Purana Kassapa

The doctrine

The position attributed to him is akiriyavada, the doctrine of non-action, meaning not that action is impossible but that it produces no moral result. In the Samannaphala Sutta's summary he is made to say that one who kills, steals, robs or commits any violence does no evil by it, and one who gives, restrains himself or speaks truth acquires no merit.

There is, on this view, no such thing as a good or bad deed in any sense that attaches consequence to the doer. The Buddhist text presents this as the most morally alarming of the six positions surveyed.

Interpretation

Taken at face value the position is antinomian, and the Buddhist sources present it as such. Whether that is what Purana Kassapa taught cannot be checked, and the summary appears in a text designed to display rival doctrines as absurd or dangerous before setting out the Buddha's own.

A possible reconstruction is that the claim concerned the ultimate rather than the conventional level — that at some level of analysis there is no agent to bear consequences — which would make it closer to certain later positions than to simple licence. This is speculation; nothing survives to test it.

Standing

He is listed first among the six teachers in the Buddhist canon's standard survey, is said to have had a substantial following, and is mentioned in Jain sources as well. Like the rest of the heterodox teachers he left no writing, and his doctrine exists only in the version his opponents needed it to have.