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In the Buddha’s Words An Anthology of Discourses From the Pali Canon Chapter 3. Approaching the Dhamma

Author: Bhikku Bodhi Publish Date: 2005-6-28 Review Date: 2022-7-13 Status:📚

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1500 One of the most distressing predicaments any earnest, open-minded spiritual seeker might face is the sheer difficulty of choosing from among the bewildering diversity of religious and spiritual teachings available.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1501 By their very nature, spiritual teachings make claims upon our allegiance that are absolute and all-encompassing. Adherents of a particular creed are prone to assert that their religion alone reveals the final truth about our place in the universe and our ultimate destiny; they boldly propose that their path alone offers the sure means to eternal salvation.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1504 If we could suspend all belief commitments and compare the competing doctrines impartially, submitting them to empirical tests, we would have a sure-fire method of deciding between them, and then our ordeal would be over. But it isn’t that simple. Rival religions all propose—or presuppose—doctrines that we cannot directly validate by personal experience; they advocate tenets that call for some degree of trust. So, as their tenets and practices clash, we run up against the problem of finding some way to decide between them and negotiate their competing claims to truth.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1626 NO DOGMAS OR BLIND BELIEF

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1537 However, in sharp contrast to revealed religion, the Buddha does not demand that we begin our spiritual quest by placing faith in doctrines that lie beyond the range of our immediate experience.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1552 One text offering an excellent example of this approach is a short discourse in the Aṅguttara Nikāya popularly known as the Kālāma Sutta,

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1553 The Kālāmas were a people living in a remote area of the Ganges plain. Various religious teachers would come to visit them and each would extol his own doctrine and tear down the doctrines of his rivals. Confused and perplexed by this conflict of belief systems, the Kālāmas did not know whom to trust. When the Buddha passed through their town, they approached him and asked him to clear away their doubts.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1637 “Venerable sir, some ascetics and brahmins who come to Kesaputta explain and elucidate their own doctrines, but disparage, debunk, revile, and vilify the doctrines of others. (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1559 He then told them not to rely on ten sources of belief. Four of these pertain to established scriptural authority (oral tradition, lineage of teaching, hearsay, and collections of texts), four to rational grounds (logic, inferential reasoning, reasoned cogitation, and the acceptance of a view after pondering it); and two to authoritative persons (impressive speakers and respected teachers).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1642 Do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of texts, by logic, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think, ‘The ascetic is our teacher.’ (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1562 This advice is sometimes quoted to prove that the Buddha rejected all external authorities and invited each individual to fashion his or her own personal path to truth. Read in context, however, the message of the Kālāma Sutta is quite different. The Buddha is not advising the Kālāmas—who, it must be stressed, had at this point not yet become his own disciples—to reject all authoritative guides to spiritual understanding and fall back solely on their personal intuition. Rather, he is offering them a simple and pragmatic outlet from the morass of doubt and perplexity in which they are immersed. By the use of skillful methods of inquiry, he leads them to understand a number of basic principles that they can verify by their own experience and thereby acquire a sure starting point for further spiritual development.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1543 The Buddha says that his teaching is about suffering and the cessation of suffering. This statement does not mean that the Dhamma is concerned only with our experience of suffering in the present life, but it does imply that we can use our present experience, backed by intelligent observation, as a criterion for determining what is beneficial and what is detrimental to our spiritual progress.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1546 Our most insistent existential demand, springing up deep within us, is the need for freedom from harm, sorrow, and distress; or, positively stated, the need to achieve well-being and happiness.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1547 However, to avoid harm and to secure our well-being, it is not sufficient for us merely to hope. We first have to understand the conditions on which they depend.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1548 According to the Buddha, whatever arises, arises through appropriate causes and conditions, and this applies with equal force to suffering and happiness. Thus we must ascertain the causes and conditions that lead to harm and suffering, and likewise the causes and conditions that lead to well-being and happiness. Once we have extracted these two principles—the conditions leading to harm and suffering, and the conditions leading to well-being and happiness—we have at our disposal an outline of the entire process that leads to the ultimate goal, final liberation from suffering.

  • Highlight - Location 1537 Rather than ask us to wrestle with issues that, for us in our present condition, no amount of experience can decide, he instead asks us to consider a few simple questions pertaining to our immediate welfare and happiness, questions that we can answer on the basis of personal experience.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1568 Always underlying the Buddha’s questions and their replies is the tacit premise that people are primarily motivated to act by a concern for their own welfare and happiness. In asking this particular set of questions, the Buddha’s purpose is to lead the Kālāmas to see that, even when we suspend all concern with future lives, unwholesome mental states such as greed, hatred, and delusion, and unwholesome actions such as killing and stealing, eventually redound to one’s own harm and suffering right here and now.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1644 But when you know for yourselves, ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them. (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1646 “What do you think, Kālāmas? When greed, hatred, and delusion arise in a person, is it for his welfare or harm?”5—“For his harm, venerable sir.”—“Kālāmas, a person who is greedy, hating, and deluded, overpowered by greed, hatred, and delusion, his thoughts controlled by them, will destroy life, take what is not given, engage in sexual misconduct, and tell lies; he will also prompt others to do likewise. Will that conduce to his harm and suffering for a long time?”—“Yes, venerable sir.” (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1572 Conversely, wholesome mental states and wholesome actions promote one’s long-term welfare and happiness here and now. Once this much is seen, the immediately visible harmful consequences to which unwholesome mental states lead become a sufficient reason for abandoning them, while the visible benefits to which wholesome mental states lead become a sufficient motivation for cultivating them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1657 But when you know for yourselves, ‘These things are wholesome; these things are blameless; these things are praised by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should engage in them. (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1659 “What do you think, Kālāmas? When nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion arise in a person, is it for his welfare or harm?”—“For his welfare, venerable sir.”—“Kālāmas, a person who is without greed, without hatred, without delusion, not overpowered by greed, hatred, and delusion, his thoughts not controlled by them, will abstain from the destruction of life, from taking what is not given, from sexual misconduct, and from false speech; he will also prompt others to do likewise. Will that conduce to his welfare and happiness for a long time?”—“Yes, venerable sir.” (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1574 Then, whether or not there is a life after death, one has adequate reasons in the present life to abandon unwholesome mental states and cultivate wholesome mental states. If there is an afterlife, one’s recompense is simply that much greater.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1674 “When, Kālāmas, this noble disciple has thus made his mind free of enmity, free of ill will, uncorrupted and pure, he has won four assurances in this very life. (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1675 “The first assurance he has won is this: ‘If there is another world, and if good and bad deeds bear fruit and yield results, it is possible that with the breakup of the body, after death, I shall arise in a good destination, in a heavenly world.’ (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1677 “The second assurance he has won is this: ‘If there is no other world, and if good and bad deeds do not bear fruit and yield results, still right here, in this very life, I live happily, free of enmity and ill will. (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1679 “The third assurance he has won is this: ‘Suppose evil befalls the evil-doer. Then, as I do not intend evil for anyone, how can suffering afflict me, one who does no evil deed?’ (Anguttara Nikaya 3:65; I 188–93)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 1681 “The fourth assurance he has won is this: ‘Suppose evil does not befall the evil-doer. Then right here I see myself purified in both respects.’

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