several times and nearly died. For example, when the boy learned to crawl, he overturned a burning candle and caused a fire, in which the Christmas tree and half of the house were destroyed. When playing on a friend's boat, the boy fell into the sea, and Yamamoto immediately jumped into water to save his son. The boy was fine, but Yamamoto suffered from pneumonia and nearly lost his life. The boy once rode a bicycle and made a sudden turn in front of him. To avoid hitting his son, Yamamoto himself fell down and broke his arms and legs.
One day he had a dream. In this dream he had gone to a temple where he met an old monk. The monk asked him if he had anything to ask him. Yamamoto thought for a while and asked, "Master, could you please tell me what relationship I have with my son? Who is he?"
The old monk said, "He is the old man whom you killed in the accident. Because you ran away after killing him, you escaped punishment that time, but the debt must be paid, otherwise retaliation will not stop. On the other hand, there is a reason that you had killed the old man. You two are just like this, generation after generation. Either he killed you, or you killed him. In different lifetimes, you were his father and his son. He would beat you up, and if he beat you more, you would beat him up in the next life. You killed him this time. If you had gone to the police to surrender, the cycle would have been broken. But you escaped punishment. The old man made trouble in the nether world. He asked to be reincarnated as your son and succeeded, since nobody could stop him. You have to be punished. Right now, this is just the beginning. He will go to school, have his own family and have kids. You need to pay off the debt that you owe him. If you pay him more than you owe him, he will pay you off in turn. If you do not treat him well in this life, you two will switch places in the next life. "
When Yamamoto heard this, he felt scared for the first time in his life. He asked the monk, trembling with fear, "What should I do? How can I end this evil, predestined relationship?"
The monk thought for a while and said, "Treat him well. Maybe compassion can transform it into a good relationship."
Yamamoto woke up from his dream and could not sleep anymore. He looked at the lovely boy with a round face by his side and the child reminded him of the old man. What could he do? Could he still play his old trick of running into a wall? Nobody would care! He still had a long way to go, and nobody knew how the old man will take revenge on him. He had no idea.
At that moment, his sleeping wife said in her dream, "Hurry up and pay him! If you pay him off, you will no longer have any troubles."
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2003/5/11/21560.htmls
