Mind Is the Forerunner
The Teaching
Mind is the forerunner of all actions. All deeds are led by mind, created by mind. If one speaks or acts with a corrupt mind, suffering follows, as the wheel follows the hoof of an ox.
Mind is the forerunner of all actions. If one speaks or acts with a serene mind, happiness follows, as a shadow that never departs.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; by non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
Commentary
The Dhammapada opens with the most important insight in all of Buddhist psychology: the quality of mind precedes and shapes all experience. This is not a moral teaching but an ontological one, reality, for the conscious being, is always mind-mediated.
Epictetus opens the Enchiridion identically: ‘Some things are in our control and others not.’ Both teachings locate the hinge of suffering and freedom in the interior, not in circumstances but in the relationship to circumstances.
Jesus’ Beatitudes operate the same way: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’, it is the quality of perception, not the object of perception, that determines whether God is seen.
Themes
Connections 13
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape. Their worlds touched after Alexander, but no Stoic text shows Buddhist influence, or the reverse.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Arose apart
Both took shape before Buddhism and Taoism were in documented contact (from 65 CE).
Unsure
Merton was reading Zen in the 1950s; his Louisville vision (1958) came a year before his letters with D. T. Suzuki began.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Hermeticism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known line from Buddhism to this scientific work.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape. Their worlds touched after Alexander, but no Stoic text shows Buddhist influence, or the reverse.
Arose apart
No known line from Buddhism to this scientific work.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).