I remember someone pointing out that the Buddha’s idea of a middle way between hedonism and asceticism involved living on begged scraps of food and sleeping under trees. But that aside, I’d agree that a good starting point for a young child would be encouraging moderation. It’s an opportunity to learn the difference between pleasure and happiness, and also to consider the pleasant and painful consequences of the actions we take.

Now I’m off to explain pratitya-samutpada to my toddler.

Thanks for your clear breakdown of the criteria in the sutta. I just want to stress that I wasn’t trying to offer a complete exegesis of the text, but simply to make the point that the Buddha was doing far more than giving people permission to think for themselves, which is how the Kalama sutta is often read, and what the Tricycle quote suggests. Your comparison with the scientific method is very apt, because it highlights the same point — the Kalama sutta is encouraging experimentation.

You’re correct that many people miss out the part concerning “these qualities are praised by the wise.” You may be right that people don’t know the significance of the term. I tend to think that people are fearful that the sutta is encouraging deference to authority and that they can’t reconcile this with the view that the sutta is saying we should all “think for ourselves.” After all, if we think for ourselves, why should we simply take the word of the wise — and who are they anyway? — about what’s right and wrong.

My sense about “the wise” is, as I mentioned in the eighth paragraph of my article, that it’s we who have to determine who the wise are. We can’t simply trust that people are wise because they say they are of because they’re generally acknowledged to be wise. We have to observe them, test them, and see how far their insight corresponds with what we can personally verify through our own experience. The wise are simply those that have gone further on the path than we have, and who therefore have a clearer sense of where we’re going, the obstacles we have to face, and the most effective approaches to bypassing those obstacles.

Anyway, thanks for a thoughtful response.

Just about everybody who quotes the kalama sutta leaves out #3 “these qualities are praised by the wise.” What is meant by this is that a person with some degree of awakening to the Dharma would agree with you. I think this gets left out either because people don’t feel it meshes with “knowing for one self” or because people don’t understand the significance of the term.

If we compare this ‘Kalama model’ to the experimental model of science we could say that.
Points 1and 2 are about running experiments to validate a theory or hypothesis. Point 3 is peer review. And in point 4. the language of, ‘when adopted and carried out’ suggests that other people running the same experiment would have the same results, which would also be part of a review process.

Of course in this sutta the Buddha is specifically talking about matters of behavioral ethics, and a certain level of meditative practice, to members of the general public. (The Kalamas are not students of the Buddha.) The advice has, by inference, a broader application beyond such ethical matters. That said one should remember the context.
Cheers
John Allan Australia

Thank you for the explanation about Tariana, I´ve just read a little about it on Wikipedia, where it is suggested there are only 100 people who speak it and they are switching to another language. The fact that there are different suffixes to show how you got the information is amazing. But I think that even if we had that in our first languages, we´d find ways to trick it. It seems to be a human tendency to be less worried about the truth than about convincing others that we are right. I think I should write ‘nihka’ after this opinion.

I cannot just say ‘the dog stole a fish’. If I want to speak proper Tariana, I will have to add a little suffix at the end of the verb.

1. If I did see the dog drag the fish from the grid over the fireplace, where fish is usually kept, I say ‘The dog stole-A the fish’ –KA shows that I saw what happened.

2. If I didn’t see this happen, but heard the noise of a fish falling from the grid in the next-door kitchen, I will have to say, ‘The dog stole MAHKA the fish.’ –MAHKA shows that I either heard what happened, or perhaps smelt or tasted it.

3. If I come into the kitchen and see the fish missing, and the dog sitting there looking full and pleased with itself, and fish bones are scattered around, this is enough for me to infer that the dog ate the fish. I then say ‘The dog stole-NIHKA the fish’. NIHKA shows that what I say is inferred, based on the results I saw.

4. But if I come in and the fish is gone, and my general knowledge is that only dogs steal fish (Tariana normally do not have pussy-cats) I will say ‘The dog stole-SIKA the fish’. –SIKA is the way to mark information based on general assumption.

5. Finally, if someone else told me what had happened, and I am reporting this, I have to use the ‘reported’ suffix: the dog stole-PIDAKA the fish.

So this points to five ways of indicating how knowledge was obtained. It seems a bit better than just sticking “Buddha” after a quote!

Yes, the situation the Kalamas were in always reminds me of the modern west, where there’s a melting pot of religious traditions available, all making competing claims about how to live life.

I see the sutta, though, as going beyond “an invitation to radical intellectual independence,” although it certainly does include that. It’s an invitation to an experiential exploration of spiritual teachings: not just thinking things through but putting them into practice in your life and seeing what the results are. It’s reducing spiritual practice to an intellectual exercise that the Tricycle misquotation unfortunately seems to do.

There’s a nice passage in the Vinaya that confirms that the path to Enlightenment isn’t limited to the Buddha’s teaching:

“Whatever teachings conduce to dispassion not to passion, to detachment not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains not to increase of them, to frugality not to covetousness, to contentment not to discontent, to solitude not to company, to energy not to sluggishness, to delight in good not delight in evil…. This is the Dharma. This is the Vinaya. This is the Master’s Message.”

In English I can tell my son: “Today I talked to Adrian”, and he won’t ask: “How do you know you talked to Adrian?” But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something – we call it “evidentiality”. I would have to say: “I talked to Adrian, non-visual,” if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: “She talked to Adrian, visual, reported.” In that language, if you don’t say how you know things, they think you are a liar.

This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath.

I’d imagine you could find out more by Googling the name Tariana.

Metta,

Joyce

I would be interested in knowing which South American language is the one you mentioned in your last message, Bodhipaksa.