The Mirror: A Buddhist Decision Helper

The mirror the Buddha gave Rāhula

The test comes from the Advice to Rāhula at Ambalaṭṭhika (MN 61). The Buddha asks his son what a mirror is for. “It’s for checking your reflection, sir,” Rāhula says, and the Buddha answers: “In the same way, deeds of body, speech, and mind should be done only after repeated checking.” The check is the same each time: does this deed lead to hurting myself, hurting others, or hurting both, and is it “unskillful, with suffering as its outcome and result”?

The answer depends on when you ask. Before acting, a harmful deed is not to be done; while acting, it is to be stopped; after acting, a harmful deed of body or speech is to be confessed “to the Teacher or a sensible spiritual companion”, and a harmful deed of mind is to be met with revulsion, and in each case restraint in future. Rāhula, by the commentary’s account, was still a boy, newly ordained; Sujato notes that deeds of body and speech are confessed under the monastic code, while acts of mind “are matters of personal integrity rather than social reinforcement.” A deed that hurts no one is to be done, continued, or, once done, is reason to “live in rapture and joy”. The tool gives you the sutta’s own words for whichever of these fits.

The Kālāmas’ tests

The Kālāma Sutta (AN 3.65) adds a way to look closer. The Buddha asks whether greed, hate and delusion come up in a person “for their welfare or harm”, and then whether such things are “skillful or unskillful”, “blameworthy or blameless”, “criticized or praised by sensible people”. It is often read as permission to trust one’s own judgement alone; in the sutta, what sensible people would say is one of the tests. For more on deciding, see making decisions with Buddhist wisdom and “don’t go by tradition”.

Other traditions

The mirror is not one school’s teaching: SuttaCentral lists full parallels to MN 61 in the Chinese Madhyama Āgama and in the monastic code of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, in Chinese and Tibetan. Mahāyāna ethics weighs the bodhisattva’s motive as well. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that, for Mahāyāna philosophers such as Asaṅga and Śāntideva, “an advanced practitioner who is motivated by compassion” who sees that a forbidden act would prevent more suffering than any the rules permit can “permissibly break the rules out of compassion.” This tool follows the early discourses only; see Buddhist ethics for how the traditions differ.

A note of care: this is reflection on two discourses, not advice. For decisions about your health, money or the law, talk to someone qualified, and if you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust.

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