Slowly but surely, analytic philosophers are becoming interested in Buddhist thought. At the same time, Buddhist scholars are slowly but surely working their way into analytic philosophy. One of the most interesting junctures of intersection is the concept of free will (vs determinism or fatalism).
‘The wo/man on the street’ today believes in free will. She or he probably doesn’t have a robust theory of how free the will is, or what that will is. But certainly it is believed that one’s own choices really, truly are (at least usually) one’s own.
On the other hand, many ‘reasonably well educated’ people, enamored with the power and progress of the sciences, see themselves as, like all things in the world, ultimately determined by preceding causes and conditions.
What’s the Buddha’s take on all of this?
In short, I will argue that the Buddha’s own theory is one of free will, where the will is described as the moral/rational agency of any individuated being, and freedom is understood as freedom from the complete causal determination observed in the physical world. I take as a starting point an excellent (and freely available) paper by Peter Harvey:
“‘Freedom of the Will’ in the Light of Theravāda Buddhist Teachings” [pdf] from the 2007 edition of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.
The key to my argument is Harvey’s modern logical extension of of the Buddhist concept of karma.
While the idea did not exist in the pre-modern era, contemporary Buddhists are able to say that, as one gets one’s genes from one’s parents, and one gets one’s parents from one’s past karma, then any genetic influence on character, and thence behavior, is itself a mode of karmic influence. (p.47)
As a caveat I should say that I’m not telling you, the reader, that you need to believe this. And indeed a mark of the great modern age we live in is the ability for each person to take or leave ideas as they see fit. What I am searching for is a coherent – hopefully the most coherent – way of understanding how the Buddha would have worked out certain contemporary issues.
That said, it is not only contemporary Buddhists that can extend their understanding of karma’s influence as Harvey notes above. The 8th century Mahayana philosopher/poet Shantideva does the same in writing:
(translated by Wallace and Wallace, 1997):
43. Both his weapon and my body are causes of suffering. He has obtained a weapon, and I have obtained a body. With what should I be angry?
44. Blinded by craving, I have obtained this boil that appears as a human body, which cannot bear to be touched. When there is pain, with whom should I be angry?
Essentially, he says that his body itself is a cause of suffering, and obtaining a human body is a result of craving (after further existence). So he is turning the blame, or rather responsibility, of suffering back on himself. This shows, in part, the moral role that karma and rebirth play in Buddhist thought.
If karma is believed to play a causal role in our being physically embodied, then moral actions influence the physical world. This is opposed by contemporary scientific reductive views wherein the mental and all that come with it are mere epiphenomena arising out of the physical. Note that there are in fact a wide range of contemporary philosophical views regarding the relation between the mental and material (or physical) world, the most extreme of which seems to be eliminativism, wherein a proper understanding of the physical world is believed to eliminate any belief in a (separate) mental realm. More moderate positions include forms of dualism, modularity, and functionalism. One of my favorite discussions of problems in mind-body interaction comes under the topic of zombies.
In any case, the Buddha and Shantideva seemed to want to avoid reductionism (in fact the same Peter Harvey has an excellent paper on this topic, available here). Instead of wondering how our physical make-up can explain our minds, the process is reversed: look at the mind (more specifically at moral behavior) to explain our physical world.
However, later in the paper Harvey explicitly asks: Is everything due to karma? (p.50) He suggests that it is not necessarily karma, but other forms of conditioning that can be the cause of experiences (p.51):
At S.IV.230-231, the Buddha discusses the various causes of the experiences (feelings/sensations: vedayitāni) that a person might have. They can originate:
in bile…in phlegm …in the winds (of the body) …from a union of humors (of the body) …born of a change of season …born of the stress of circumstances …due to (someone else’s) effort (opakkamikāni)… and some things that are experienced here, Sīvaka, arise born of the maturing of karma.
It is thus seen as incorrect to say that, “Whatever this person experiences, whether pleasant or painful or neither painful nor pleasant, all that is due to what was done earlier.”
But how does this match up with Harvey’s logical extension of karma above?
It seems to me that the Buddha held to a sort of physicalism turned on its head. A physicalist might, for instance, believe that everything does arise from physical matter and the basic laws of physics. However, she might also recognize that certain processes, such as organic or psychological, are best explained in organic or psychological terms: not in terms of physics. If you try to explain the germination and growth of a plant in terms of protons and electrons, you’re just not going to get it. You’ll look like an idiot, and (importantly), you’ll be talking beyond your own knowledge or common understanding. Even if you believe it all comes down to physics, it just makes sense to explain it in terms of biology.
So the Buddha, while teaching an extensive understanding of the reach of karma, found it foolish to attribute all things to karma:
[A]ny priests & contemplatives who are of the doctrine & view that whatever an individual feels — pleasure, pain, neither pleasure-nor-pain — is entirely caused by what was done before — slip past what they themselves know, slip past what is agreed on by the world. Therefore I say that those priests & contemplatives are wrong.”
(from the Thanissaro translation here:) SN 36.21: Sivaka Sutta — To Sivaka {S iv 230; CDB ii 1278} [Nyanaponika | Thanissaro].
cf the Pali:
…te samaṇabrāhmaṇā evaṃ vādino evaṃdiṭṭhino: “yaṃ kiñcāyaṃ purisapuggalo paṭisaṃvediyati sukhaṃ vā dukkhaṃ vā adukkhamasukhaṃ vā sabbantaṃ pubbekatahetu” ti. Yañca sāmaṃ ñātaṃ tañca atidhāvanti, yañca loke saccasammataṃ tañca atidhāvanti, tasmā nesaṃ samaṇabrāhmaṇānaṃ micchāti vadāmi.
They’re not wrong in the sense that karma is definitively ruled out of its causal role, they are wrong in that 1) they themselves don’t know it, and 2) it makes no ‘common sense’ to attribute certain things to karma. The teaching is epistemological, not ontological. We could also say that by focusing on what is known it is also empirical and practical.
If being born as a human is due to karma, as all schools of Buddhism emphatically claim, then aren’t all experiences in this human body due to that same karma? Now, that is emphatically not to negate other causal factors. If I have a belly-ache, it makes more sense to investigate the Thai food I ate last night, not what I did in a past life. But even that is to look at past karma (actions). A friend, no doubt wiser than me, might say, “hey, 1) you don’t know it was the Thai food, and 2) it makes better sense now to simply take an antacid and get on with life. I take this to be what the Buddha was suggesting here.
It is said that in this passage the Buddha was specifically refuting Jain theory. This fact supports my interpretation. The Jains focused so heavily on karma that they sought both to create no new karma (through an ultra-minimalistic lifestyle) and to burn off remaining karma through austerity (tapas). In this context we can see that the Buddha is simply giving a less radical, more common-sense teaching: ”maybe you are sick because of the ‘changing of the seasons’ or because someone sneezed on you, (in cases such as this) don’t worry so much about karma.” He is not making the more radical claim that there are certain things in our life completely outside the sphere of karma.
So I think Harvey is wrong in a sense when he says that not everything is attributed to karma in Theravada Buddhism. Instead I think Gombrich has it right when he discusses karma as follows:
It seems that karma operates on a grand scale, for example, in determining where one is born and when one dies. At first sight the example of the child with AIDS may appear to contradict this. But no. One must realize that karma must operate through some specific cause; it is, as it were, the cause behind causes. In that sense the other causes cited are not on the same level. (What the Buddha Thought, p.21, emphasis added.)
But, as the sutta passage above cautions, we must not interpret the ubiquity of karma as a form of karmic determinism. This would make it impossible to change one’s character and ultimately become awakened. Neither, obviously, should we abandon altogether the importance of our moral decisions, as certain forms of materialism suggest. As embodied beings (as opposed to non-embodied beings, which is a distinct state in Buddhist cosmology), the physical world is important to us. But while the physical is of chief importance for the physicalist, I think the mental (moral) is of chief importance for the Buddha.
But while the chief focus of the teachings is related to embodied, karma-producing and result-feeling beings, the goal is a sort of transcendence of both embodiment (repeated through lifetimes) and karmic creation. The Buddha, who stands as the personified goal, is, we read in Milindapañha 137, like a clod of dirt tossed in the air (whatever happens to him now is not a result of karma); likewise, the earth itself is torn up by farmers, but it’s not due to past actions of the earth. Just so, a splinter enters the Buddha’s foot through no cause of his own.
So at the stage of awakening we could say that ‘agency’ falls away. That is because agency is an aspect of individuated karma. Comparing the Buddha to the earth clearly suggests this. He is no longer responsible for what happens to him. And yet he is fully moral, he is the embodiment of the dharma. He cannot help but be moral.
The rest of us, while we might embody the dharma here or there, inevitably fall into our selfish (individuated, karma-creating) conditioning.
** this post is an update of a previous post, available here.
Along with all of this Buddhism and philosophy, I also have an enormous love of photography, nature, and running. I have a very busy couple of weeks ahead, so I am not sure if I will have time to write much in the Buddhism/philosophy categories too soon.
” from Groundhog Day.
