On to the Devadaha Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 101), which was the subject of the talk given by Bhikkhu Bodhi, mentioned in the last post. The Devadaha Sutta is recorded in the Sutta-pitaka (basket of sutras), one of the three major sections of the Pali Tipitika or Pali Canon.
In this sutta, the Buddha is speaking to a group of Jains about their understanding of karma. Their teacher, Mahavira, taught a doctrine of karma that was quite different from what the Buddha taught, and I'll explain that in another post. For now, I want to point to a passage in which the Buddha discussed why we believe what we believe, or the basis for accepting a teaching as true.
In this sutta, the Buddha said there are five means for deciding what is true that are not to be relied upon. These are:
- conviction / faith
- liking
- tradition / hearsay
- careful thinking / reasoning by analogy
- pondering views / reflective acceptance
(I'm taking the list from two different translations, which accounts for the two versions of some of these.)
In each of these five cases, the Buddha said, the outcome can go one of two ways, depending on what kind of conviction, what kind of liking, what kind of reasoning, etc. In other words, the basis of your trust might be sound, or it might be unsound.
You might remember a similar list in the Kalama Sutta, where the Buddha said,
"So in this case, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical deduction, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.'"
People often cite the Kalama Sutta's teaching on not blindly accepting the words of legends, scriptures, traditions, or teachers. But sometimes these same people overlook the rest of the warning and cling to ideas about Buddhism developed through reasoning by analogy and pondering views. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Theravada monk and scholar, wrote of this,
"When the Buddha says that you can't go by logical deduction, inference, or analogies, he's saying that you can't always trust your sense of reason. When he says that you can't go by agreement through pondering views (i.e., what seems to fit in with what you already believe) or by probability, he's saying that you can't always trust your common sense. And of course, you can't always trust teachers, scriptures, or traditions."
Of course, whenever we are learning something new, we nearly always try to fit the new thing into what we already know. Put another way, we try to file it in the intellectual filing system that has accumulated in our brains since we were children. The human brain seems to be wired to do this.
The problem is that if the new thing really doesn't fit, rather than opening a new filing cabinet we are likely to modify the new thing so that it fits into one of the old ones. And then, most of the time, the wisdom the new thing might have given us is lost.
So, it's entirely normal to judge Buddhist teachings by their agreement (or not) with the views we already hold. But the Buddha specifically warned us to not do that. How, then, do we know whether to accept or reject a teaching? And the short answer is, by means of direct insight gained through practice.
If you wade through the Sutta-pitaka, you might notice that nearly all of the Buddha's talks were, in one way or another, about how to realize direct insight through practice. He spent about 40 years teaching how to realize direct insight through practice. This is what Buddhism is; realizing direct insight through practice. It's not at all about concocting Grand Theories of Dharma through intellectual speculation and pondering views. For some reason, that's a difficult point to get across.
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