[cko]

I was all in on Theravada Buddhism for a while. Until I realized I only believed in a small subset of it - cherry-picking, if you will. Anything that my western sensibilities don’t find appealing, like nagas and devas and stuff I just conveniently filtered away.

Cherry picking gets a bad rap in religion as being arbitrary, but in the Kalama Sutta, which to me is an epistemological treatise, Gotama (or some other guru, who really knows?) says:

> "So, as I said, 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.' Thus was it said. And in reference to this was it said.

Cherry-picking.

[potatote]

This! The Kalama Sutta was broadcast on national TV every night (around 8-9pm) when the military junta was in power. It is their way of saying, "Don't believe in what you heard about our evil doings from outsiders--such as the western propaganda". So almost everyone in the country is aware of that. Ironically speaking, that Sutta really became my go-to philosophy for life. Never believing everything taught by anyone/any being UNTIL it fits my experience/goals. That Sutta, if it was really said by Buddha, is one of the most powerful and most empowering statement he made of all his teachings (in my humble opinion).