Buddhism and the Serenity Prayer

Most English speakers are probably familiar with the Serenity Prayer, originally composed by Reinhold Niebuhr—a 20th-century Protestant theologian who was a major inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr. The prayer is deservedly popular, especially in its best-known form as popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA): “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, / The courage to change the things I can, / And the wisdom to know the difference.” Sometimes the prayer is phrased in the plural: “Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change . . .” Either way, what makes the prayer so helpful is its focus on the distinction between what we can and can’t change, reminding us how much we can’t change even when we or others would be better off if a change were possible, even if the unchangeable situation is unjust. One does not need to believe in a God who can grant courage, serenity, or wisdom to realize how helpful they can be in responding to the things we can and can’t change.

Niebuhr never spelled out in detail what he meant by the prayer, so we don’t have his own specification of what exactly he intended by the key word accept. As I understand it, acceptance is the opposite of resistance—that is, the opposite of reacting to a negatively valued object in a way that is agitated and remains in the forefront of our minds. We may still disapprove of what we accept, but we remain calm about that disapproval and put it to the back of our minds. We acknowledge that a bad thing is bad—that a fact goes against our values—but that fact does not disturb us. The more we tame our habit of resistance, the more likely we are to accept the bad things around us.

Psychologist and Zen priest Seth Zuihō Segall notes that acceptance means “acknowledging that things really are the way they are and not how we would prefer them to be.” The important thing about viewing acceptance this way is that that acknowledgment must not merely be conceptual or intellectual: We need to act and feel as though things are the way they really are.

Such acceptance is essential with respect to those things we cannot change, however bad they might be. We need to put their badness in the back of our minds and let it go; for the resistance will cause us mental suffering, and when we can’t change the situation, it offers us no compensating benefit.

That mental suffering then leads, in turn, to anger. Anger at what we can’t change is particularly bad, because it can’t become “transition-anger”: the positive kind of anger described by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, which alerts us to an injustice but then transitions “off the terrain of anger toward more productive forward-looking thoughts.” But if you truly cannot change the situation, then there is nothing to transition to: you have no way to be productive with it, no way to look forward to something different. And the content of transition-anger, on Nussbaum’s account, is “Something should be done about that.” But if we know there is genuinely nothing we can do, then to focus on what should be done will only lead us to more mental suffering and unhelpful anger, the kind regularly criticized by Buddhist philosophers like Shantideva.

It can still be helpful to point out that an unchangeable situation is unjust, and there may even be some benefit to the anger that signals this, just in helping us see the situation accurately and realize we’re not crazy. But if we really cannot change anything, then we still need to leave the terrain of anger to avoid its harms—but in that case we can’t move toward productive forward-looking thoughts, since there is nothing to be productive about, but rather toward acceptance. For resistance will only serve to create more suffering and more anger, and their attendant harms. There are going to be situations in which we need to accept unjust systems we can’t change even though they are unjust, because if we really can’t change them, the resistance will just lead to unhelpful suffering and harmful rage.

The Serenity Prayer (in the AA version) is a particularly pithy way of putting a lesson that, it seems to me, is both simple and widely needed across cultures. Not surprisingly, we find similar advice from the Stoics. The ancient Stoic Epictetus says, “What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it occurs.” The modern Stoic philosopher Lawrence Becker presents Epictetus’s doctrine in formal terms as the Axiom of Futility: “We ought not to try to do things that are known to be impossible.”

Likewise, the medieval Jewish philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol says in his Choice of Pearls, “At the head of all understanding— is realizing what is and what cannot be, and the consoling of what is not in our power to change.” And the Zhuangzi, the Daoist classic, says,

As to serving your own heart, without sorrow or joy alternating before you, to know what you can’t do anything about and be at peace with it as with fate, [this is] the ultimate in de [virtue, excellence]. In being a subject or son, there are bound to be things that are inevitable. Act on the facts of the situation and forget about yourself.

As we might expect, similar advice turns up within Buddhist tradition. One Pali sutta, the Aghatapativinaya Sutta, tells us that there are ten related ways to get rid of aggravation. The first way is, “One drives away the aggravation by thinking ‘They harmed me, but what can be done about it?’” Each of the other ten is another case where something disvalued happens (past, present, or future), and to each, one responds in the same way. For example, “One drives away the aggravation by thinking ‘They are harming my loved one, but what can be done about it?’” In each case, the way you get rid of aggravation is through the rhetorical question, asking yourself what can be done—reminding yourself that if you can’t do anything, there’s no good served by aggravation.

The most valuable related Buddhist advice is a wonderful verse of Shantideva’s. He asks rhetorically, “If there is a solution, what’s the point of mental suffering? / But if there is no solution, what’s the point of mental suffering?” Shantideva has argued that mental suffering (daurmanasya) is harmful, both in its own right and as a cause of anger. But now Shantideva makes the additional claim that it is not helpful either—whether or not one can fix the problem. That additional claim is important to remind us that the suffering itself doesn’t accomplish anything: The suffering and the solution are independent of each other. Even if we can fix things, the suffering is not only harmful—it’s not going to be what helps us fix them.

The suffering and the solution are independent of each other. Even if we can fix things, the suffering is not only harmful—it’s not going to be what helps us fix them.

What makes Shantideva’s advice here stand out is that it is significantly different from Niebuhr’s, but it is complementary. That is, this verse and the Serenity Prayer offer contrasting advice—but they are both right.

Let’s first acknowledge the similarities. Shantideva and the canonical AA Serenity Prayer each identify two different cases. Both cases respond to a situation that the recipient of the advice disvalues, a situation we take to be bad in some way. In one of those cases, we can fix or change the situation; in the other, we can’t. And both Shantideva and the prayer agree that, in the second case, where we can’t change things, we need to have serenity and not react with resistance. This connection is a key reason I see “serenity” as a helpful translation of Shantideva’s kshanti. This much also seems to underlie the advice of Epictetus, ibn Gabirol, the Zhuangzi, and the Aghatapativinaya Sutta. 

The difference between Shantideva’s verse and the prayer comes in the first case, where we can change the bad situation. There, Niebuhr asks for courage instead of serenity as the virtue needed to fix the situation, for he rightly recognizes that making change is hard and frightening. Where Shantideva gives identical advice in the two cases, Niebuhr emphasizes their difference, and that is why he helpfully asks for a third virtue, wisdom, to distinguish between the two. We will see shortly how important this third virtue is, as distinguishing what we can and can’t control turns out to be quite difficult. And the emphasis on the cases’ difference is why the prayer needs to be in the first person, as Shantideva’s verse is not: What matters is whether I (or we) can change the situation. I don’t need courage when there is a solution, if the solution is just that things are going to be better on their own without my help. I need courage when I, or we, can make the difference.

Shantideva instead emphasizes the similarity between the two cases, and this emphasis shapes the poetic form of his Sanskrit verse: The second pāda (quarter-verse) of each of his half-verses is exactly the same—daurmanasyena tatra kim (what’s the point of mental suffering?)—and I submit that he is right about that too. Mental suffering is all too common even when we can change the situation. (This might be particularly helpful advice for anxiety sufferers, who are often the least serene in situations we have some control over.) After all, change is a process: To change or fix something involves moving from the situation you don’t want to the situation you do. Before you can make that movement, the state of the situation you don’t want is already here, and you can easily get frustrated by that, whether or not you make the change.

Moreover, mental suffering can impede the change. Prajnakaramati’s traditional commentary on the verse says: “If one makes mental suffering when a desired thing is destroyed, there is no desired thing; what is desired will not succeed.” That is, mental suffering gets in the way of success. In his other work, Shantideva elaborates on this part of the verse: “If there is a solution, what’s the point of mental suffering? Even the remedy may get confused; anger stupefies one who is mentally suffering. Or, because of sluggishness, your perseverance is harmed and an even worse calamity takes hold.” Mental suffering confuses us and makes us angry or despairing; it’s not going to help us.

So we can put Shantideva’s and Niebuhr’s advice together quite fruitfully. We need the elusive wisdom to distinguish between what we can change and what we can’t. When we can’t change something, resistance is unhelpful; accepting the situation helps us avoid suffering. When we can change it, we additionally need courage to make the change happen, but we should still try to avoid mental suffering.

With this comparison in mind, we can resolve an apparent problem in Shantideva’s thought: he tells us to have some fear or aversion to suffering, even though that fear or aversion can itself cause more suffering. The reason he does so is that he, just like Niebuhr, does accept that it is important to change what we can. That change may well require a mental agitation, a resistance that is at the forefront of our minds, making our disapproval active and not just passive. Despite that, he still reminds us that the mental suffering itself is pointless, even when we can change things. Mindful awareness of our mental states might help stop the resistance from causing more mental suffering than necessary.

The conclusion I draw from Shantideva’s contrasting advice is a subtle distinction: When we can change something, resistance is not pointless, but mental suffering is—even though resistance produces mental suffering. That is to say, mental suffering is a harmful but sometimes necessary by-product of something potentially valuable. Imagine a lifesaving medicine that cannot be manufactured without creating hazardous toxic waste. We would not (I expect) advocate that all factories producing the medicine be shut down just because of the waste. Still, we would want to produce only as much of this medicine as is necessary to save lives, and we would want to take great care in handling the waste. Just so, the resistance that helps us make change may necessarily lead us to some mental suffering. But we want to remain careful around that mental suffering and mindful toward its dangers—and we definitely don’t want to produce any resistance that doesn’t help us make positive change.

♦

Adapted from After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Our Culture of Rage © 2026 by Amod Sandhya Lele. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com