From the perspective of patience, things happen because other things happen. Nothing is separate and isolated. There is no absolute, end-of-the-line, the-buck-stops-here root cause.
If someone hits you with a stick, you don’t get angry at the stick or at the arm that swung it; you get angry at the person attached to the arm.
But if you look a little deeper, you can’t find a satisfactory root cause or place for your anger even in the person, who literally doesn’t know what he is doing and is therefore out of his mind at that moment.
Where should the blame lie, or the punishment?
Maybe we should be angry at the person’s parents for the abuse they may have showered on a defenseless child. Or maybe at the world for its lack of compassion.
But what is the world? Are you not a part of that world? Do not you yourself have angry impulses and under some conditions find yourself in touch with violent, even murderous impulses?
— Wherever You Go There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn), Loc. 455–61