I want to turn now to what I think are the really interesting questions raised by Justin Whitaker’s latest post on the Sigālovāda Sutta. These are questions of hermeneutics, of method in interpretation. As noted, the previous post was exegetical: I think everything I say there could have been endorsed by a historically oriented religion scholar with no stake in Buddhist tradition. But Justin and I are not that: we are Buddhist theologians, who consider ourselves Buddhists and seek to apply the tradition to our lives. So I now want to take the previous post’s ideas into that wider theological context.
I think there is value in the two methodological sentences that Justin returns to from his earlier post. I have been aiming throughout this discussion to follow the first piece of advice, “dig beyond the specific wording of the instructions to perceive the underlying reasoning behind them.” The reasoning, as I understand it, is that worldly pleasures, like the theatre, are inherently unsatisfactory, leading one (as the sutta says) to always want more of them, and therefore the ideal life is a monk’s life that renounces them; there are still better and worse ways to pursue a household life, but the better ones emulate monkhood, and one of the ways that one would do this is to avoid the theatre.
I don’t think Justin’s points about benefits in this life make a difference in that regard: from the perspective of the reasoning underlying this sutta and others like it, as far as I can tell, monks too are getting benefits in this life, and the benefits householders accrue are those that come from being like a monk. The sutta’s reasoning is that we benefit in this life from not attending theatrical shows because shows are as unsatisfactory as any other worldly pleasure, and we should reject them alongside other worldly pleasures – just as, if we were further along the path, we would reject familial love and get an even bigger benefit in this life from becoming monks. I derive this interpretation from looking at the sutta in the light of other suttas, and Pali texts contemporary to them, that express similar ideas. I think that is the most effective way to figure out what the reasoning of text’s authors was.
That much remains exegetical. But Justin’s next piece of advice gets constructive, and that’s where I think it gets both more interesting and trickier – for both me and Justin. That is: “Once one understands the reasoning, the difficult work of applying it to one’s own life begins.” For us as theologians, application is essential. But it is not at all clear to me that we want to apply everything in the suttas to our own lives, when there is a significant amount in there that is wrong and perhaps even potentially harmful. Consider here the Kamboja Sutta in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, whose entire text says this (in the Bhikkhu Sujato translation):
At one time the Buddha was staying near Kosambi, in Ghosita’s Monastery. Then Venerable Ānanda went up to the Buddha, bowed, sat down to one side, and said to him:
“Sir, what is the cause, what is the reason why females don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia?”
“Ānanda, females are irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent. This is the cause, this is the reason why females don’t attend council meetings, work for a living, or travel to Persia.” (Aṅguttara Nikāya II.83)
Are we going to apply that idea to our own lives? That women and girls are “irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent”, and that’s the reason why they shouldn’t work for a living? Or even, are we going to apply the underlying reasoning behind that idea? Because it sure seems to me that the reasoning here is that the author – a man observing a patriarchal society – observed women in inferior positions, and therefore reasoned that they must be of inferior capacity (a line of reasoning that still gets applied to black people). I wouldn’t want to apply that underlying reasoning to my life, and I’m willing to bet Justin doesn’t either.
From my perspective, the idea that a good householder does not frequent theatrical shows – an idea that remains in the text, no matter what anybody else has said about the text in the two thousand years since its writing – is a bad one, just like the idea that women shouldn’t work for a living because they’re jealous and dumb. I look at what’s in the texts, I infer the underlying reasoning from them and from other texts in the canon, and I conclude that we are better off not applying either of these ideas to our lives.
Now I think Justin could push me further on these points because of the interpretive stance I previously took discussing Rudolf Bultmann. Walter Kaufmann had described Bultmann as interpreting instead of saying no; I had supported Bultmann’s method as follows:
I find it valuable when Bultmann says his “criticism of the biblical writings lies not in eliminating mythological statements but in interpreting them; it is not a process of subtraction but a hermeneutical method.” (99) It is this approach, of not eliminating but interpreting, that is involved in the project of naturalizing karma.
What the present conversation is helping me to realize is how much can be involved in “not eliminating but interpreting”. I think it is exactly that approach that Justin wants to take to the Sigālovāda Sutta, and I am sympathetic to it: we want to avoid rejecting a classical text, eliminating it. We may disagree with what the sutta says or appears to say, but we can still interpret it on a different, perhaps higher, level. This sort of interpretation is what I have called reinterpretation: it is constructive, rather than exegetical, interpretation. So when I noted last time that I was not reinterpreting the Sigālovāda: well, this response would go, perhaps I should be!
Now two points are important regarding such a response. First, Bultmann is still willing to admit that, on an important level, the text does mean what it says. He believes the world picture in the New Testament actually is a mythical one, fanciful and supernatural, and he thinks that those claims are wrong as stated: the world is not really like what the New Testament authors thought it was. The point for him, though, is that there’s a deeper level of meaning, existential meaning, that was there in the mythical picture and is also there when we read it now without the myth. That deeper level is what has value to us now. We are trying to get at that deeper level without denying that the text often also had literal meaning for its authors; as responsible historians, we do need to recognize the latter is real.
Second, though, it seems to me that if we really take Bultmann’s approach to the fullest and try to reinterpret everything rather than subtract it, then that doesn’t just apply to the Sigālovāda Sutta; it also applies to the Kamboja Sutta. I think that what the Sigālovāda says about the theatre is awful; I think that what the Kamboja says about women is even more awful. The simple and straightforward approach to these texts is subtraction: we just ignore the advice that we think is wrong. We can also say that these are both sacred texts of our tradition and we must take them seriously on a deeper level, but that is much harder – and we will then need to do that with the Kamboja as well as the Sigālovāda. And I’m not sure what that would involve.
Thanks, Amod. The way I would put it, our main task is to treat the Suttas and Sutras as resources for our life projects rather than as received and unalterable dogma, and to discover the degree to which, through reading, rereading, and comparing the advice therein with other potential sources of wisdom, they reshape, enrich, deepen, and/or detract from our previous understandings of what our lives are and ought to be about. My own path has been a gradual movement away from being “all-in” on Buddhism, to increasingly seeing Buddhism as enriching and contributing to my own understanding of the good life, but this appreciation of Buddhism is now situated within a larger philosophical frame that borrows from many diverse sources—initially from Aristotle, but now also from divergent sources within the broad history of Chinese philosophy, and also more recently (the more I read of him) John Dewey’s pragmatism. I’m not sure what we should call people like me–it feels like the Buddhist hat doesn’t necessary fit quite so well any more, at least not in its entirety—am I a “Pragmatic” Buddhist, or a “Cosmopolitan” Buddhist, or a “Eudaimonic Buddhist?” Or a philosophical magpie? The label doesn’t really matter to me—I don’t need a label—but it does differentiate the desire to 1) (as much as possible) read Buddhist texts trying to understand them from what we imagine is the point of view from which they were written by their original authors—and this takes a lot of historical and philological research to so half-way well—and 2) discover the value or lack thereof of these texts for our own personal projects in living.
Seth, you spoke of “my own path”: More and more, I have come to see and emphasize that people’s meaning-making is an expression of their unique paths, their life history and what they have encountered, and this is true even when people think they are being perfectly orthodox (since the only way they could come to be so “perfectly orthodox” was by having the life history that they had!) or think they are all-embracingly cosmopolitan (since that embrace is always practically limited by the life history that they had!). The more we can see and talk about how our paths shape our meaning-making, the more precise we can be about the desires 1 and 2 that you mentioned.
Thanks, Seth. In some ways I think you and I have moved in slightly opposite directions. “Philosophical magpie” would have been a fine description of me ten years ago, but it no longer really is: I have felt the need not only to describe myself as a Buddhist, but to place some faith in the tradition, for reasons I previously described in response to a question of yours. It’s that faith that leads me to turn to Bultmann on method, and which does make it harder for me to say of any text “let’s just scrap it”.
Still, I am with you on the desire to have both points 1 and 2. I’ll say more about that in response to Nathan.
So, as you can guess from my comments on the previous post, I think Amod would do well to admit that there are often different possible exegeses of texts, whenever the texts are not perfectly unambiguous. I’m thinking of Arne Naess’s analytical account of ambiguity in Interpretation and Preciseness (1953), but I expect the same point has been made in religious hermeneutics. A good example is the question in the previous post about whether the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibits attending the theatre. The text is not so precise, loquacious, and comprehensively explanatory that only one answer could possibly be given.
And as Amod says above, an exegetical interpretation of a text that is not perfectly unambiguous is going to depend on how one understands the underlying reasoning. Amod thinks the underlying reasoning behind the supposed prohibition on theatrical entertainment is that worldly pleasures are inherently unsatisfactory and therefore one should renounce them like a monk. But a contrary understanding of the underlying reasoning is expressed by Bhikkhu Basnagoda Rāhula in his book The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity (Wisdom Publications, 2008); he sees Amod’s interpretation as a common misunderstanding caused by not emphasizing how different the Buddha’s teachings for laypeople are from the teachings for the monastic community. For Rāhula, the underlying reasoning for laypeople is much more secular than for the monastic community: for laypeople, the emphasis is on how overdoing these pleasures will obstruct worldly success. It’s a very practical message according to Rāhula.
Such a radical difference in exegesis will affect how readers decide to apply the text’s message to their lives: Amod, given his understanding of the reasoning behind the Sigālovāda Sutta, is inclined to reject the text’s message and can’t see any way to constructively reinterpret it. Rāhula, given his understanding of the underlying reasoning, embraces the text’s message.
Nevertheless, I don’t think one could plausibly argue that everything in these texts is infinitely ambiguous and malleable. I don’t see how the Kamboja Sutta quoted above can be “interpreted” into something palatable. Likewise, in a comment on Amod’s earlier post “The goods of lay life”, Bernat Font-Clos complained about a “heteronormative and old-fashioned” passage of The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity—a passage that also happened to be a commentary on the Sigālovāda Sutta! In my response, I conceded to Bernat that one just had to “laugh and imagine non-heteronormative generalizations” for our time. Not even Bhikkhu Basnagoda Rāhula could manage to transform the Sigālovāda Sutta into a gay liberation manifesto, and the Kamboja Sutta is never going to be a vindication of the rights of woman, although it is ripe for ironic quotation in a feminist rap song. (However, writing in Thailand’s The Nation, Paisarn Likhitpreechakul argued something like this: The Buddha struck down gender roles, therefore the Kamboja Sutta can’t be a description of the Buddha’s own views and must be merely the Buddha’s observational description of the prevailing prejudices against women in Kosambi. I imagine that Paisarn could also find a non-heteronormative message in the Sigālovāda Sutta’s marriage advice!)
I’m reminded of something Martha Nussbaum once said in a talk: “For the Jewish tradition, of course, the texts are multiple, and the instantiation in ritual is multiple, and in the Christian tradition also there is all kinds of multiplicity and diversity, so it’s not a question of choosing a religion or a tradition, but finding the parts of one’s own tradition. I happen to be a Reformed Jew, and that’s a convenient place to be because I can decide that anything that belongs in the text that is out of keeping with my view of moral obligation is historical but not binding. [Audience laughs.] And I do, you know. I mean, that for me is what it means to put the moral first. I think Christians do this too…” And why not Buddhists?
I find Paisarn’s view instructive here. It sounds like he is taking up a hermeneutic that in its way is older and more traditional: the Buddha was omniscient, everything he said was true, and truth cannot contradict truth. Therefore the Buddha could not have had patriarchal views himself, and must have been making an observational description of the patriarchal society around him – even though the text’s own wording of “females are irritable, jealous, stingy, and unintelligent” hardly suggests such a reading. Such an approach would have also been there in Aquinas’s reading of the Bible, say: our faith makes us take it as axiomatic that the text must be true, so if it says something that appears false we must read it as saying something different.
What Paisarn’s and Aquinas’s view don’t share is a concern for history: specifically for the methods of discovering historical accuracy that characterize history as a discipline, pioneered by German historicists like Leopold von Ranke. Ranke’s studies had their roots in biblical hermeneutics, but he was one of the first and clearest to insist on studying the past “as it actually was”. That takes us to Seth’s point 1 above, on looking to the original author’s point of view. Standards of historical and philological accuracy do not allow us to presume an author’s omniscience. This point has been a thread throughout the conversation with Justin: it would seem like better advice to us if the Sigālovāda did not say “a good householder does not attend theatrical shows”, so if we start from the premise of the Buddha’s omniscience, we would want to believe the text doesn’t actually say that. But as scholars, I don’t think we should be starting from that premise.
But it is hard to square that concern for historical accuracy with faith in the tradition. That’s why I have found Bultmann’s route promising: accept that the historical authors did believe a lot of things that are false and that we don’t want to accept, but find a deeper message that they did believe and that remains true.
This reminds me of Spinoza’s reading of the Old and New Testaments—that the prophets were people with their own limited understandings and that they were prophesizing in response to a particular situation in a language the people of their time could relate to—but that if one took that into consideration, one could discover the authentic revelation being expressed through their teaching.
I don’t know too much about Bultmann’s theological influences, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that Spinoza was one.
Paisarn’s piece doesn’t emphasize the Buddha’s omniscience but does rely on the assumption that at least the Buddha and his transcribers would have been smart enough not to be contradictory, so Paisarn invokes other Tipitaka texts to make his arguments. Also, if we consider that Paisarn was awarded the GALA International Prize for Gay Rights Activist of the Year and once wrote an article titled “The Kantian Dhamma: Buddhism and Human Rights” that concluded “a Journey to the West may very well turn out to take Buddhist societies closer to the land of the Buddha in a way that traditional Buddhism has never been able to”, we’re more likely to suspect that his interpretation has a distinctly modern twist: the truest text awaits us on a path through the West to the land of the Buddha.
As Nicholas Rescher said, “The impetus of coherence and consistency is the motive force of any dialectical process”, and Buddhist thinking is no exception. The idea that a truer text emerges in a historical unfolding is not something that Buddhists had to wait to learn from Westerners: Mahāyāna Buddhists faced the task of reconciling profoundly different teachings and came up with the doctrine of the three turnings of the wheel of dharma (in the Samdhinirmocana Sūtra and subsequent texts), which is a quintessentially dialectical schema. As Robert Thurman said in “Buddhist hermeneutics” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 46(1), 1978), “It is noteworthy that this scheme of the Samdhinirmocana, fundamental in the Vijñānavāda school, is both historical (as relating to Buddha’s biography) and philosophical, as relating to the content of the teaching.”
But Thurman also emphasized that Buddhist hermeneutics as found in “Śākyamuni himself (himself the first hermeneutician of his own Holy Doctrine!), Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, Asanga, Chih I, Candrakīrti, Fa Tsang, Śāntaraksita, and Tsong Khapa” is not only a story of growing historical and philosophical sophistication but is also a story of “unswerving dedication to practice” in which “intellectual wisdom concerning the ultimate has been combined with one-pointed concentration, which combination leads to the holy knowledge of the space-like equipoise (ākāśavatsamāhitajñāna), the meditative wisdom (bhāvanāmayīprajñā), the nondual knowledge, etc. Thus, even though one has reached a profound intellectual knowledge of the definitive meaning of the Scriptures, one must go on cultivating this knowledge until it permeates one’s deeper layers of consciousness. Of the utmost significance is the fact that at no point is the intellectual study merely cast aside. On the contrary, reason is pushed to its utmost and held there by the cultivated power of concentration (samādhi).”
In other words, Buddhist faith as it developed over the centuries points to an enlightenment that is rooted not (only) in the historical Buddha, but in our own minds. The Kantian Dhamma indeed.
I thought of a possible objection to what I wrote that I should address. Amod might say: “That account of Buddhist faith is for monks! I’m all for reason and intellectual study, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so we laypeople gotta fight for our right to party!”
I would respond by repeating what I said in a comment on the post “The goods of lay life” (while referring generally to The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity): “What monastic life and lay life have in common is that there is a developmental path. The path is different for monastics and laypeople, but the path is different for people with various other differences in life circumstances too.”
Whatever our personal ideals and goals are as laypeople, there is a path of development of our minds. The message that some people have reasonably found in the Sigālovāda Sutta’s passages about intoxicating substances, behaviors, and spectacles is that the path can be obstructed by immoderate indulgence in and obsession with such things. Amod may feel that this message does not apply to him, and I would say that the proof is in the practice: if he can party as hard as he wants and still show all the signs of developing himself as a pandita, a mensch, or whatever other word you use to name a well-developed person, then I would say he’s being as good a Buddhist layperson as anyone.
So, eliminate or reinterpret: we’ll judge the results by who you become. Judging by his blog, I would say Amod has been doing pretty well without the guidance of the Sigālovāda Sutta.
A monk asked Dong-shan: “Is there a practice for people to follow?” Dong-shan answered: “When you become a real person, there is such a practice.”
From the time of my first Buddhist awakening in the late ’90s, I have noted some contrast between my party-animal tendencies (which were, as you might imagine, more pronounced in my early twenties) and the teachings. I recall reading Thich Nhat Hanh suggest a meditation where one becomes one with the song of the thrush, and thinking “I want both the song of the thrush and the song of the Offspring.”
I don’t think I have done a particularly great job as a Buddhist layperson in the years that followed (I think I present a chiller persona on the blog than I sometimes do in person)! But it never seemed to be the partying that got in the way of that (as opposed to my insidious anger). I have seen the risks in alcohol, especially in my forties (in my twenties consumption was naturally limited by how much I could afford!) – there is definitely some craving that sneaks up on you from it, and that’s clearly not a good Buddhist thing to feel. But that craving has just been so much easier to control than the deeper kleśas of anger and fear and self-pity, it’s never seemed like a particular problem.
Hi Nathan,
So happy to see your mention of Paisarn Likhitpreechakul. He and I studied Pali together back in 2011 with Prof. Gombrich in Oxford. We met up again when I visited Thailand in 2014. He’s a brilliant guy and generous in spirit.
And I’ll order a copy of Bhikkhu Basnagoda Rāhula’s book The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity now. It seems like a worthwhile book to have.
As to whether the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibits attending the theatre, I think you’re spot on that the text is not clear on such a thing and various interpretations could be made. Indeed, Amod allows that “prohibit” might not be the right word in one of the comments on his last post and suggests that the Buddha is “asking his lay followers to abstain from frequenting the entertainment that is the theatre.”
So we have a “prohibition,” an “ethical prohibition,” and the Buddha “asking his lay followers to abstain.” To me, these are all different degrees of interpretation. A better exegesis sees the Buddha as one who most often *offers* teachings or advice (there are exceptions), allowing his interlocutor to take it or leave it. It’s as if someone asks you for directions to the University and you give some cautionary notes such as:
“If one takes Broadway, there are six problems one will incur. One will be distracted by billboards. One might get lost in a poorly signposted fork in the road. One might encounter many people crossing the road. . . etc.”
This is a way we could direct someone to instead take 6th Street, the most direct route to the University.
In the same way, the Buddha knows and shares common pitfalls. But not as one who prohibits or even asks people to do this or not do that.
I’ll comment more when time allows :)
I think one can get fairly far reading the Buddha’s instructions in terms of cause and effect: this will cause suffering and that will prevent it. But these are pretty obviously normatively laden (it’s good to prevent suffering and bad to cause it). This is a big reason why I read Buddhist tradition as eudaimonist: there’s nothing saying you must follow these instructions, and obviously people often don’t. (There’s a sense of necessity in Kant, by contrast, that I don’t see in anything Buddhist.) And, the instructions to not attend theatre in the Sigālovāda are no weaker in this regard than are the instructions to avoid causing harm, to meditate, or to give to monks.
The Sigālovāda tells us it’s a bad idea to go to theatrical shows, and the Kamboja tells us women are stupid. I think they’re both wrong.
Since I mentioned Kant above, I should add that I personally don’t see Buddhism as similar to Kantian morality either. I was having a little fun and being flippant above when I said “The Kantian Dhamma indeed”, thinking vaguely that Kant was opposed to dogmas of revealed religion in favor of a rational religion of morality, but not that Buddhism is Kantian in the details.
Amod said, “The Sigālovāda tells us it’s a bad idea to go to theatrical shows”, which is a succinct summary of his interpretation. As I said above, though, this is not a text that is so precise that other interpretations are impossible, so Amod should own his interpretation and say “I read the Sigālovāda as saying it’s a bad idea to go to theatrical shows”, so as not to imply dogmatically that the meaning is self-evident and not in need of exegesis at all. That may be what Justin meant when he referred to Amod’s “reading quite literally”. In the previous post Amod said it wasn’t clear what the alternative to such “reading quite literally” is supposed to be; I would say the alternative is to admit that multiple interpretations are possible and to own your interpretation.
This is where I still disagree. I think the text is pretty clear. You rightly noted that a lot of the question depends on the translation: when it is translated as “frequenting” then this advice is not so clear. But as far as I can tell, “frequenting” is a mistranslation if it gives the sense of “attending frequently”, because that meaning isn’t there in the Pali.
I mean, to say “well this is just my interpretation and one among many” would be to invalidate the entire point I’m trying to make. I’d like it to be a legitimate interpretation of the Sigālovāda that going to theatrical shows (and for that matter staying out late and drinking) is totally fine. If it were, then none of the criticism I’d made of the Sigālovāda would stand. My whole point is that it isn’t.
I think there are different constructive reinterpretations one can make of the text – which is something I have not tried to do, so far anyway, with either the Sigālovāda or the Kamboja. On the exegetical interpretation of what the text itself means, no: as far as I can tell, this is not an obscure text layered with multiple possible meanings. It’s pretty clear about telling you “the good householder doesn’t go to theatrical shows and here’s why”.
Other exegetical interpretations are of course possible. It is possible to interpret the text as saying space aliens built the Pyramids. It is just that that interpretation is incorrect.
Space aliens. LOL! OK, you’re convincing me. Above Seth distinguished between imagining the point of view from which the texts were written and trying to discover their value or lack thereof for our own personal projects in living. I don’t have a strong reason to think that you’re wrong about what the text meant to the people who wrote it, although I still wonder exactly what samajjābhicarana meant back in the day. But then comes the task of finding some value in the text for me or you or others. And that’s when interpretive possibilities expand and diverge since we come to the text with varying purposes and paths. A reconstructive reading that seems reasonable to me or Justin could be irrelevant to someone like you who needs teachings that are better tuned to your particular kleśas.
I hadn’t read the Sigālovāda Sutta before this conversation started, and even on a charitable reading I wouldn’t say it has aged well! One thing I liked about The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity (sorry to keep mentioning it) is that it extracts ideas from a variety of scriptures and constructs some coherent value for today’s laypeople that I wouldn’t have found if I had tried to read the original texts.
Not much new under the sun. More-or-less, just nuanced ways of noticing how it shines. Philosophy and religion are driving towards similar destinations. The side trips and other roadside attractions vary, but an overall improvement in the tone and timbre of the human condition seems congenial. There was another post shown on this edition of the platform blog, dealing with a letter/message from the Pope. I made a short comment to the originator, via their contact address, drawing parallels between the Papal message and philosophy. It is, as are other matters addressed today, transparent. As on other days and in other years, much is well. In other areas, not so much. Another day at the office…
Hi Amod, et al!
Sorry for the very late reply. I should have replied earlier but wanted to give this some thought, but then realized I have little time for thought these days (family, work, etc). So here’s a shorter reply than I’d like to offer.
Amod, when you write:
“But it is not at all clear to me that we want to apply everything in the suttas to our own lives, when there is a significant amount in there that is wrong and perhaps even potentially harmful.”
Yes. 100 times, yes! And I think as Buddhist theologians it is quite up to us to choose the parts we find relevant. The misogyny in many early suttas (and beyond!) has been pointed out by many before us, so I think you’re on good ground in dismissing the Kamboja Sutta.
On the other hand, I’ve read a number of secondary sources on the Sigalovada Sutta and yours is an outlier in its interpretation. Perhaps you’ve discovered a whole new reading, worthy of publication and discussion on its own (beyond the blogosphere, of course)?
In perhaps too brief a term, I think you’re overreacting to the advice to Sigala.
You write in a comment to me above, “the instructions to not attend theatre in the Sigālovāda are no weaker in this regard than are the instructions to avoid causing harm, to meditate, or to give to monks.”
I prefer the term “advice” to Sigala; and I’d agree, they’re no weaker, and also no stronger. As you say, the Buddha’s laying out cause and effect.
It’s up to Sigala, and the rest of us, to determine how and when to put that into practice. I keep thinking of the Khaggavisa sutta (the Rhinoceros Horn) and thinking you’d read it as the Buddha placing a prohibition on companionship (if you were to apply the same reasoning as you have to the words on theatre). Some people need to be told about the ills of theatre. Some people need to be told about the ills of being around all people.
The teachings have a place. Perhaps for you there is no place for the advice on theatre now. Perhaps there will be in 10 years. Perhaps not. Buddhism plays the long game, so as long as one goes in the general direction of a more ethical life and purified mind, I don’t think there is much to worry about.
Last week I was reading an article that repeated a point that Justin made earlier about the situational nature of Buddhist teachings, a point that Amod never refuted if I remember correctly. Here’s the passage that I happened to read (from: Florin Deleanu, “How gnosis met logos: the story of a hermeneutical verse in Indian Buddhism”, Journal of the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies, 23, 2019, 222–184):
If Deleanu is right, even in traditional Buddhist hermeneutics the Sigālovāda is to be understood as situationally tailored and not as timeless general truth.