Most mornings in Bradford start the same way for me now. I sit down and chant Daimoku, the chanting at the heart of my practice with SGI. The day itself hasn’t been decided yet. I get a say in it.
I didn’t always know that.
I remember looking for happiness everywhere. In alcohol. In drugs. In casual sex with women I’d just met. In overeating. Every one of them pointed outside me. Whatever I found was gone by the next day.
What I know now is simpler. Happiness was never out there waiting to be caught. It’s within me. And because it’s within me, I can pass it on. The words I choose are part of how that happens.
Why words carry weight
There’s a popular explanation that Abracadabra comes from Aramaic and means “I create as I speak.” It sounds neat. Scholars dispute it, and the Oxford English Dictionary treats the origin as unsettled, so I won’t write it as a fact. What is documented is older: the earliest known written use is in Quintus Serenus Sammonicus’s Liber Medicinalis (second or third century CE), where Abracadabra is written in a shrinking triangle as a charm against fever. I’m not recommending charms. I’m interested in why so many traditions keep circling the same intuition: speech is not empty.
The Buddha put a related idea at the start of the Dhammapada, the collection of verses attributed to him in the Pāli Canon. “Mind precedes all mental states,” the first verses begin, in Acharya Buddharakkhita’s translation. If you speak or act with an impure mind, suffering follows you the way a cart wheel follows the foot of the ox. If you speak or act with a pure mind, happiness follows you like a shadow that never leaves. Speech comes after the mind moves, and what we say leaves its mark on the life that follows. The Buddha didn’t teach a word that creates the world; for him the weight of speech is in what it does to the one who speaks and the one who hears.
What I like is that none of these lines sells a trick. They just point at an order: the mind moves, the mouth follows, and then the life follows those.
Other voices, in their own words
The Buddha isn’t the only one who noticed the weight of a word. I don’t want to stir every tradition into one pot. Each line comes from its own home. I’m happy to let them sit next to each other for a minute.
In Genesis, creation arrives by speech: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” John’s Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
In Jewish mysticism, the Sefer Yetzirah — the Book of Formation — teaches that the world was shaped through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In William Wynn Westcott’s translation, those letters were “combined, weighed and changed,” and by them were formed “all beings which are in existence, and all those which will be formed in all time to come.”
In the Rig Veda, Speech herself speaks. In the Vāk Sūkta (Rig Veda 10.125), Vāc says, in Ralph T. H. Griffith’s translation: “I am the Queen, the gatherer-up of treasures, most thoughtful, first of those who merit worship.”
And in Islam, remembrance of God — dhikr — is a living practice, treasured especially among Sufis. The Qur’an says, in Sahih International’s rendering of 13:28: “Unquestionably, by the remembrance of Allah hearts are assured.”
Different roads, different maps. They don’t agree on everything, and I won’t pretend they do. What they share is a direction: speech is heavy. Treat it that way.
Happy mind, don’t speak ill of others
Happy mind, don’t speak ill of others. I think those two belong in one sentence. An unhappy mind goes looking for someone to blame. A settled one has much less need to tear anybody down.
In Buddhism this is sammā vācā, right speech, one of the factors of the Noble Eightfold Path. In the Subhāsita Sutta, the Buddha says speech is well spoken when it has four marks: it’s well said, it’s just, it’s endearing, and it’s true. Afterwards the monk Vaṅgīsa praises him in verse. One line, in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation, has stayed with me: “Speak only the speech that neither torments self nor does harm to others.”
Neither torments self. Speaking ill of someone always looks like it’s about them. That line says it’s about the speaker too. The words go out, and the mind that made them stays home with you.
Passing it on
I still volunteer in Bradford, in food banks and soup kitchens. I’m not there to share my thoughts on happiness. I’m there to serve food and treat people with respect. But if happiness really is within me, then maybe some of it gets passed on: with a plate, with patience, with a word that doesn’t wound.
Abracadabra is also one of the FunGuyMe designs, on tees and a mug, and they’re coming to the shop soon. A mug can’t make anyone’s speech kinder. But a few letters looking back at you over morning tea might remind you that words shape more than we think.
So I’ll leave it open. If speech really does help shape a life, what have your recent words been building — and what would change if the next ones came from a quieter mind?
Read next: A Slower Mind at the Sink · What My Knee Knows About “I”
— Rafik