How Did a Religion of Awakening Become a Religion of Conduct?
Buddhism is a religion of awakening, yet historical Buddhism changed continuously after the Buddha’s death. That is unsurprising in a world where everything changes. To recover the Buddha’s original teaching, however, we must see how it changed. I read the Kalama Sutta as one cross-section of that process: a skeptical verse close to the original teaching survives beside conduct-centered additions by editors who no longer understood it.
I offer three grounds. First, the editor failed to understand the central verse repeated twice. Second, the original meaning of greed, anger, and ignorance in the Octads had already been compressed into three labels and prohibitions. Third, the alternatives “if an afterlife exists” and “if it does not” show an intermediate stage between skepticism and a religion affirming karma, rebirth, and postmortem reward.
The Kalamas’ Question and the Skeptical Verse
The Kalamas of Kesaputta were confused because visiting ascetics and brahmins praised their own doctrines while condemning others. They asked the Buddha how anyone could know which teacher was right. Their question is the same problem addressed throughout the preceding episodes: do not claim that your view is one hundred percent correct, fight others with it, or cling to it. I am a frog in a well, able to see only from within my own experience and perspective.
The transmitted answer is radical. Do not accept a claim merely because it is hearsay, tradition, common report, scripture, logical, inferred, compatible with reflection, plausible, spoken by an authority, or taught by one’s own teacher. Human sensation, private experience, language, tradition, and authority can all fail.
This connects with the Diamond Sutra’s images of conditioned things as dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows, dew, and lightning, and with its statement that every image is false. It also connects with the Heart Sutra’s emptiness of all dharmas. Understanding this makes me humble: even when tradition, scripture, teacher, authority, logic, and experience support a claim, I can still ask why.
First Ground: The Editor Did Not Understand the Verse
After this answer, the text asks whether greed, anger, and ignorance are good or bad and concludes that, because they are bad, one should not engage in them. It does not explain why they arise or what precisely is wrong with them. The language abruptly becomes good versus bad, do versus do not, moral rule and precept.
The verse immediately above warned against treating any view as absolute truth. The prose below then declares three behaviors absolutely bad and commands their abandonment. The Kalamas’ original question was already answered by the skeptical verse. Appending detached moral regulations suggests that the editor did not understand what the verse meant. I conjecture that the repeated verse belonged to an older oral transmission, while the conflicting prose was attached later; this is explicitly my intuitive inference.
Second Ground: The Original Meaning of the Three Poisons Was Forgotten
I previously read four Octad texts—on the cave, the wicked, purity, and the supreme—and treated the Octad on the Wicked as the original form of anger among the three poisons. Its teaching is not the bare command “do not be angry.” It explains release from attachment to one’s views and freedom from argumentative combat.
Over time, the detailed teaching was compressed into greed, anger, and ignorance. By the Kalama Sutta’s editorial stage, its origin appears to have been forgotten. The skeptical verse already addresses the problem of anger, yet the editor adds the three poisons below it as a separate list. Causes and understanding disappear, leaving “do not fight, do not argue, do not become angry.” A religion that sought to understand why these states arise was becoming a religion that prohibits conduct.
Third Ground: “If” an Afterlife Exists and “If” It Does Not
After instructing the cultivation of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, the text lists assurances. The first says that if another world and karmic fruits of good and evil exist, one will be reborn in heaven after death. The second says that if there is no other world and no karmic fruit, one will live happily here without hatred, ill will, and suffering.
The key words are “if it exists” and “if it does not.” The writer was not certain whether afterlife, rebirth, and karmic reward actually existed. He divided an unobservable question into two possibilities. I see a historical transition here. Skepticism had not vanished, so the author retained both possibilities; yet good and evil, karma, reward, and heaven had already entered. Later scriptures speak of previous lives and heavenly reward as fact. The Kalama Sutta stands between these phases.
A Religion of Conduct Requires Absolute Truth
A religion that commands “do this, never do that” needs a universal judge of good and evil. If the five precepts or Noble Eightfold Path are converted into absolute orders, there must be eternally right speech, work, and action. But what counts as right speech or livelihood changes with time, circumstance, and position. Who gives the final judgment?
In a system where evil deeds produce a low rebirth and good deeds lead to heaven, karma and rebirth perform the work of God. Would Yi Sun-sin be sent to hell and reborn as an ant because he killed many Japanese soldiers? Who determines good and evil, and where is karma stored? A transcendent system that judges and rewards after death is God under another name.
Perspectivism says that even if absolute truth exists, neither you nor I can possess it completely. Scriptures were written by human beings from human perspectives. A religion of conduct instead needs the Buddha to be an omniscient god whose commands are infallible. The Buddha is thus deified as an eternal Dharma body, while karma, rebirth, and afterlife guarantee his commands. I regard this as mysticism and imagination, not Buddhism.
Precepts and Morality Do Not Exist Apart from Circumstances
Is harming life always evil? Is a fish evil for eating another fish to live? The Buddha made rules as communal needs arose and changed them with circumstances because they were not absolute. Followers who insist that one must always behave in one fixed way oppose that example.
Once conduct and merit become central, awakening recedes. With karma, rebirth, afterlife, and a deified Buddha, becoming a buddha here and now looks impossible. People accumulate merit for a future life and lose interest in society. As in the dialogue between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu, building temples and stupas yields no merit that can substitute for awakening.
Buddhist Awakening Begins with a Question
A religion of conduct prizes obedience to “do” and “do not,” so questioning disappears. Releasing attachment to views, however, begins by doubting one’s own view. Awakening does not come from performing more external acts. It starts when I look at the shell of views around me and ask questions.
Do I really know? Why do I suffer? Why am I angry, and what makes anger arise? Such questions are Buddhism’s beginning and the key to awakening. Buddhism does not hand us a finished answer; it only points toward awakening. I must ask and leave the illusion that I already know. Buddhism must be a religion of awakening, not merely a religion of conduct.
Buddhism requires questions. Awakening begins not when authority, scripture, or teacher closes the matter, but when I ask again whether I truly know.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.