"It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways"
About this Quote
The line lands like a quiet demolition of our favorite alibi: the villain is not out there. By pinning temptation on "a man's own mind", Buddha relocates moral drama from the battlefield to the interior, stripping away the comforting story that wrongdoing is mainly the product of bad influences, hostile rivals, or corrupt times. The rhetorical force is its plainness. No demons, no fate, no glamorous outlaw energy - just the ordinary mind, doing what it does when untrained: rationalizing, craving, resenting, narrating.
The subtext is accountability without melodrama. Buddha isn't offering a Western-style guilt trip so much as a diagnostic claim: suffering and harmful action arise from the same source, the mind's habits of grasping and aversion. "Lures" is the key verb. Evil doesn't usually arrive as a conscious decision to be evil; it arrives as persuasion. The mind talks us into it, presenting small selfishness as necessity, anger as justice, desire as deserved reward. The enemy is internal not because we're rotten, but because we're suggestible.
Context matters: in early Buddhist teaching, the point of identifying the mind as the engine of harm is practical, not punitive. If the cause sits inside you, the remedy can, too. The quote carries the political weight of a leader who builds authority without coercion: instead of policing behavior through external threats, it offers a technology of attention. Control the mind's storytelling, and you interrupt the supply chain of cruelty before it reaches the world.
The subtext is accountability without melodrama. Buddha isn't offering a Western-style guilt trip so much as a diagnostic claim: suffering and harmful action arise from the same source, the mind's habits of grasping and aversion. "Lures" is the key verb. Evil doesn't usually arrive as a conscious decision to be evil; it arrives as persuasion. The mind talks us into it, presenting small selfishness as necessity, anger as justice, desire as deserved reward. The enemy is internal not because we're rotten, but because we're suggestible.
Context matters: in early Buddhist teaching, the point of identifying the mind as the engine of harm is practical, not punitive. If the cause sits inside you, the remedy can, too. The quote carries the political weight of a leader who builds authority without coercion: instead of policing behavior through external threats, it offers a technology of attention. Control the mind's storytelling, and you interrupt the supply chain of cruelty before it reaches the world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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