What is it about?
This is a re-interpretation of the Sutta showing that it is more about ethics than epistemology and that it teaches that faith is integral to following the "right" path.
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Why is it important?
The typical interpretation of this Sutta is foundational to rational/empirical/scientific interpretations and reconstructions of Buddhism in the West. That interpretation is mistaken and emphasis on it accounts in part for the mutual incomprehension between traditional Asian and modern Western Buddhists.
Perspectives
The popular misinterpretation of this Sutta, both among scholars and popularly, has motivated many to force scientific or protoscientific interpretations onto the whole corpus of early texts, blinding us to deeper, or at least less anachronistic, meanings.
Stephen Evans
Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Doubting the Kālāma-Sutta: Epistemology, Ethics, and the ‘Sacred’, Buddhist Studies Review, May 2007, Equinox Publishing,
DOI: 10.1558/bsrv.v24i1.91.
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