The dust of hatred is to take offense at someone's advice given in good faith, to hate a son-in-law or a daughter-in-law, to slander others behind their backs, and to condemn not the offense but its perpetrator. All such uses of mind are dusts.

To bear animosity toward others simply because one does not like them, to hate someone because of some error or impropriety, to hate someone because of his rudeness or impertinence, to slander others behind their backs
--all are the dust of hatred. Basically, to hate someone through one's own Self-centeredness and cold-heartedness is the dust of hatred.

Cold-heartedness is, for example, as follows: a mother-in-law hates her daughter-in-law, or a step-parent teases his or her stepchild unmercifully. One accumulates this dust through such cold-heartedness or self-centeredness: he is very unkind to, or hard on, someone whom he hates; does not give what he should to that person; makes an unreasonable demand of him; or does something so cruel toward him as to make him cry.

If one finds an admirable quality in the conduct of someone whom he hates, he never praises that person. Instead, when he finds something only a little bad, he exaggerates it and speaks ill of the person. He may publicly shame the person whom he hates, and come to be known as cruel or inhuman.

Even if a mother scolds her child so severely that the child may not wish to come near her, he still will come up to her lap in response to her love. Also, a cold-hearted and self-centered person tends to love as well as hate over small things that really do not matter. As brothers and sisters, we should not bear hatred even though we find someone committing an error or being rude toward us, but we should help him to mend his ways with love.

There is a story that, on one occasion, a poor man broke into the storehouse and tried to steal a sack of rice. The servants discovered it and seized him, and were about to take him to the authorities. Oyasama, having heard the commotion, said. "He must have been driven by poverty to steal. I pity such a mind." She forgave the man and gave him the rice he tried to steal, with a word of caution for his own good.

(The above is an excerpt from Dust and Innen, first published in September 1982. Quotations from the Ofudesaki and the Kakisage have been replaced by the revised, current translations.)