Daily Inspiration Quote by Bodhidharma

Bodhidharma doesn’t diagnose “ignorance” as a lack of information; he treats it as a generator, a mind-state that manufactures suffering with industrial efficiency. “Infinite afflictions” isn’t poetic exaggeration so much as a strategic escalation: if the outputs are endless, you stop hunting for a single bad habit and start looking for the engine. That engine, in his framing, is moral-psychological and fundamentally political in the original sense of governing the self: greed, anger, delusion.

The line works because it refuses to flatter the listener. It strips away the comforting modern idea that our problems are mostly external and fixable with better tools, better systems, better optimization. Bodhidharma’s subtext is harsher: the mind itself, when untrained, is an unreliable state that will keep reinstalling the same malware under different names. Greed dresses up as ambition. Anger poses as principle. Delusion masquerades as certainty.

Calling them “poisons” is rhetorically loaded. Poison isn’t merely “bad”; it’s something you ingest, often willingly, and that spreads internally. The target isn’t moral panic, though. It’s clarity about causality: these three aren’t random sins but mutually reinforcing conditions that distort perception, then justify the next grasping or outburst.

Context matters: Bodhidharma, the semi-legendary transmitter of Chan (Zen) to China, is speaking from a tradition that distrusts ornate doctrine in favor of direct diagnosis and practice. This is leadership language with monastic stakes: if you want liberation, stop negotiating with symptoms and confront the sources.