“If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.” - Marcus Aurelius

Yes and no. They don't instruct you to outright forgo responsibility to do something about your situation, they instead instruct you to be honest about it and what you can actually do about it. Training in Morality is to train yourself to do this with the most compassion for yourself and others.

Sutra #20 in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (great book, by the way) is called “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts.” In it, Buddha admonished his followers to deal with unskillful, evil, unwholesome or useless thoughts in the following ways. First, if the student is paying attention to something that is causing these unskillful thoughts, then they should pay attention to something wholesome that does not produce unskillful thoughts. If this fails, then they should reflect on the danger in those thoughts and thus try to condition themselves to not think such thoughts in this way. If this fails, then they should try to forget those thoughts and not give any attention to them. If this fails, then they should give attention to quieting the mind and to stilling these thoughts. If this fails, then the student should bear down with their full will and “crush mind with mind,” forcing the thoughts to stop with unremitting and unrestrained effort. He also recommended the formal concentration practices of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity (see Lovingkindness, The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, by Sharon Salzberg, or Training the Mind, by Chogyam Trungpa).

-Daniel Allen

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