India, c. 5th–4th c. BCE
Buddha
Siddhartha Gautama — the awakened one. His teachings on the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path form the foundation of Buddhism.
Buddha in 36 lines
Every Buddha passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.”
“The tongue is like a sharp knife, it kills without drawing blood; words in the hands of someone skilled can do more damage than a weapon in the hands of a warrior.”
“Well, Lord, is the soul the same as the body, is the soul one thing and the body another?”
“Just as the eldest son of a wheel-turning monarch properly keeps in motion the wheel of sovereignty set in motion by his father, so do you, Sāriputta, properly keep in motion the Wheel of Dhamma set in motion by me.”
“Monks, a lay follower should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison.”
“As rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, passion will break through an unreflecting mind.”
“He abused me, he struck me, he overcame me, he robbed me' -- in those who do not harbor such thoughts hatred will cease.”
“Can there be joy and laughter When always the world is ablaze? Enshrouded in darkness Should you not seek a light?”
“Conquer anger with love, evil with good, meanness with generosity, and lies with truth.”
“Indeed, wisdom is born of meditation; without meditation wisdom is lost. Knowing this twofold path of gain and loss of wisdom, one should conduct oneself so that wisdom may increase.”
“To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.”
“Leaving behind son and wife, and father and mother, and wealth and grain, and relatives, and sensual pleasures to the limit, one should wander solitary as a rhinoceros horn.”
“The brahman Kasibhāradvāja addressed the Blessed One with a verse.”
“Not by birth does one become an outcaste, not by birth does one become a brahman. By one's action one becomes an outcaste, by one's action one becomes a brahman.”
“Faith is the best wealth for a man in this world. Righteousness when well practised brings happiness. Truth is the sweetest of flavours. They say the life of one living by wisdom is the best.”
“I spit on my life. Death in battle would be better for me than that I, defeated, survive.”
“I will go about, from kingdom to kingdom,”
“The innumerable worlds in the cosmos are like the eyes of the net. Each and every world is different, its variety infinite. So too are the Dharma Doors (methods of cultivation) taught by the Buddhas.”
“For fear of causing terror to living beings, Mahāmati, let the Bodhisattva who is disciplining himself to attain compassion, refrain from eating flesh.”
“The food of the wise, Mahāmati, is what is eaten by the Rishis; it does not consist of meat and blood.”
“If, Mahāmati, meat is not eaten by anybody for any reason, there will be no destroyer of life.”
“There is no meat to be regarded as pure in three ways: not premeditated, not asked for, and not impelled; therefore, refrain from eating meat.”
“I can affirm that a person who neither eats the flesh of other beings nor wears any part of the bodies of other beings, nor even thinks of eating or wearing these things, is a person who will gain liberation.”
“Listen well, listen well, and mull it over in your thoughts!”
“If you have wisdom, you will be without greed or attachment. Always examine yourselves, and do not allow yourselves to have faults, for it is in this way that you will be able to obtain liberation within my Dharma.”
“You should increasingly benefit yourselves by acquiring hearing, contemplating , and cultivating wisdom. Even though a person only has flesh eyes, if he has illuminating wisdom, he has clear understanding.”
“If you have doubt about suffering and the other Four Truths, you may quickly ask about them now. Do not harbor doubts and fail to clear them up.”
“Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.”
“Let my skin and sinews and bones dry up, together with all the flesh and blood of my body! I welcome it! But I will not move from this spot until I have attained the supreme and final wisdom.”
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, And the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”
“I will not take final Nirvana until I have nuns and female disciples who are accomplished... until I have laywomen followers...who will.... teach the Dhamma”
“In all things, there is neither male nor female.”
“Whatever an enemy might do to an enemy, or a foe to a foe, the ill-directed mind can do to you even worse.Whatever a mother, father or other kinsman might do for you, the well-directed mind can do for you even better.”
“In a world become blind, I beat the drum of the Deathless.”
“Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame, but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the absence of pride.”
Where Buddha lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
You are questioning craving, status, and the romance of struggle. The risk is calling fear by the prettier name of peace.
You were wronged, and anger is giving you energy.
You are asking whether justice is still the goal, or whether the wound is asking to be fed. The risk is abandoning yourself too quickly.
The goal you want is beginning to cost your peace.
You are refusing to rent your inner life to an external scoreboard. The risk is leaving before you have truly tested yourself.
Someone apologizes, but you do not fully trust them.
You are refusing to let injury become your permanent address. The risk is using forgiveness to skip discernment.
You open your phone for one minute and lose twenty.
You are treating willpower as one tool among many. The risk is never asking what desire sent you scrolling in the first place.
Public life feels ugly, exhausting, and still important.
You are protecting the conditions for clear judgment. The danger is letting disgust become permanent exemption.
Someone younger is doing what you meant to do, better.
You are releasing a version of yourself you no longer have to fund. The danger is surrendering at the first real evidence of difficulty.
You have imagined their comeuppance more than once today.
You are declining to lend them further occupancy. The danger is suppression that resurfaces as something colder.
A grief has not moved in a long time and people expect it to.
You are dropping the demand that it resolve on anyone's timetable. The danger is acceptance used to avoid the harder work.
Your body is quietly becoming something you did not order.
You are loosening an identity built on capacities that were always temporary. The danger is philosophy used to skip the gym.
A past version of your life keeps looking better than this one.
You are accepting that the moment and the self both moved. The danger is a resignation that stops you rebuilding anything.
You cannot tell if you are finding yourself or inventing one.
You are declining a question that may not have a referent. The danger is using a clever answer to avoid choosing anything.
You got the thing you wanted and it did not land.
You are auditing the desire rather than its object. The cost is a scrutiny that can dissolve motivation entirely.
Reading Buddha today
Buddha wrote in c. 5th–4th c. BCE, from India — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Buddha is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 36 passages above are what the app draws on.
Argues the same cases
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Epictetus, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill take positions on the same dilemmas as Buddha, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.