Big questions

Start from experience as it is lived, before the theory explains it away.

The world is made of a few kinds of thing, substance, quality and motion among them, built up from tiny atoms.

That a thing exists is not the same fact as what it is.

Reality keeps changing shape, and our categories are lenses, not the thing itself.

Nothing has a nature of its own. Things are real by depending on other things.

Look for the one stuff or law beneath all change: water, fire or unchanging being.

Everything flows from a single source, the One, and the soul can climb back toward it.

Beneath subject and object lies a field of nothingness in which all things arise.

Reality is a whole that develops through conflict and comes to know itself in history.

Nothing is permanent and there is no fixed self; things arise from causes and pass away.

Everything is atoms moving in empty space, the soul included, so death is nothing to fear.

Knowledge is open to anyone who studies, and it can be found anywhere, even in a kitchen.

Faith and reason can look at the same world. One does not cancel the other by arriving.

Hold every certain view loosely: a dreamer can be sure of waking and still be mistaken.

Every view depends on conditions; use everyday truths without mistaking them for the final word.

Where you stand shapes what you notice, so a fuller picture needs more than one position.

Each person is the measure of how things seem, so learn to argue both sides of every question.

When the arguments balance, suspend judgment, and calm follows.

Trust only what the senses show; inference and scripture can mislead.

Knowledge comes through reliable means: perception, inference, comparison and trustworthy testimony.

Suffering has a cause. A path of life can loosen it.

Do not harm what lives. That constraint comes before convenience.

Train body and mind, repeatedly, until the noise quiets.

Welcome each feeling as a guest. It may stay; it does not decide what you do.

Dharma is read from the Veda’s injunctions. Ask what the rite itself requires.

Name the aim and name what else the act brings about. A good aim does not erase a chosen harm.

Let people believe what you think is wrong. Step in only to stop a real harm.

Act so that your freedom widens other people’s, never by deciding their part for them.

The means shape the end: resist injustice with truth and without violence, and bear the cost yourself.

A person becomes a person through other people. Freedom that stops at one household is unfinished.

Do what brings the most well-being to everyone affected, counting each person alike.

Right conduct includes rules you could defend to anyone they affect.

Give the task in front of you your whole attention. The practice is the ordinary hour.

Pause before routine does the harm, then begin something, and keep it going by forgiving and promising.

Test a teaching by its basis, what people see and what it does when used. Keep what earns its cost.

Act as a relative of the land and living things, with the seventh generation in mind.

Beauty is the One shining through things, and to see it the soul must grow beautiful itself.

Beauty lives in the simple, the worn and the passing, seen without grasping.

A life need not be useful to someone else’s plan; it can fit its own natural course.

Meaning is not found by chasing it. It shows up when you stop grasping and look.

This life is the only one, so enjoy it well and waste none of it on ritual.

Love God and live rightly in ordinary life; birth and caste do not decide your worth.

A life is for flourishing: using reason well and acting with virtue over a whole lifetime.

A life goes well when it holds happiness and adds to the happiness of others.

A life is for virtue, living in agreement with nature and reason; the rest matters less than it seems.

A community governs well when it repairs harm and restores people to each other, rather than taking revenge.

Laws and policies are good when they improve lives overall, and should change when they do not.

Authority is justified by terms free people could accept, and rules are fair if chosen without knowing your own place.

A fair city counts the unpaid work of care and listens to those at its edges.

A public is made when people appear to one another and act together. Power lasts while they do.

Care for every family in the city as for your own, and drop customs that cost the many more than they give.

Power rests on a group’s solidarity, and comfort slowly wears it away.

Keep talking until everyone can agree, rather than counting votes.

Politics follows economics: change who owns the work and how it is organized.

Ask whose interests the common sense of an age quietly protects.

Those who know the good should rule, and rulers should be trained for it from youth.