I’ve dealt with a libertarian mistranslation of this verse elsewhere, but this version is different. But here’s the full quote, lifted from one of the well- known quotes sites that litter the web: “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”Buddha quotes (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 5. B. C.)It’s ironic that this, one of the commonest Fake Buddha Quotes, is about not believing things just because you’ve read them somewhere, but for many people the assumption seems to be, “It must be true — I saw it on a website!”So first let me state that the Buddha was not a “Hindu Prince.” He was not a “Hindu” and he was not a “prince.” We don’t know what, if any, religious tradition the Buddha- to- be followed in his youth, and the first mention that’s made of any religious endeavors is his encounters with the two teachers Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta. These two teachers followed meditative traditions, but it’s anachronistic to refer to them, or the Buddha, as Hindus. The Buddha himself came from a Republic in which there were, of course, no kings and no princes. In the early text there is no mention of him being a prince or his father being a king, and it’s clear that he lived at a time when the last republics (including the one in which he was born) were being swallowed up by the newly- emergent monarchies. Several hundred years later, monarchies were well- established, republics were unthinkable, and so the Buddha was seen as having been born in a kingdom and (because people like their heroes) he was seen as an heir to that kindgom — an heir, no less, that rejected kingship for an even more noble spiritual “career.”But on to the quote. In the original Kalama Sutta, we have. It’s not that logic is rejected as such, just that it can’t be relied on. What is needed is experience. We need to “know for ourselves.”What we need to know for ourselves is not whether a teaching “agrees with reason” but whether when put into practice they are skillful, blameless, praised by the wise, and lead to welfare and to happiness. This garbled version of the Kalama Sutta appeared in a 1. Buddha Jayanti,” celebrating the 2. Buddha’s parinirvana. I haven’t read the book, but this recasting of the Buddha’s teaching may have been done to make Buddhism appear more “rational.”PS. The exact quote found in “2. Buddha Jayanti” (page 3. Do not believe in anything (simply) because you have heard it ; Do not believe in traditions, because they been handed down for many generations ; Do not believe in anything, because it is spoken and rumoured by many ; Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books ; But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. However, it goes back further. A commenter below pointed out that the same quote is found in the first of three lectures given in 1. Sayagyi U Ba Khin. These lectures are available online here and are also published in a book called “What Buddhism Is.”There the quote is: Do not believe in what you have heard; do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations; do not believe in anything because it is rumoured and spoken by many; do not believe merely because a written statement of some old sage is produced; do not believe in conjectures; do not believe in that as truth to which you have become attached from habit; do not believe merely the authority of your teachers and elders. After observation and analysis, when it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and gain of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. This is almost identical, the differences being mere changes in wording. This is no doubt the prototype of the “Buddha Jayanti” quote. Unfortunately my local library has been unable to get me a copy through Inter- Library Loan, so I can’t tell if Sayagyi U Ba Khin was the speaker at the conference who used this quote. However, I have searched the Google Book version linked to above, and no results appear for his name. So at the moment my hypothesis is that in his 1. Sayagyi U Ba Khin was loosely paraphrasing the Kalama Sutta from memory, and that someone else (possibly taking this to be a direct scriptural quotation) tidied it up a little and presented it in the context of a talk at the Buddha Jayanti conference, leading to it appearing in this book and thus gaining wider currency. For the best examples of the proverb “truth is stranger than fiction,” look no further than the true crime genre. We see atrocities happening all the. Discipline is for the sake of restraint, restraint for the sake of freedom from remorse, freedom from remorse for the sake of joy, joy for the sake of rapture. Buddha-nature or Buddha Principle refers to several related terms, most notably tath.
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