水に流す mizu ni nagasu Forgive and Forget

What is set adrift is a grudge, a quarrel, the knot an old wrong leaves in the heart. To set it adrift is to make what happened as if it had not, and to hold nothing against what is past. It is an act done to the grudge, not a lapse of memory. So forgive comes before forget, and it is said at the moment two parties make up. The water is a rite's water. At the purification, a paper figure that has taken the year's defilements is set adrift on a stream. The idiom sends the grudge down the same river. A person who chooses it for a quarrel settled, or for the one they mean to settle, has the phrase exactly.

It is the phrase for a quarrel settled.

The idiom is Edo stage speech, first known in a play of 1825 by Tsuruya Nanboku, where a geisha accepts the forgiveness of the samurai she has swindled, and it grew from an older phrase, "make water of it," which meant to forgive by 1806; the earliest known English equation, "to forget and forgive," is a phrase dictionary's of 1909.

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