Tao Te Ching
Cause and Effect
The understanding of cause and effect, karma, may be one of the strongest links connecting Buddhism and science. The Buddhist teachings say, “Even the Buddha cannot change the law of karma.” This undermines superstitious views and creates a fertile ground for the scientific method. Going beyond the scientific, physical dimension, the scope of karmic consequence includes the psychological, social, political, ethical, and religious realms. The foundational attitude beneath most crime, selfish action, and cruelty seems to be a belief that we can get away with something, create harm externally without suffering any consequences. Although the Tao Te Ching seems to be mainly about freedom, letting go of all concepts and social restraints; a major theme is understanding consequences, karma. The sum of all karmic consequences—genetic and environmental, personal and cultural—create the present moment as well as a strong momentum pushing us in a particular direction. We can become aware of these influences and consciously shift this direction but that only creates more imprisoning, habitual momentum. Awareness deeply influences this momentum as well but without the imprisoning aftereffects.
Quotes (138)
“No one who does good work will ever come to a bad end, either here or in the world to come.”
“You may blame Aphrodite soft as she is, she has almost killed me with love for that boy”
“The vanity of success only brings to harvest a crop of calamities.”
“What you are is what you have been. What you'll be is what you do now.”
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought… if we speak or act with a pure thought, happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves.”
“When ten to one, surround them.
when five to one, attack them.
When two to one, do battle with them.
When matched, then divide them.
When fewer, then defend against them.
When inadequate, then avoid them.”
“But dwelling with the glorious gods in ease
A tearless life they pass,
Whose joy on earth it was
To keep their plighted word.”
“Cultivating shoots of goodness gives form to truthfulness that then burns bright influencing and transforming the people.”
“just because a man happens to be rich and eminent or pleasant-featured and attractive, he will not necessarily turn out to be wise and alert when placed in office... this will lead to ruin.”
“The man who is wronged suffers injury in body or in external things, while the man who does wrong injures his own soul.”
“With anything young and tender, the most important time is the beginning because that is the time when character is formed.”
“That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.”
“Do not let finely meshed nets be cast in ponds and lakes and the fish and turtles will be more than can be consumed; let axes enter the mountain groves only at the appropriate time and the timber will be more than can be used.”
“The Tao gives birth to the beginning. One gives birth to yin and yang. Yin and yang give birth to the breath between them,the mixture of clear and turbid. These three breaths divide themselves into Heaven, Earth, and Humankind and together give birth to the ten thousand things.”
“Good luck changes into bad and bad luck changes into good. The workings of events are beyond comprehension.”
“If you seek what you don’t have, what you do have will be lost. If you cultivate what you already have, then what you want comes about.”
“I have examined the deeds and events of the past and investigated the principles behind their success and failure, their rise and decay. I wished to examine into all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of the past and present, completing all as the work of one family.”
“He who exposes the faults of others endangers himself.”
“Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.”
“what is created gives rise to it’s own function… Sight does not exist before the birth of the eyes, nor speech before the creation of the tongue.”
“Happy the man, who, studying nature's laws,
Thro' known effects can trace the secret cause.”
“Return your sword to its place, for all who will take up the sword, will die by the sword.”
“What hurts a person is not the occurrence itself—for another person might not feel oppressed by the situation at all. What hurts a person is the response they have uncritically adopted.”
“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”
“Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.”
“To live in nothingness is to ignore cause and effect; this chaos leads only to disaster.”
“Those desiring to escape suffering hasten right toward it. With the very desire for happiness, out of delusion they destroy their own happiness as if it were an enemy.”
“Following the meandering course of a thought can lead to madness; resist and karma is restrained.”
“Without farming, harvests are difficult, without exertion, accomplishing a goal is difficult.”
“No one who does good work will ever come to a bad end, either here or in the world to come”
“The heat of a candle flame can’t compete with the heat of the sun… When you grasp this, then all things will be your teacher.”
“If those above take too much, those below will be impoverished. If those above use too much force, those below will rebel.”
“The wise carefully contemplate before taking action; fools quickly act before thinking.”
“Kissed lips don’t lose their fortune; but, on the contrary, like the moon, quickly renew themselves.”
“I punish them in order to make manifest the consequences of good and evil actions.”
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past. Human events always resemble those of earlier times because human nature doesn't change, people are always animated by the same passions and so produce the same results.”
“Intemperance is naturally punished with disease, injustice with the violence of enemies, cowardice with oppression”
“Better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about worrying them afterwards. Most think less of consequences than of excuses.”
“Leave your luck while still winning. A fine retreat is as good as a gallant attack…The higher the heap of luck, the greater the risk of a slip…Fortune pays you sometimes for the intensity of her favors by the shortness of their duration.”
“Clear are the workings of cause and effect. You become deluded, but don't know it's something that you've done yourself... what's called self-centeredness.”
“Careless handling of one item might bring harm to the whole world, a moment's carelessness damage all future generations.”
“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”
“I never doubted… that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. These I esteem’d the essentials of every religion.”
“The same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from the same causes”
“There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason why somebody else's action or some circumstance should produce a negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness.”
“Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.”
“The first step toward wisdom is to question everything - and the last is to accept everything.”
“If you treat someone as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
“The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.”
“a man's deeds are merely the constantly repeated expression, somewhat varied in form, of his intelligible character”
“What a man is and has in himself is the only immediate and direct factor in his happiness and welfare.”
“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”
“it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.”
“The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and passions; but these being antagonistic to the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by them, so that their effect is, in the great average of human affairs, nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total knowledge of which mankind is possessed.”
“The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
“Free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
“It has so little bond with externals... the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit.”
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
“All wrong recoils upon the doer, and the man who makes wrong statements about others is himself to be pitied, not the man he vilifies.”
“Words have a magical power capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair.”
“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”
“In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.”
“Suffering raises up truly great souls; it is only small souls that it makes mean-spirited.”
“If we take care of the means, we are bound to reach the end sooner or later. When once we have grasped this point, final victory is beyond question.”
“We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true.”
“as in the past, so in the future, the wrong we have done, thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls.”
“I began to think of reincarnation as a manifestation of stability amidst flux, of continuity in tradition, of intellectual life, of individual life that transcends time”
“You always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another”
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
“In each of us, the entire history of the world is reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon it from all sides—before it came into being—by the totality of the earth's energies.”
“If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.”
“In some existing tribes and probably in the earliest human groups, the physiological role of the male in reproduction appears to have escaped notice quite as completely as among animals who rut and mate and breed with happy unconsciousness of cause and effect.”
“In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.”
“history as man's rise from savagery to civilization—history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man's knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills—history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments—history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future... your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been”
“The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.”
“You are looking for a cure while I am concerned with prevention. As long as their are causes, there must also be results... If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must first have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds.”
“Nothing in the world has only one cause. When we speak of causality, we arbitrarily select one of the many causes namely the one which is the most obvious or nearest in time... the Buddha's conception was more profound and based on a reality far beyond the one-sided perspective assumed by our illusory ego.”
“Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception... We are led—for example by the pricing system in market exchange—to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend.”
“We can never speak of cause and effect in an absolute way, but that an event is a cause of another event which is its effect, relative to some universal law. However, these universal laws are very often so trivial that as a rule we take them for granted instead of making conscious use of them.”
“The stages of developing awareness begin with blaming and then expand to a discovery that the transgressions were only a response to what others have done”
“The more people were bound together... and the more closed the form... the more violent the disintegration.”
“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”
“How do you build up your bank account? By putting something in it everyday.Your health account is no different. What I do today, I am wearing tomorrow. If I put inferior foods in my body today, I'm going to be inferior tomorrow, it's that simple.”
“The test of liberation is not whether it issues in good works; the test of good works is whether they issue in liberation.”
“...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.”
“When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.”
“The latent function of schooling, the hidden curriculum, forms individuals into needy people... Our society doesn't only produce artifact things, but artifact people...How did it come about that such a crazy process like schooling would become necessary?... The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”
“My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.”
“We can only control the end by making a choice at each step—obscure admixtures, blends with no proper tool by which to untangle the components—… and we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence, an unfolding process.”
“‘common sense’ is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of ghosts from the past.”
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
“In a matter of months we can cut down a rain forest that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless in repulsing the desert that takes its place.”
“Did slavery in the world end because of people’s sense of injustice or only because it stopped being economically profitable? As technology evolves, unskilled labor becomes both less necessary and less valuable. As physical slavery organically ended in the world, mental slavery, true-believership, and wage slavery are rapidly ending now.”
“We can't expect a golden age... if we have a long period of time without a war, everyone will be effected by a depression; if we have a long period of economic high, everyone will just abuse themselves completely.”
“the chain of cause and effect is not unalterable; it can be interrupted and transformed by recognizing its illusory nature and by tapping into the inconceivable energy of our natural awakened state.”
“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make...”
“Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.”
“You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man... Isn't that what love is—losing your mind? You don't see your beloved's faults... [but] when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences.”
“Humans had made wolves more human, and thus dogs, and in that same time period wolves had made humans more wolfish, by teaching them pack behaviors.”
“serial monogamy, de facto polygyny… the sort of country we already live in… is, in an important sense, the worst of all worlds… inequality among males is more socially destructive than inequality among women.”
“Human beings are prediction machines... Our lives are permeated by decision-making that requires projecting our minds forward in time and considering the consequence of our actions.”
“I used to think you became a star by having hits... No—you are a star first, therefore you have the hits.”
“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”
“over 90% of all new businesses fail in the first 3 years... 50% of all marketing works, the problem is, which 50%?”
“Aspects of our past are carried forth into each new moment. This is the nature of karma... Our activities today tend to conform to our ideas of who we think we were yesterday.”
“Why does all the bad stuff taste so good? Our bodies think we're still living in the Stone Age, and back then it made perfect sense to binge on sweet and fatty food.”
“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
“If you enter Korea to avoid another China, and enter Vietnam to avoid another Korea, and enter Cambodia to avoid another Vietnam—at what point do you begin to worry that you are drawing lessons and inspiration from too shallow a pool of historical events?”
“if we are serious about protecting the planet's resources, it is indispensable that we find it in ourselves to change our feelings toward and our habits of consumption.”
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