Regarding Buddhism's teaching gratitude and respect towards parents, you actually don't have to respect someone who has done something harmful. You don't actually respect them. The word respect is generally that we see somebody who has something that is worthy of respect. So we simply don't have respect just because the person was our parent. If they were good parents, fine. We have respect and we have gratitude.
Now as to gratitude, we can have gratitude towards the parent because they did raise us up. And this is one case where respect and gratitude may not go together. It is possible to have gratitude but not actually respect. We are thankful for some of the things that person gave us, but we also recognize that that person is not worthy of the respect. So when Buddhism teaches that sort of thing, it's not black and white. To give you a little background on ancient India helps, because the Buddha was teaching in ancient India. The Buddha was not teaching in San Francisco. The culture was different, the respect attitude was different.
All of you know that here in Asia respect is still quite different to most of the West. There is this parent worship, grandparent worship, all these other things that may just be surface at times and yet they are ingrained into the society. The respect of religion in the East. Imagine India 2,500 years ago. You had people walking around naked in the streets with a bowl getting food. People would come out and put food in their bowl. They were walking around naked! They hadn't bathed for years, their hair was totally matted, by itself, not because they made it that way. They slept curled up around trash cans but they were allowed to walk in the streets and get food.
There were other people who practiced what they called dog duty asceticism where they acted like a dog. That was the whole thing, to act like a dog. So they crawled on all fours. There were horse duty ascetics, all those different religious beliefs that somehow you could purify if you acted like an animal. There was some weird stuff. Now imagine, take one of those people and have them walk around the streets of San Francisco. They would be locked up very quickly, taken away extremely fast. They're not allowed to do that.
So this sort of attitude of Respect towards people doing any religion at all, even though it might be totally crazy, it was part of ancient India and to a certain extent, if you go there, I believe there are still some of them around today. So when the Buddha was talking about having respect and gratitude towards parents, this was a much easier issue because respect was something that was well ingrained.
When I was a kid in grade school we were taught how to dance, all the different types of dancing, we were also taught how to bow, and the girls how to curtsy. Now I don't know if there are a lot of young people around who know about that today, most of them don't know what the word "curtsy" means, and they never bowed in their life. We were also taught if you were wearing a hat in the winter, you took it off when you passed by a woman, any woman. That's 35-40 years ago, that's not done today. I believe respect is now out the window.
So don't be black and white on the Respect and Gratitude towards parents. If a parent has been very bad, has done bad things, they don't deserve respect to a certain extent. There can still be a thankfulness for what they gave us, but if they've done something harmful and the children turned away because of it, that's fair enough. Because we want to look at a different family also. All of you have a different family, you have two families. You have your blood family and you have your Dhamma family. And as you practice, you may discover that your Dhamma family is more important.