I had intended to make my first real post be about the life of Siddhartha Gautama just to give a bit of background about when the man lived and the experiences he had that eventually led to his sitting beneath the bodhi tree and throwing back the curtain covering Truth. However, every different book and website tells a slightly different story and some lean more heavily on various ‘supernatural’ elements. I will still do it but not until I can do it properly. Look for that in the future!

I’m sure there are as many reasons for investigating Buddhism as there are people who study it, but there are two big ones that I tend to hear quite commonly. The first is that they heard or read the Heart Sutra and (typically) failed to understand it but could feel in their guts that there was something there. Even without being able to consciously interpret what the text was trying to convey they were able to recognize that ‘finger pointing at the moon’ and were filled with a desire to experience the ‘moon’ as it were. (Don’t worry about these seemingly weird phrases I will sometimes use. It’s not important to understand exactly what I mean, you will get used to seeing some of them as they are quite common. Just use the context to interpret the basic idea if you don’t know what something means, or comment and complain!) I’ve even heard that some people have that same feeling of hearing something truly important even when they heard the Heart Sutra read in a language they didn’t understand! I have no idea whether that is actually true or a bit of revisionist history on the part of the people remembering it, but I certainly won’t say it’s impossible.

The other big one is people hear the quote that we are discussing today, and it is such a drastic change from the types of things they are used to hearing from organized religions that they are compelled to investigate further. Without further ado, here it is:

“Now, 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.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.”

That (unsurprisingly) is the Buddha, speaking in the Kalama Sutra. Most people originally find that quote sort of rewritten or ‘translated’ for a modern audience but in my opinion, the important takeaway remains intact either way. We’ll break it down a bit in a second, but to me he’s basically saying ‘Think (or learn, or know) for yourself.’ And since that’s the takeaway and this blog is meant to draw parallels between Buddhist teachings and video games, I’ve got a good one.

The Assasin has overcome my last defense, and now he’s come to murder me. In the end, what seperates a man from a slave. Money? Power? No, a man chooses, a slave obeys. You think you have memories. A farm, a family, the airplane, the crash, and then this place. Was there really a family? Did that airplane crash? Or was it hijacked, forced down by something less than a man? Something bred to sleepwalk through life, until activated by a simple phrase spoken by their kindly master. Was a man sent to kill? Or a slave? A man chooses, a slave obeys. Stop. Would you kindly? Would you kindly? A powerful phrase. A familiar phrase? Sit. Would you kindly? Stand. Would you kindly? Would you kindly run? Stop! A man chooses, a slave obeys. Kill! A man chooses… A slave obeys. OBEY! -Andrew Ryan (BioShock, 2007)

A favorite of mine! Some people won’t love the comparison between Buddha and Andrew Ryan, the Objectivist superman. It is very true that they have almost nothing in common. Ryan spends half of the game speaking out against altruism and claiming that anyone who needs any help in life is a parasite.

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I think there’s something there. When you finally meet Andrew Ryan he reveals to you that your whole life you’ve been manipulated by other people into doing what they wanted. In the game it’s the use of the code phrase ‘Would you kindly’ that prompts you to follow whatever command was given blindly. The message they were trying to convey was about the linearity of games and the way gamers just do what a game tells them to without questioning anything.

But in reality, many people just do things without questioning them. Going back to the Buddha quote, too many people take reports, legends, scriptures, traditions, inference and more as absolute truth without any further investigation. The most powerful part is when he mentions ‘the thought “this contemplative is our teacher.”‘ Even people who would shrug off ancient texts or traditions they deemed silly or pointless can be deceived by someone who positions themselves as a wise teacher in order to lead them astray.

So what should we rely on, then, if even the teachings of the Buddha aren’t necessarily to be followed without question? He explains straight away: ‘When you know for yourselves’ that things you have been taught are blameless and bring happiness and welfare to the people of the world, those are things you want to be doing. There are some religious traditions where all that matters is what you believe in. Believe in this or that and you’re covered, and you should probably be a good person but that isn’t really what’s important. Just believe properly and tell other people to believe it too. Buddhism isn’t really like that. There are a great many teachings in Buddhism that are incredibly valuable and I know that personally, I’d love to get a chance to read them all. But ultimately it’s your experience that is most important. Take the things you hear that sound like good advice and put them to the test. It is after you have experienced firsthand that these things make the world a better place and make you feel like a better person that you can know for sure they are worth continuing.

And all this time people have been telling us we have to do things, maybe things we knew deep down were wrong, simply because some teacher, or tradition, or authority figure said so. Turns out that isn’t true!

So would you kindly see for yourself?