‘He insulted me, he struck me, he defeated me, he robbed me’: those who do not harbor such thoughts will cease in hatred.

The opposite pair to the previous verse. The same objective situation — the insult, the blow, the defeat, the theft — but a different mental response. Nupanayhanti: those who do not bind, who do not cling to the narrative of grievance. In them, veraṃ tesūpasammati: hatred calms, subsides.

The teaching is not that the harm did not occur, nor that we should pretend it didn’t matter. It is more subtle: what perpetuates suffering is not the event but the story we construct about it. The event belongs to the past; resentment converts it into continuous present.

Upasammati — calms, subsides — uses the same root as santi, peace. Peace is not absence of external conflict but absence of internal struggle with what was. It is the difference between feeling pain (inevitable) and cultivating suffering (optional).

In practice terms: each time the mind returns compulsively to a grievance, we have the opportunity to practice this verse. Not by repressing it, but by seeing it clearly: this already happened; what is here now is only thought. That clear vision (vipassanā) is the beginning of freedom.