"Do not believe,
in what you have heard,
in tradition,
because it is handed down to you from generations past,
in that which is spoken and rumoured of by many,
or simply because it is found in your religious scripture
or has been told unto you on the authority of your teachers and elders.
only when you yourselves know after watchful thought,
that these things are pure, blameless, agree with reason
and leads to benefit, and happiness of one and all,
enter on and abide in them."
Gauthama Buddha, The Kalama Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya, Vol 1, 188-193
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kalama Sutta (Sanskrit: Kalama Sutra) is a Buddhist sutta in the Anguttara Nikaya of the Tipitaka. In this sutta, Gautama Buddha instructs the people of Kesaputta the Kalamas on which basis one should decide which religious teaching to accept as true. The Buddha tells the Kalamas to not just believe religious teachings because they are claimed to be true by various sources or through the application of various methods and techniques. Even Buddha's own teachings are not to be accepted at face value.
The Buddha provides ten specific sources which should not be used to accept a certain teaching as true, without further verification:
1. Oral history
2. Traditional practices
3. News sources
4. Scriptures or other official texts
5. Logical reasoning
6. Philosophical reasoning
7. Common sense
8. One's own opinions
9. Authorities or experts
10. One's own teacher
Instead, he says, only when one has personally verified that a certain teaching is skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness, then one should accept it as true and practise it.
However, it should be stressed that the Buddha instructed the Kalamas to pay attention to the teachings of the wise; he did not advocate that individuals can or should decide truth purely by and for themselves. Nevertheless, the emphasis remains on one's personal verification of any teaching, and in particular whether a particular teaching reduces or eliminates the mental defilements of greed, hate and ignorance, or vice versa (in which case it should be rejected).
