In Buddhism there is the concept of Action as Karma. Which includes the concept that the events of our future are influenced by our past but are something we can have influence over.
From His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book Path to Bliss:
"Some people misunderstand the concept of karma. They take the Buddha's doctrine of the law of causality to mean that all is predetermined, that there is nothing that the individual can do. This is a total misunderstanding. The very term karma or action is a term of active force, which indicates that future events are within your own hands. Since action is a phenomenon that is committed by a person, a living being, it is within your own hands whether or not you engage in action."
Physics also includes a concept called "Action"
"In physics, action is an attribute of the dynamics of a physical system from which the equations of motion of the system can be derived. It is a mathematical functional which takes the trajectory, also called path or history, of the system as its argument and has a real number as its result. Generally, the action takes different values for different paths.[1] Action has the dimensions of [energy]⋅[time] or [momentum]⋅[length], and its SI unit is joule-second."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action...)#Introduction
In both cases we see the trajectory or past path leading toward a defined future.
In physics, if we wish to change the action of a physical system, if we look at the units, we see we can do so by manipulating time and/or energy and that will change the trajectory.
In Buddhism (and other eastern traditions), if we wish to change our path so that our past does not lead to the future it is heading towards, we seek to change our Action (Karma). To do so we manipulate our time and energy to alter our trajectory.
Is this just a neat similarity, or is it pointing to something more profound?
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