Pain can be an action itself, not merely a cause of action.

Evidence

However, my interest in suffering as a passion is a little different from most of this literature. I ask first whether pain is not simply a cause of action, but can also itself be a kind of action. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 333

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framework on sacrifice (ADDENDUM article on ritual sacrifice as grief/love) — pain as a form of action rather than stimulus fits that theme. — connects to: Anguish is not paralysis but the necessary condition of responsible action. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 12
• SEED: Article angle: reframing suffering as a mode of agency — how the anthropology of pain has treated it only as stimulus, and what changes when we see it as action.