An Eye for an Eye...

Here is a  passage from the General Introduction  to The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, edited by W.Y. Evans Wetz.

This might explain why after all these years of "An Eye for an Eye ", mankind has not progressed so much.

So long as men are held in the bondage of appearances, so long will they use such terms as moral and immoral, right and wrong, good and evil, and enact laws to preserve virtue and to destroy vice; not knowing that all sentient beings are members of one body, even as the Christian Seer St Paul perceived; and that therefore, whatever punishment be meted out to the one part cannot but affect all parts of the social organism. In this connexion the writer recalls how, when a student under the late Professor Williams James, he was taught that if even the most inconspicuous Eskimo within the Arctic Circle were to suffer pain and misfortune, it would inevitably affect, although unconsciously, every other human being on the planet. And the eminent psychologist illustrated his teaching by pointing put that if the tiniest pebble were picked up and p[aced elsewhere, event at a very short distance from its original resting place, the whole center of gravity of the Earth would be shifted.

For these reasons, none of the fully enlightened Teachers have advocated, as do the unenlightened multitude, the infliction of suffering and death upon others. Throughout uncounted milleniums, even as now, the unenlightened, the world-fettered, have maintained that this doctrine of the Enlightened Ones is impracticable, that if society is to be held together there must be the jungle law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Because of man's failure to rewrite his legal codes in the light of Divine Wisdom, the world today is probably more given to serious crime, particularly in the legalized form of war, than at any epoch in known history. And, notwithstanding that humanly instituted laws have failed to make man good or brotherly or wise after all these milleniums, Ignorance remains unshaken. Inevitably, as the Great Gurus teach, what men sow in law-courts or on battle-fields produces ever new harvests; and the sowing will continue until they recognize, individually and collectively, the Higher Law of the Divine At-one-ment of mankind, irrespective of nationality, race, religion, or social status, and, equally, of everything that lives.