A skill that encodes six Buddhist epistemic and decision-making principles as practical work disciplines for Claude (or any LLM-driven workflow). Each principle targets a specific failure mode that LLMs routinely exhibit: pattern-matching instead of verifying, patching symptoms instead of removing causes, capitulating under social pressure instead of holding to evidence.
🇹🇭 อ่าน README.th.md สำหรับเวอร์ชันภาษาไทย
A Claude skill (SKILL.md plus references/) that gives Claude a checklist for:
| Principle | What it catches |
|---|---|
| Kalāma (กาลามสูตร) | Stating facts from pattern memory without verifying |
| Yoniso Manasikāra (โยนิโสมนสิการ) | Treating symptoms instead of finding root causes |
| Sati-Sampajañña (สติ-สัมปชัญญะ) | Acting on stale or remembered state |
| Anatta (อนัตตา) | Patching a fundamentally wrong draft instead of rewriting |
| Pahāna (ปหานะ) | Workarounds that hide bugs instead of removing them |
| Upekkhā (อุเบกขา) | Capitulating under user pressure or thrashing under tool failures |
Plus deeper references for harder situations:
- The Four Noble Truths as a debugging frame (
references/ariyasacca-debug.md) - Apāyakosalla — recognizing decline / anti sunk-cost
- Appamāda — heedfulness across long tasks
- Sappurisadhamma (3 of 7) — knowing self / time / audience
- Atthatraya — short-term vs long-term benefit trade-offs
- Majjhimā Paṭipadā — the middle way for solution sizing
The Pali names are kept on purpose. They are mnemonic keys — each name retrieves a complete, well-developed pattern that a paragraph of plain English does not retrieve as cleanly. Yoniso manasikāra pulls in the whole discipline of attention to causes; "root cause analysis" loses the framing of attention itself.
This is the same reason engineers learn "sigmoid" rather than "the curvy function" — names are infrastructure.
The skill is not a religious framework. It does not require belief, ritual, or commitment to any tradition. It is a checklist with cultural roots, presented honestly. For the principles in their full traditional depth, read the suttas — this skill makes no claim to teach them.
Paste this prompt into Claude Code — it clones the skill and wires up ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md in one step:
Install the buddhist-method skill:
1. Run: git clone https://github.com/nai0om/buddhist-method ~/.claude/skills/buddhist-method
2. Open ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (create it if it does not exist) and append:
## Working method
For tasks involving factual claims, debugging, user pushback,
or long multi-step work, consult the buddhist-method skill at
~/.claude/skills/buddhist-method/SKILL.md before responding.
After that, Claude Code references the skill automatically across all sessions.
Anywhere skills are supported, drop the directory in. The structure is standard (a SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter, plus references/).
The SKILL.md and references/ files are readable on their own. Each principle has a trigger (when it fires) and an action (what to do). You can use them as a personal checklist without involving an LLM.
By default, Claude loads the skill on demand — it sees the description and decides whether to read the full SKILL.md based on the task at hand. That is fine for most uses, and it keeps your context budget free for everything else.
If you want the skill to be a persistent reminder regardless of task, add a small pointer to your CLAUDE.md:
## Working method
For tasks involving factual claims, debugging, user pushback,
or long multi-step work, consult the buddhist-method skill at
~/.claude/skills/buddhist-method/SKILL.md before responding.Two places you can put this:
- Project root
CLAUDE.md— applies only when working in that project. ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md— applies globally across all your Claude Code sessions.
The pointer is only a few lines, so it doesn't bloat your context. Claude still loads the body of the skill progressively when triggers fire — you are just guaranteeing that the skill stays on Claude's radar.
buddhist-method/
├── SKILL.md # six core principles + dispatch
├── README.md # this file
├── README.th.md # Thai version
├── LICENSE # MIT
└── references/
├── ariyasacca-debug.md # Four Noble Truths as debug frame
└── extended-principles.md # five secondary principles
MIT. Use, modify, and redistribute freely. See LICENSE.
Issues and pull requests welcome. Particularly interested in:
- Failure modes the current principles don't catch.
- Better triggers (more specific situations that should fire each principle).
- Translations into other languages where the source tradition is alive.
If proposing a new principle, please show:
- The specific failure mode it catches.
- A concrete trigger and action.
- Why an existing principle doesn't already cover it.
The bar is keeping the skill tight. New principles are easy to add; what's hard is keeping the set small enough to actually be used.