Daily Inspiration Quote by Bodhidharma

Wisdom, here, isn’t framed as an aggressive act of “correcting” people; it’s framed as a disciplined refusal to take the bait. “Not engaging” is doing heavy lifting. It implies temptation: ignorance isn’t just a lack of knowledge, it’s a social force that tries to recruit you into argument, ego, and performance. Bodhidharma, cast in later tradition as the hard-edged patriarch who brought Chan (Zen) to China, isn’t offering a polite self-help maxim. He’s issuing a monastic directive about attention as a moral resource.

The subtext is unflattering: ignorance feeds on engagement. It wants your outrage, your cleverness, your need to win. Replying can become its own kind of vanity, a way of polishing the self while pretending to serve truth. In a Zen context, that’s the trap: the mind clings to views, even “right” views, and turns them into identity. Refusal becomes wisdom not because knowledge doesn’t matter, but because the performance of knowledge so easily becomes another delusion.

Context matters because Bodhidharma’s rhetoric is famously severe: direct, pared down, allergic to ornament. The line works the way a koan works, by tightening the choices. If you feel an impulse to argue with it, you’re already inside the mechanism it describes. In modern terms, it reads like an antidote to doomscroll discourse: conserve your attention, don’t confuse reaction with clarity, and remember that some fights are designed less to be solved than to keep you spiritually busy.