The Kalama Sutta: What the Buddha Didn’t Say

Last updated on: October 23, 2026 at 12:01 pm by Barbara O'Brien

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The Kalama Sutta: What the Buddha Didn’t Say 2026-10-23T12:01:28-05:00 Barbara O'Brien

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The Kalama Sutta is a popular sermon of the Buddha. It may be the most popular, and frequently quoted, sermon of the Buddha in the West. Or should I say, frequently misquoted? There are renderings of it all over social media, in memes and videos, that have the Buddha saying things it’s very unlikely he ever said.

No, the Buddha never taught that you ought to find your own path and believe whatever you like. He didn’t tell us to follow our own sense of right and wrong. He didn’t tell us to believe only what fits reason and common sense. Sorry, but he didn’t say any of that. The sutta — Pali for sutra — also has been understood as a rejection of anything that contradicts rational thought or empirical evidence, even Buddhist teachings. This misunderstanding has encouraged many westerners to reject teachings like karma and rebirth as mere superstitions that were added to Buddhism at a later date. But there is no evidence that’s true.

There are several translations of the actual Kalama Sutta online, and I can’t say I’ve reviewed all of them. I can recommend the translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, an American-born monk of the Thai Forest Tradition, and the translation by Soma Thera (1898-1960), a renowned monk and scholar of Sri Lanka. The Kalama Sutta is not long, and I encourage you to read it. And I’ll be happy to explain what the Buddha did say. But first let’s review the provenance and background of the Kalama Sutta

About the Kalama Sutta

The Buddha’s sermons, and his rules for the monastic orders, were not written for some time but instead preserved by memorizing and chanting them. In time there were chanting lineages in several languages, mostly dialects of Sanskrit, and some in Sanskrit itself. In the 1st century BCE the sermons and rules preserved in the Pali language were committed to writing in what is now Sri Lanka, and these became part of what’s called the Pali Canon. The Pali Canon is a huge collection of scriptures. One of its three major sections is the Sutta Pitaka, the “basket of sutras.” A sutra in Buddhism is usually a talk given by the Buddha or a senior disciple. The Kalama Sutta is found in the Pali Sutta Pitaka, in Anguttara Nikaya 3:65.

Today the Pali Canon is the canon of scriptures associated with the Theravada Buddhists of southeast Asia — Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos. It contains the only chanting lineage that was preserved in its entirety. Parts of several others were eventually translated into Chinese and preserved in the Chinese Canon, which is associated with Buddhism in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam (there is also Theravada in Vietnam). A parallel version of the Kalama Sutta is found in the Chinese Canon as Madhyama Āgama 16. This version differs in some ways from the Pali. I understand it is an editorial revision from the Sarvastivada school. Here we’ll just be discussing the Pali Kalama Sutta. The third major canon of Buddhist scriptures is the Tibetan Canon, which does not include the Kalama Sutta, I don’t believe.

In the Sutta, the Buddha is in the market town of Kesaputta, which today is called Kesaria. This is located in modern-day Bihar, a state in eastern India that borders Nepal. The people he is addressing are Kalamas, members of an Indo-Aryan tribe that settled in the eastern Ganges plain during the Iron Age. These townspeople of Kesaputta are not the Buddha’s disciples. But they have questions. They’ve been visited by other spiritual teachers who promoted their own teachings as the absolute and only truth. How do we know what to believe? they asked the Buddha. And this was the question the Buddha addressed in the sutta.

What the Buddha Did Say

The section of the sutta that is most often misunderstood is at the very beginning of the Buddha’s response. This is the fourth paragraph in the Soma Thera and Thanissaro Bhikkhu translations. Let’s look at how Thanissaro Bhikkhu translated the problematic paragraph. It begins,

“Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.'”

Westerners tend to love the part about not going by scripture. But what about the rest of it? Don’t go by something just because you’ve heard it a lot, even if “everybody says so.” Don’t go by philosophical reasoning, or because something fits what you already believe. Don’t go by “common sense” — whatever that is — or what seems likely or logical. And you can’t always trust teachers. So what do you do? The remainder of the sutta — which the mistranslators overlook — presents the Buddha’s advice on sorting right from wrong and on determining truth.

Confronting the Three Poisons

The Buddha continued,

When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’ — then you should abandon them.

It’s helpful to know that the Pali words that mean “skillful” and “unskillful” are often translated into English as “good” and “evil.” And much of this sutta is about sorting what is skillful from what is unskillful, or what is good from what is evil. In Buddhism, good and evil are created by our thoughts, words, and deeds. And before thought there is intention. In order to be a moral person, to act skillfully, we must purify our intentions.

In the next few passages, the Buddha walks the Kalamas through a series of questions. In this section the Soma thera translation may be easier to follow, under the subhead “Greed, hate, and delusion.” Does greed lead to benefit or harm? Does hate to benefit or harm? In brief, if you harbor qualities that could lead to harm, release them. And if you are considering action that could lead to harm, don’t do it. Buddhists will recognize greed, hate, and delusion as the Three Poisons, mental states that cloud our perceptions and lead to unskillful action and harm. The way to truth, and the way to skillful action, begins by confronting these mental states in ourselves and engaging in the practices taught by the Buddha to release them. This is several light years away from “follow your own sense of right and wrong.”

About Truth and Delusion

It’s important to understand that Buddhism is not a belief system. The Buddha taught that we are all lost in a fog of delusion and stress because our perceptions are limited. We don’t understand our own existence, never mind the world we see around us. But the absolute truth that is called “enlightenment” is so far from our ordinary experience that we can’t even imagine it. The only way to realize this truth is through practice. And so the Buddha’s discourses are not about what to believe but how to realize enlightenment.

Most of his talks focused on an aspect of Magga — the Path. The Path covers every aspect of one’s life. Morality is a big part of it. Another part is mental cultivation, engaging in concentration and mindfulness practices to enable us to perceive what’s beyond the fog. The important point is that “truth” is not about arriving at some correct conceptual model but perceiving the true nature of existence itself. And logic and reason, as important as they are, won’t help you with that.

The sutta ends with sections under the subheads The Four Exalted Dwellings” and “The Four Solaces” in the Soma Thera translation. The Four Exalted Dwellings are compassion, loving kindness, joy for the good fortune of others, and equanimity. The Buddha spoke of the importance of cultivating these virtues in many of his sermons. The Four solaces describe the benefits of practice within one’s life. Again, what is emphasized here is not just making it up as we go along but following an exacting path. I hope that when you run into one more meme on social media claiming the Buddha said follow your own sense of morality or reason, you’ll know that’s not what he said.

There are a couple of excellent commentaries on the Kalama Sutta that I recommend. One is called “Lost in Quotation” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, and the other is “A Look at the Kalama Sutta” by Bikkhu Bodhi.

Buddha

A Buddha at the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, Kandy, Sri Lanka. The hand gesture represents teaching. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Buddhism

Buddha

Buddhism in southeast Asia

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About Barbara O'Brien

Barbbara is the author of The Circle of the Way: A Concise History of Zen from the Buddha to the Modern World (Shambhala, 2019). You can read more about the author here.

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