Lately, a particular question has been circulating in my mind. Perhaps I am working through the issue psychically, or perhaps it is somehow moving through the collective imagination. Either way, I keep returning to the question of whose instructions and interpretations we rely on in the Buddhadharma, and what this reveals about the extent to which we trust our own discernment or depend on external forms of legitimacy.

Spoiler: the Buddha suggested we do both.

This question resurfaced recently when I gave a talk on the controversial topic of misogyny in Buddhism with senior monk and translator Bhante Sujato.

We found ourselves discussing the political and social implications of silence in Buddhism, particularly how noble silence is understood and practiced in modern Buddhist settings. We suggested that, in some contexts, these norms may encourage people to distrust or suppress their own perceptions, signals, and inner experience, especially when confronted with harm or systemic mistreatment.

Systems of authority can rely precisely on this kind of inner distrust: we may still see and feel what is happening but learn not to trust our own perceptions. Where there is little precedent for speaking out, it becomes easier to dismiss our own inner compass and discernment. This can be especially problematic for those who are new to Dharma practice, unfamiliar with the culture, or still learning what is considered acceptable within the community.

Around the same time, I encountered another version of this question while listening to a recent ABC All in the Mind series on adverse effects associated with meditation. While I had some reservations about framing meditation primarily as a psychological intervention, something that researcher Willoughby Britton said stayed with me.

She explained that many of the people in her research who experienced difficulties in intensive meditation settings were not obviously psychologically vulnerable beforehand. They were often highly educated, achievement-oriented and deeply committed practitioners. They were also very good at following the rules.

This finding is significant for several reasons. First, we often assume that the more diligently we comply with instructions, the more fruit we will reap from the practice.

But what happens when the very qualities rewarded elsewhere, including within capitalist culture, such as discipline, conscientiousness, endurance, and respect for authority, become liabilities in a spiritual setting? I keep pondering this.

In Buddhist settings, this can take tacit forms. We might notice that nobody else is questioning a teacher, practice, or rule, and take that silence as evidence that we should not question it either. We might assume that a particular rule carries authority simply because it has become pervasive. Common practice can be mistaken for legitimacy, and conformity for spiritual attainment.

Further, this rubs up against a foundational orientation in the Buddha’s teaching. The Dharma is described in Pali as ehipassiko, which invites us to come and see, to investigate for ourselves (SN 55.1).

More explicitly, in texts such as the Kesamuttisutta (AN 3.65), the Buddha resists the idea that something should be accepted simply because it has been handed down through tradition or lineage, appears authoritative, or comes from a respected teacher. Instead, he says: “When you know for yourselves: ‘These things are unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by sensible people, and when you undertake them, they lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should give them up.”(AN 3.65)

In this way, the practitioner retains responsibility to discern: to examine what a teaching or practice actually does, and whether it leads towards harm or away from it.

On several meditation retreats, I have known quite viscerally that something I was being asked to do was not beneficial for me. I could feel it somatically, but I could also observe that my mind was not settling—it was becoming more agitated.

Yet I dismissed those signals because I was committed to following the rules well. I assumed that the teachers, and the tradition itself, knew better than my confused and ignorant mind.

Now, as a teacher myself, I caution against blind obedience to instructions and instead encourage personal discernment and careful investigation, grounded in the practitioner’s own experience. Open your eyes in meditation if that is what is needed. Lie on the ground. Leave the room and take a break. Speak when silence becomes harmful rather than helpful. Attend closely to what is actually happening, and intentionally cultivate the conditions that lead towards less harm, greater clarity and wiser response.

This is not a rule-following exercise designed to produce magical states. It is a moment-by-moment attunement to experience as it actually is.

Noble silence became a particularly telling example here. Like many meditators, I had more or less assumed that the practice of prolonged Noble silence on retreat came directly from the Buddha. Yet something Bhante Sujato said during our conversation complicated that assumption.

In fact, the canonical description of “noble silence” does not simply refer to refraining from speech. In SN 21.1 it is identified with the second jhana in which the mind becomes internally settled and unified.

In one Vinaya story Bhante Sujato referred to, a group of monks decide to spend the rains retreat without speaking to one another. Rather than praising this, the Buddha criticises them as “foolish” for taking a vow of silence while living together “like animals”. . . “like sheep” . . . “like enemies.” (Kd 4) He then tells the monks that, at the end of the rains retreat, they should invite correction from one another in regard to what has been seen, heard, or suspected, in order to clear themselves of offences and prioritise the training. (Kd 4)

Elsewhere in the Canon, monks who sit silently when lay followers have gathered hoping to hear the Dharma are criticized by those lay followers as sitting there like “dumb pigs. (Kd 2) The Buddha then permits them to give a Dharma teaching. (Kd 2)

The point is not that silence has no place in Buddhist practice. It plainly does. What surprised me was something else: a practice I had embraced as fundamentally Buddhist turned out to have a much more complicated relationship with the Pali Canon than I had assumed.

I realized that I had rarely thought to question noble silence itself. I had certainly noticed that, at times, it did not feel good for me. But I lacked the language and, frankly, the confidence to ask whether the norms themselves might sometimes need questioning.

Buddhism itself developed through cultures of argument, questioning, and debate. The Buddhist texts depict disagreement, competing interpretations, and people directly challenging the Buddha. Our modern Buddhist culture should contain more of this, not less.

But discernment does not mean practicing alone or treating our own intuition as foolproof. It requires good teachers, spiritual friends and communities capable of disagreement, where we can test whether what we are experiencing is wisdom, ignorance or something else we hadn’t imagined.

The problem, then, is not instruction itself. We need teachers and traditions because we cannot always see ourselves clearly, and because there is wisdom to be inherited from those who came before us. The problem is authority that asks us to suspend the very capacities the path is meant to cultivate.

The Buddhadharma should sharpen our capacity to discern, not replace it.

See more

Kd 4: Pavāraṇākkhandhaka—Bhikkhu Brahmali (SuttaCentral)
Kd 2: Uposathakkhandhaka—Bhikkhu Brahmali (SuttaCentral)
SN 21.1: Kolitasutta—Bhikkhu Sujato (SuttaCentral)
AN 3.65: Kesamuttisutta—Bhikkhu Sujato (SuttaCentral)
SN 55.1: Cakkavattirājasutta—Bhikkhu Sujato (SuttaCentral)
When meditation goes wrong: part one (ABC Listen)
When meditation goes wrong: part two (ABC Listen)

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