Deliverance from Karma?

My father's clan had run a small spa inn in northern Japan until 1960s. It is said that the inn was opened roughly 400 years ago by Suwa Yorisada, a warlord's son who had fled his territory after his father's assassination by Takeda Shingen, a very famous warlord of the Warring States period of Japan. Then this spa became a designated retreat for Lord of Soma, the local ruler and continued to be until the mid 19th century...

So this is a spa with a long history and pride. A small spa in thick natural forest may be rather a fashionable thing now. But it left my father with very traumatic memories; His grandmother forced him and his siblings to work for the ailing family business like a slave driver or an evil stepmother in a fairy tale. Later, my father left the forest and became a seafarer. From his somewhat extreme move, I feel his trauma was as deep as the forest around the inn.

After pondering these things, I suddenly became aware of where his verbal abuses to me had come from. He simply passed his grandma's abuses to me! Then I felt I would be able to forgive him soon. Then I thought that his grandma also might have had inherited the abusive words from her parents or grandparents...

Probably the family's sorrow was handed down through abusive words for a very long time. Perhaps it was the clan's way of passing of the sorrow of the territory lost four hundred years ago. And I felt I understood what the karma from one's previous lives was... It is sorrow, anger or any negative emotions handed down from a generation to a generation.

The karma from previous lives is often used as a means of extortion in this part of the world. Many a false monk lives on demanding large sums of money from people in distress, saying that he can deliver them from the karmic suffering by a prayer or a ritual. Nobody is sure about his previous lives so it is an easy way to exploit on people's fears...

But now I think deliverance from karma is not about mysterious previous lives. It is about dissolving the suppressed negative emotions inherited from previous generations and keep these from passed down to coming generations. I do not know if this idea is orthodox but it is very useful for me. Anyway, this blog has the word unorthodox in its name so perhaps I don't have to care at all...