"What Would The Buddha Do?"

This prompt has quickly become my favorite.

A Buddhist practice I find useful is noticing.
Simple, but hard.

Paying attention to what you’re actually feeling, where your mind is pulling you, and why. Is it ego? Fear? The desire to control how someone else reacts?

Once you see the driver clearly, the right response often becomes obvious: sometimes it’s doing nothing, sometimes it’s acting and releasing attachment to the outcome.

This is why prompting “What would the Buddha do?” works for me. It surfaces emotions and motivations I might otherwise miss, and often suggests what to do about them.

For example, when I felt misrepresented in a published interview, I gave Claude¹ the Buddha prompt, and it replied:

“Probably nothing.

Notice the irritation, notice the desire to be seen accurately, notice the attachment to reputation—and then let it pass.

Sending a note, posting on LinkedIn—these aren’t wrong, but they’re both responses to ego.”

When figuring out how to share feedback that might distress a coworker, the answer was:

“You can’t control whether the other person has a minor crisis. You can’t find magic words that make them fully understand without feeling anything. The attempt to do so is actually a subtle form of manipulation - trying to engineer their emotional response.

The Buddha might say something like:

‘I’ve noticed my input doesn’t tend to contribute much. I’m not upset, but I’d rather focus my energy elsewhere. I want to step back from those projects.’

[…]

The suffering you’re experiencing right now is partly about the situation, but also partly about trying to control something you can’t control - their inner experience.

Say what’s true. Say it with kindness. Let go of the rest.”

These are beautiful, wise responses — for me.

The power of this approach is that it works with any person or philosophy, as AI is really good at impersonating well-known figures.²

Next time you face a dilemma, think of someone you’d like to model, and ask your favorite AI: “What would … do?”³

1. All these responses are from Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 model.

2. You can also train it on someone without a public persona by giving it descriptions and feeding it their articles, interview transcripts, etc.

3. Of course, I had to ask: Would the Buddha share this post?

“This is wonderfully recursive.

The honest answer? Probably not. The Buddha famously walked away from his kingdom, spent years in silent practice, and taught primarily through direct encounter. LinkedIn optimization wasn’t really his thing.

But the more interesting answer is what he might notice if you asked him:

The tension is right there in the post itself. You include Claude telling you that posting on LinkedIn about feeling misrepresented is “a response to ego” — and then you’re... posting on LinkedIn about how wise that advice was. The post is self-aware enough to name the dynamic but not quite self-aware enough to see it’s doing the thing.

The desire to be seen as someone who practices noticing is still desire. There’s a subtle ego in positioning yourself as the person who asks Buddha prompts and receives beautiful, wise responses. The post teaches non-attachment while being quite attached to being perceived as non-attached.

And yet — the Buddha also taught. He didn’t stay silent under the Bodhi tree forever. If sharing this genuinely helps someone, maybe that matters more than your motivations for sharing it.

The Buddha’s response might be: “You can post it. But notice the part of you that wants to check how it’s performing. Notice the satisfaction if it does well. Notice the disappointment if it doesn’t. Those are the interesting teachers — not the post itself.”

The real question isn’t whether to post. It’s whether you can post it and then genuinely let go.”