[re] Visiting the Kālāma Sutta
13 April, 2011
Bodhipaksa has a running series on his site entitled “Fake Buddha Quotes”. The category link is dead, so you’ll have to do a bit of searching to find the individual posts. He’s not addressed this one yet, but it happens to be one of the ones that concerns me quite a bit:
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own commonsense”.
As usual, Jayarava does an excellent analysis of the Kālāma Sutta in Negative Criteria for Moral Decision Making in the Kālāma Sutta and Positive Criteria for Moral Decision Making in the Kālāma Sutta. The following paragraph from the latter essay stands out for me:
Many readers and commentators seem to have taken this sutta as suggesting that it’s up to each of us to decide for ourselves how to think or behave. They take it as a confirmation that the Buddha preached something like the Romantic view of natural virtue spontaneously emerging in the individual free of social constraints. [3] In fact the Buddha’s view was not like this at all. For the Buddha the way of virtue was one of restraint (saṃvara) and vigilance (appamāda); where remorse (hiri) and shame (ottappa) were uppermost in the mind; and one restricted sensory input by guarding the senses (indriyesu guttadvāra) and carefully avoiding contact with disturbing influences (yoniso manasikāra). Buddhist morality, as we find it in these early sources, is in fact about carefully and strictly conforming to a set of norms which provides the mental clarity and calm that enable effective meditation.
I would also like to recommend Bhikkhu Bodhi’s essay A Look at the Kālāma Sutta and Buddhadasa Bhikkhu’s Help! The Kalama Sutta, Help!.
