Kalama Sutta
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The Kesamutti Sutta (Pāli: Kesamuttisuttaṃ), or better known as Kalama Sutta (Sanskrit: Kalama Sutra; Thai: กาลามสูตร, Kalama Sut), is a Buddhist sutta in the Anguttara Nikaya[1] of the Tipitaka. It is often cited by Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists alike. Kalama sutta is also called Buddha's charter of free inquiry.[1]
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[edit] Premise
In this sutta, Gautama Buddha passes through the village of Kesaputta and is greeted by the people who live there: the Kalamas. The Kalamas greet the Buddha and ask for advice. According to the Kalamas, many wandering holy men and ascetics pass through the village, expounding their teachings and criticizing others'. The Kalamas ask the Buddha whose teachings they should follow. In response, he delivered a sutta that serves as an entry-point to Buddhist tenets for those unconvinced by revelatory experiences.
[edit] Discerning Religious Teachings
The Buddha instructs the Kalama People on which basis one should decide which religious teaching to accept as true. The Buddha tells the Kalamas to not just believe religious teachings because they are claimed to be true by various sources or through the application of various methods and techniques. He urges that direct knowledge from one's own experience should be called upon. He counsels that the words of the wise should be heeded and taken into account when deciding upon the value of a teaching. This is not a dogmatic acceptance but rather a constantly questioning and testing acceptance of those teachings which can be proven to reduce suffering.
- Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing,
- nor upon tradition,
- nor upon rumor ,
- nor upon what is in a scripture,
- nor upon surmise,
- nor upon an axiom,
- nor upon specious reasoning,
- nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over,
- nor upon another's seeming ability,
- nor upon the consideration, "The monk is our teacher."
- Kalamas, when you yourselves know: "These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness," enter on and abide in them.'
Thus, the Buddha provides ten specific sources which should not be used to accept a specific teaching as true, without further verification:
- Oral history
- Traditional
- News sources
- Scriptures or other official texts
- Logical reasoning
- Philosophical reasoning
- Common sense
- One's own opinions
- Authorities or experts
- One's own teacher
Instead, he says, only when one personally knows that a certain teaching is skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness, and that it is praised by the wise, should one then accept it as true and practise it.
In view of many misrepresentations of this statement of the Buddha's (to the effect that one can just "follow one's own feelings and views or reason things out for oneself", independently of Dharmic advice), it needs to be stressed again that the Buddha instructed the Kalamas to pay attention to the teachings of the wise; nowhere in the Pali suttas does the Buddha encourage people NOT to trust in his word. He did not advocate that individuals can or should decide truth purely by and for themselves:
| “ | On the basis of a single passage, quoted out of context, the Buddha has been made out to be a pragmatic empiricist who dismisses all doctrine and faith, and whose Dhamma is simply a freethinker's kit to truth which invites each one to accept and reject whatever he likes.[2] | ” |
Nevertheless, the emphasis remains on one's personal knowledge of the validity of any teaching, and in particular whether a particular teaching reduces or eliminates the mental defilements of greed, hate and ignorance, or vice versa (in which case it should be rejected).
However, Buddha allows monks who have the power to read minds to examine him for his inner purity and also allows other monks to question that mind-reading monk on what he has noted about the Buddha and then to question the Buddha; this is permitted in the Majjhima Nikaya 47 Vimamsaka Sutta, since thus testing, it will make the faith of the student strong and firm. The "wise" are encouraged to prove themselves to be so. However, one notes that there is still required trust in the truthfulness of the words of such mind-reading monks and in the Buddha himself.
[edit] Faith in the Kalama Sutta
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It should be stressed that some Buddhists[specify] are not always comfortable that the Kalama Sutta dispenses with the primacy of faith as found in other religions. Instead it is telling us that any faith must be questioned constantly, that even the teachings of the Buddha must be questioned. It is a rejection of faith which leads to dogma.
One must be watchful for those who would say the Buddha's teachings are unquestionable or who would twist the writings together to mean anything they please. Basically, Buddhism should be a struggle to constantly test our understanding of the world. We should neither accept nor reject unproven the teachings of the wise, or even the Buddha.
Again, we note that there is encouragement here for doubting the veracity of even the Buddha's word: that word does not carry any ultimate spiritual weight or authority. The fact that a teaching has come from the Buddha's own mouth is not implicitly presented here as the determinant of its veracity. All teaching rests solely on demonstrative merit and this separates Buddhism from other faiths.
[edit] References
- ^ AN 3.65; PTS: A.i.188; Thai III.66
- ^ A Look at the Kalama Sutta by Bhikku Bodhi (1988), retrived 2009-06-18.
[edit] External links
- अङ्गुत्तरनिकाय तिकनिपातपाळि महावग्गो केसमुत्तिसुत्तं Pali text
- English translation of the Kalama Sutra
- A Look at the Kalama Sutta by Bhikku Bodhi - About the common misinterpretation of the Kalama Sutta as denial of the need for faith.
- The wisdom of Kalama Sutta
- Kalama Sutta: To the Kalamas — from Access to Insight
- Knowledge and Truth in Early Buddhism Dharmachari Nagapriya from Western Buddhist Review
