Forgiveness is of central importance to but only to interpersonal relationship restoration but also to intrapersonal physical and psychological health. Though past research has revealed the effects of many levels of factors including personality traits, transgression nature, relationship commitment level, little research focuses on what one could actively do to forgive. Through three studies, the present research revealed the value of cultivating compassion as active efforts to forgive and forgo grudge. Study 1 (N = 230), an online survey, found that dispositional compassion was significantly related to trait forgiveness even when traditional prosocial traits and positive affects at the moment of filling out questionnaires were controlled. In study 2 (N = 110), we experimentally manipulated compassion by watching slides depicting human sufferings, and found that participants in the compassion induction group showed a significantly higher tendency of forgiveness indicated by lower revenge motivation, avoidance versus benevolence motivation and behaviorally writing down more virtues of the person causing harm. And in study 3 (N = 97) we devised a brief reading-and-writing compassion intervention to cultivate compassion in high school students towards their parents, in order to buffer them from feeling resentments towards their parents’ negative parenting behaviors. The results revealed two weeks after the intervention was conducted, students in intervention group reported significantly higher level of compassion, lower level of resentments towards their parents, and more academic engagement, compared to those in control group. These findings hold significant implications for facilitating effects of compassion cultivation on forgiveness, especially for adolescents confronted with malicious parenting behaviors and for individuals haunted by hurt feelings resulted from relational conflicts.