Judges 2:12 · World English Bible
They abandoned Yahweh, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed themselves down to them; and they provoked Yahweh to anger.
Kataññutā: Gratitude, knowing what was done for you Kataññutā is knowing a debt and acknowledging it. Everything these people had came from the hand that opened the way out of Egypt, and abandonment here means treating that rescue as weather, something that simply happened.
From the Buddhism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
BUDDHISM
Kataññutā: Gratitude, knowing what was done for you Kataññutā is knowing a debt and acknowledging it. Everything these people had came from the hand that opened the way out of Egypt, and abandonment here means treating that rescue as weather, something that simply happened. Naming him the God of their fathers keeps the debt in view, since it was handed down like a family story, and a story left untold stops being owed.
Muṭṭhassati: Lapsed mindfulness Muṭṭhassati is memory gone slack. The generation growing up after Joshua never stood on the far bank of the sea, so Egypt became something heard about rather than something carried, and a rescue nobody keeps in mind soon shapes nobody's conduct. Sati is first of all remembering, which is why the God of their fathers slips away the way a name you stop saying slowly leaves you.
Pāpamittatā: Bad company Pāpamittatā is the shaping pull of the people you live among. The gods taken up were the gods of the peoples around them, chosen by nearness: already practiced at the next farm over, requiring no argument. A settled neighbor with a working altar makes a stronger case, day after day, than a wilderness story about a sea.
Saraṇa: Refuge Saraṇa is what you run to when you are frightened. Bowing settles with the body the question of who sends rain and who fights for you, and the local gods answered on terms a farmer could manage, season by season. Frightened people have always crowded into groves and hilltop shrines, and a shelter chosen for being close at hand protects no one from anything.
Anusaya: Underlying tendency Anusaya is a leaning that lies quiet until conditions wake it. The pull toward the neighbors' altars was in them the whole time Joshua lived, pressed down by his presence and never pulled up by the root, so his death was less a cause than an opening. Hence the round that follows through the whole book: each deliverance treats the outbreak, and the next generation begins again.
Kammavipāka: Action and its ripening Kammavipāka is the fruit a deed brings with it. Provoking anger sounds like a mood raised in someone else, though the burning that arrives comes as raiders and lost harvests, the ordinary wreckage of a people who cut themselves off from what held them together. A seed already contains the plant, and nothing extra has to be added for the harvest to come up.
Buddhism lens
Whose help am I using every day without remembering it came from them?
In every generation a person is to tell the story as though they themselves came out of Egypt. A rescue only stays real while it is being told, and a story nobody tells stops shaping anybody.
The friends you keep shape you more surely than anything you intend. Nearness to the honest and steady lifts a person; nearness to the flattering and easy wears them down without their consent.
The ungrateful person forgets the gift while still using it, which is why gratitude has to be practiced and not merely felt. Call the kindness to mind by name, or it quietly becomes something you think you always had.
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