As the world become more globalized each day and nation states make a gesture of envisioning a world without borders, the issue of how to deal with history of traumatic memories becomes not only an issue for individual who have survived the trauma of the past but also that of a community which shares the collected memory called history. This paper is a preliminary meditation on how Buddhism can deal with this issue of history and memory. I will discuss the issue by examining Jacques Derrida’s concept of forgiveness and its ethical implication in Buddhist context. The first part thus discusses Derrida’s “On Forgiveness”; the second part examines contemporary Buddhist leaders’ view on forgiveness and their way of dealing with history and memory and discusses that in the context of Buddhist philosophy. The concluding section considers the ethical implication of the relationship between history, memory, and forgiveness.
