“All beings quiver before violence”

“All beings quiver before violence” introduces a sequence of Buddhist sayings the narrator hopes Tadamasa Goto will read and take seriously. The line is not offered as an abstract maxim alone: it begins an ethical argument that moves from vulnerability, through recognition of another’s likeness, to the consequences of pursuing happiness by hurting others. Its significance lies in that movement, and in the narrator’s decision to direct the passage toward a man whose life and soldiers’ actions he asks him to reconsider.

Source and Context

The narrator describes an interest in Buddhist sutras without claiming religious conversion or belief in karma and reincarnation. He would like to believe that good is rewarded, evil punished, and that people eventually receive what they deserve, but acknowledges that the world does not reliably confirm such hopes. The saying therefore appears amid a tension between desire for moral order and skepticism about whether the world supplies it.

That tension gives the passage its practical emphasis. The narrator finds something compelling in what he calls the unforgiving quality of traditional Buddhism: wrongdoing is atoned for by doing right, not merely by apologizing. In that account, remorse does not erase consequences or furnish an easy exemption. The saying about violence belongs to an ethical framework that asks what a person does next, rather than promising that belief alone will settle the matter.

The narrator singles out the Hokukyo, a collection of Buddhist sayings, and imagines that Goto, if he is seriously studying the Noble Path, will encounter it. The selection is purposeful: rather than presenting a general account of Buddhist doctrine, the narrator chooses lines that speak directly to violence, suffering, and responsibility. His framing makes the expression both a teaching to consider and an implied appeal to a particular reader.

The Ethical Argument

The passage begins with three claims about living beings: they quiver before violence, fear death, and love life. Together, these statements establish vulnerability as shared rather than exceptional. The focus then shifts from what beings feel to the relationship between them: the reader is asked to remember that others are like him, just as he is like them. In the sequence, likeness is not a decorative comparison. It is the step that turns recognition into a question of conduct.

The questions that follow ask whom one would hurt and what harm one would do. Their placement makes the opening expression more than an observation about fear. If vulnerability is common and other beings resemble oneself, violence cannot be treated as though its consequences belong only to someone else. The text does not supply a detailed program or a legal remedy; it frames restraint as an ethical response to the shared facts of fear and attachment to life.

The next verses sharpen the argument through an apparent contradiction: someone who seeks happiness by hurting others who also seek happiness will never find happiness. The repeated word “happiness” binds the pursuer and the injured person together, exposing the harm-doer’s aim as incompatible with the means chosen to reach it. The passage thus moves beyond a warning that violence causes suffering. It challenges the premise that another person’s pain can serve as a dependable route to one’s own well-being.

The closing image makes accountability inescapable. Misdeeds cannot be hidden in the sky, the depths of the sea, or the deepest mountains. The widening list of possible refuges gives the claim a sweeping scale: neither distance nor concealment changes what has been done. In the context of the narrator’s skepticism about cosmic justice, this assertion carries particular weight. It presents moral reckoning as something the wrongdoer must face, without relying on a promise that the universe will automatically punish him.

Address to Tadamasa Goto

The narrator explicitly connects the sayings to Goto’s possible study of Buddhism. He hopes that late at night, lying on his futon, Goto will replay the mental record of his life and reflect on both his own actions and those of his soldiers. The imagined moment is private and contemplative, in contrast to the public force of the violence named in the passage. The narrator does not report that Goto reads the verses or changes his conduct; the appeal remains a hope, not an account of a conversion or response.

That distinction matters to the expression’s function. The narrator does not use the maxim to claim that Goto has already accepted its teaching, nor to declare that studying Buddhist texts will absolve him. Instead, the verses set a standard against which his actions and the actions of his followers might be considered. The demand is reflection on what has been done, not the performance of belief. The narrator’s insistence elsewhere that atonement requires doing right makes the hoped-for reflection a possible beginning, but not a substitute for action.

Narrative Significance

The passage’s short, cumulative lines give the argument a different rhythm from the narrator’s surrounding prose. Each assertion builds on the one before it: vulnerability becomes likeness, likeness prompts questions about harm, and those questions lead to a judgment about happiness and misdeeds. The expression names the bodily and emotional premise of that progression, while the succeeding lines carry it toward responsibility. Read in sequence, the opening is less a detached proverb than the foundation for an ethical appeal.

The appeal also turns back toward the narrator. After hoping that Goto will think long and hard about the sayings, the narrator says that he knows he does. That closing acknowledgment does not equate the narrator’s position with Goto’s or claim that their actions are alike. It shows instead that the words are not only an instrument directed at an adversary: they are also a standard the narrator applies to himself. The passage’s force rests in holding both gestures together—asking another person to confront the consequences of violence, while admitting that the same moral questions remain personally present.