Kesamutti Sutta

The Buddha proceeds to list the criteria by which any sensible person can decide which teachings to accept as true. Do not blindly believe religious teachings, he tells the Kalamas, just because they are claimed to be true, or even through the application of various methods or techniques. Direct knowledge grounded in one's own experience can be called upon. He advises that the words of the wise should be heeded and taken into account. He proposes not a passive acceptance but, rather, constant questioning and personal testing to identify those truths which verifiably reduce one's own suffering or misery (Pali: dukkha).

The Kesamutti Sutta states (Pali expression in parentheses):[5]

• Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava),
• nor upon tradition (paramparā),
• nor upon rumor (itikirā),
• nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna)
• nor upon surmise (takka-hetu),
• nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu),
• nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka),
• nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā),
• nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya),
• nor upon the consideration, The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)
• Kalamas, when you yourselves know: "These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness," enter on and abide in them.'

Thus, the Buddha named ten specific sources whose knowledge should not be immediately viewed as truthful without further investigation to avoid fallacies:

1. Oral history
2. Tradition
3. News sources
4. Scriptures or other official texts
5. Suppositional reasoning
6. Philosophical dogmatism
7. Common sense
8. One's own opinions
9. Experts
10. Authorities or one's own teacher

Instead, the Buddha says, only when one personally knows that a certain teaching is skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness, and that it is praised by the wise, should one then accept it as true and practice it. Thus, as stated by Soma Thera, the Kalama Sutta is just that; the Buddha's charter of free inquiry:

The instruction of the Kalamas (Kalama Sutta) is justly famous for its encouragement of free inquiry; the spirit of the sutta signifies a teaching that is exempt from fanaticism, bigotry, dogmatism, and intolerance.[2]

However, as stated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, this teaching is not intended as an endorsement for either radical skepticism or as for the creation of unreasonable personal truth:

On the basis of a single passage, quoted out of context, the Buddha has been made out to be a pragmatic empiricist who dismisses all doctrine and faith, and whose Dhamma is simply a freethinker's kit to truth which invites each one to accept and reject whatever he likes.[6]

Rather than supporting skepticism or subjective truths, in the sutta the Buddha continues to argue that the three unwholesome roots of greed, hatred and delusion lead to the opposite negative results, i.e. they are unskillful, blameworthy, etc. Consequently, behaviour based on these three roots should be abandoned. Moral judgements of actions can therefore be deduced by analysing whether these actions are based on the unwholesome roots or not.