Marcus Aurelius returns to the problem of other people's behavior so frequently in the Meditations that the repetition itself is worth noticing. These are private notebooks — working documents, not polished arguments — and the same problem keeps surfacing. In Book 9 he makes one of his most precise observations: no one chooses what they believe to be wrong. The person who acts badly does so from what they take, in that moment, to be right, or at least permissible. The act that seems wrong to the observer and the act that seems right to the person performing it are the same act, seen from opposite sides of an explanation neither party has fully examined.
This has an immediate consequence Marcus doesn't belabor but clearly lives with: the story told about why someone did something is not the same as why they did it. The act is visible. The motive is constructed. And it tends to be constructed quickly, with materials already on hand — the pattern that seemed to be forming, the thing someone else said about them, the earlier incident that now, in light of this one, seems to confirm a type. In Book 10 he reminds himself that when a particular person irritates or troubles him, the right first question is not what to make of their character but what they were actually trying to accomplish. What did they believe they were doing? The question seems obvious. It almost never gets asked.
Book 4 offers a smaller version of the same correction: when disturbed by another's act, look first for a similar act in yourself. Not as self-flagellation, but as a reality check on the story being built. The person who cut you off in conversation, the colleague who took credit without acknowledgment, the friend who didn't show up when expected — these acts are real, and they have real effects. But the story about what kind of person would do such a thing, and what it reveals about them, and whether they can really be trusted — that story is built fast, with very little access to what was actually happening inside the person at the moment they acted.
The Kalama Sutta, a discourse from the Anguttara Nikaya in the Pali Canon, approaches this territory from an unexpected angle. The Kalamas of Kesaputta were surrounded by competing teachers, each claiming authority and dismissing the others, and they brought their confusion to the Buddha: how is one to know what to believe? His answer became one of the most cited passages in Buddhist philosophy. Do not accept something as true, he tells them, simply because it is traditional, or widely repeated, or plausible-sounding, or because it seems to fit a pattern you already recognize, or because a trusted teacher says so. Test it instead against what you can actually observe about its effects — whether, when acted upon, it produces harm or wellbeing, in yourself and in others.
The instruction was given about doctrinal claims, but it maps with uncomfortable precision onto the verdicts reached about people. The conclusion that someone is careless, or dishonest, or fundamentally self-interested — on what is it based? Often on something close to the Kalamas' unreliable sources: a pattern that feels like evidence, the word of someone trusted, a plausible story that fits the facts as known, or the simple fact that it confirms what was already half-believed. The Kalama Sutta is asking for a higher evidentiary standard, one that requires setting aside the feeling of obvious correctness and asking what direct observation actually shows.
What connects Marcus and the Kalama Sutta is this: both are pointing at the gap between the act and the explanation, and both are suggesting that the explanation deserves far more scrutiny than it usually receives. Marcus keeps returning to the problem in the Meditations because it doesn't stay solved. Each new irritation is a fresh occasion to reach for the familiar story — the unflattering one, which arrives with a feeling of realism and clear-sightedness. The Kalama Sutta is asking what that feeling is actually evidence of.
The story behind an act is always partly a story about the person constructing it — what they already suspected, what they needed confirmed, what they weren't quite willing to leave open. Holding the story lightly doesn't mean having no views. It means noticing how quickly the explanation was assembled, and leaving a margin for the person it was assembled about to be more complicated than the story requires them to be.