What Buddha Actually Said About Action
All 5 Buddha passages on action, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Buddha returns to action five times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. Siddhartha Gautama — the awakened one. His teachings on the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path form the foundation of Buddhism.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is ancient, but the question underneath is not: what is action for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Buddha passage on action
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Buddha is not offering five opinions about action; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “I will go about, from kingdom to kingdom,” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
Buddha applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts two such cases to Buddha.
You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one.
Argued as buddhist release: 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.
Argued as buddhist release: 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.
Work through these yourself
- You can choose the easier year or the harder, better one. — argued from buddhist release and several competing positions
- You were wronged, and anger is giving you energy. — argued from buddhist release and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Plato, Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi and Lao Tzu all address action too, and they do not converge. Reading Buddha alone gives you a coherent position; reading Buddha against Plato shows you what the position is actually choosing against.