Daily Inspiration Quote by Bodhidharma

Karma is usually sold as a cosmic vending machine: do bad, get punished; do good, get rewarded. Bodhidharma’s line refuses that comforting arithmetic. “Neither gods nor men” is a deliberate stripping away of authority. Even divinity, even human cleverness, can’t timetable consequence. The point isn’t that justice doesn’t exist; it’s that your demand for a schedule is itself part of the delusion.

As a spiritual leader, Bodhidharma isn’t offering moral relativism. He’s tightening the moral screw. If you can’t predict when an evil deed “will bear its fruit,” you also can’t game the system. No quiet bargain with fate, no assumption that getting away with it today means you’re clear forever. The metaphor of fruit matters: fruit ripens invisibly, gradually, in its own season. The deed is the seed, and what follows is organic, not judicial. That framing shifts wrongdoing from “breaking a rule” to “altering the conditions of life,” inside you and around you, in ways too complex to chart.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences: the anxious sinner and the smug cynic. To the first: stop obsessing over penalties and start seeing causality as ongoing. To the second: stop confusing delay with absolution. In a world obsessed with instant feedback, Bodhidharma insists on moral time that doesn’t care about your watch. That’s why it lands: it denies both fatalism and control, leaving responsibility uncomfortably intact.