Free Will and Karma
Photo by Eric Masur
Do we choose the course of our lives, or is it divinely chosen for us? In this talk, Zuisei explores the age-old question of the relationship between pre-determination and free will using the support of the Buddha’s teachings coupled with wisdom from other spiritual and philosophical traditions.
Zuisei says that regardless of the cause and effects of our circumstances, we do have the ability to choose how we respond to what happens to us. Through cultivating awareness of our actions, we can be of benefit to ourselves and others—whether that’s in the present moment, or for lifetimes to come.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei’s notes and might differ slightly from the final talk.
This is Walpola Rahula in What the Buddha Taught:
The question of free will has occupied an important place in Western thought and philosophy. According to the twelvefold chain of dependent origination, this question does not and cannot arise in Buddhist philosophy. If the whole of existence is relative, conditioned, and interdependent, how can will alone be free? Will, like any other thought, is conditioned. [So is freedom, in this context.] Such a conditioned and relative free will is not denied… [But] not only is so-called free will not free, even the very idea of free will is not free from conditions.
This subject came up recently during our Buddhist study sessions with the month-long residents, and we had a very interesting conversation about it. Since we’ve had reason, human beings have been trying to explain what we are and why things happen the way they do. Is everything causally determined in a line going back all the way to the beginning of the universe, or are events random and therefore open to choice? Is the truth somewhere in between?
I think this is an interesting question, not just philosophically, but because of its practical implications for our lives. We act based on what we know, and perhaps even more significantly on what we believe. If I believe that there is an omniscient creator who has a plan for my life—or that there is a Book of Ages where all of existence is written—then if I encounter misfortune, I may be comforted by this belief. But, this could also allow me to become passive. Maybe I’m fated to be in this abusive marriage, in this luckless job. Or, it can lead us to believe that there are groups of people who are meant to rule others, because that is their destiny. Or that human beings can’t help but act the way they do: “Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls.”
On the other hand, we have the theory of free will. Given a range of choices, human beings are equally capable of choosing among them and that there really is no impediment to this choice. If you’ve come to this country in order to pursue the American Dream, for example, and you fail, after much work, to achieve it, this is because you didn’t work hard enough. Is this what we see to be true? Or, is this what we want to see?
There’s even a scientific theory that takes determinism further. It says that we may be a simulation, a computer program created by a higher species, just like in the Matrix. One reason for this is that the universe seems to work according to mathematical laws—at least as far as we can tell.
A couple of years ago there was even a conference at Harvard to discuss this theory. One physicist said it opened up questions about eternal life and rebirth (because you can just keep reloading the program). Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, opinions were arranged loosely along gender lines. Most of the guys were really into this theory. And the women, not so much. One theoretical physicist, Linda Randall, said we’re just thinking about ourselves, as usual. Why do we assume there’s a bunch of intelligent beings out there who are spending their time simulating us? Don’t they have something better to do? But, if we are a 14-year-old alien’s video game, that would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?
This theory has been refuted recently based on the fact that we have a sense of free will, and also because quantum events which happen in the mind, don’t fit into the classical laws of cause and effect. To play devil’s advocate, that could just be part of the program, couldn’t it? “Let’s throw in a bit of quantum physics, to confuse them…” Simulation or not, we still have to deal with ourselves and each other.
We can also look at it from a theistic perspective—or more accurately, a Judeo-Christian perspective. When we say—as some of us do—“thy will be done,” does that mean that God’s will is done in every circumstance at every time? If we believe in God’s omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, then yes. But does that mean that God is concerned with what I have for breakfast? Is he responsible for my dislike of garlic and my love for eggplant? Or does he only get involved in high-level decisions (the other stuff he delegates). I actually don’t mean this sarcastically or facetiously, I believe in God, and I really want to understand how all of this works.
Maybe that’s the problem. I’m trying to understand something that cannot be understood—at least not logically. Buddhism has its own answer to this conundrum, and the key is in Rahula’s qualifier: he says yes, there’s free will, it’s just that it’s conditioned and relative. It cannot stand outside of causes and conditions, outside of interdependence. So is it really free or not?
Interestingly, even some Western philosophers, when speaking of free will, say that the adjective “free” is not meant to modify “will.” John Locke said that “free” is actually modifying “mind.” “I think the question is not proper,” he said, “whether the will be free, but whether a person be free.”
The Buddha spoke of karma as “volitional action.” Action that is not willed does not produce karma. If an apple falls from a tree, it does not produce wholesome or unwholesome karma—unless it hits Newton on the head, then it’s a different story.
We usually speak of karma very loosely. We say, “Oh, that’s bad karma,” almost equating it with luck. Rahula clarifies that karma just applies to the action, not to the effect. The effect of karma is called it’s fruit. It may ripen in this lifetime, or in the next, or in a future life way down the line. And further, karma doesn’t move in a straight line. It takes place within multiple feedback loops: the present moment is shaped by both past and present actions. Present actions shape the present and the future and present actions need not be determined by past actions. Karma is a natural law but it is not inflexible.
The Buddha:
If one says that in whatever way a person performs a karmic action, in that very same way they will experience the result—in that case there will be no (possibility for a) religious life and no opportunity would appear for the complete ending of suffering. But if one says that a person who performs a karmic action with a result that can be experienced in various ways will reap its results accordingly—in that case, there will be (a possibility for) a religious life and an opportunity for making a complete end of suffering.
An angry thought will lead to another angry thought. But, I have the ability to choose how to respond to that angry thought and therefore transform it. It won’t be easy, but it’s possible. And, the more we see our actions and their results, the more possible it becomes. That’s why we say that to enlighten is to shine a light on what is there. It’s to free what is bound. There’s the anger. I can follow it with more anger, or I can shift.
We don’t ignore causes and conditions, we don’t abandon our sense of volition. They work together, dependent on one another. So we are never stuck in a fixed pattern. Otherwise, practice would not be possible. Realization would not be possible. We would just stay deluded, forever.
A person who is free uses their body, uses their mind, to change a habitual thought pattern (Rahula: one thought-moment conditions the next). The mind is incredibly powerful, and it is capable of such change. What if you can’t “just do it”? Then you do it to the extent that you can. And you do it again, and again If you can’t do it alone, you arrange your circumstances to support you. You make what’s easy, difficult. You shift a thought-moment in order to shift the next, which eventually (and by eventually I mean it might be years, if the thought stream runs deep enough), but eventually, what is difficult becomes easy. And when it’s not, we can always ask ourselves, what is difficult? Where is the difficulty? Even that changes it.
Lately I feel it in my body like wheels spinning or skidding over ice. Part of me wants to be offended, annoyed. Part of me: “I don’t want to put my energy there.” I can’t put my energy there, because it has nothing to bind to—or there is less to bind to, I should say. It still arises, but it’s lost its momentum. Our thoughts are very powerful, if we grant them power. Our stories are very powerful. And we can’t ignore them, but we also don’t want to use them as a cop-out. Someone said to me the other day, “My ignorance is complete.” I said, “So is your wisdom. You just need to manifest it.”
And it doesn’t really bother us that often these stories we tell ourselves are based largely on unexamined assumptions or have only a tenuous connection with reality. This is what I love about stories, on one hand—we really can create anything. Our stories can also lead to quite a bit of suffering.
Years ago, my aunt was in a hotel with her then partner and they had stuff all over the room. Clothes were on the bed and floor, gifts they’d bought were open and laying on various tables and chairs, cartons of food, it was messy. They went downstairs to have a leisurely breakfast, and when they came back to the room they found a note that said: “We cleaned your disgusting room” (the note was in Spanish, and this is what my aunt read). She flew into a rage, she told her partner, who also became livid, and the two of them rushed to the reception desk brandishing the note and screaming. “How dare you address us in this way?” she says to the poor receptionist. My aunt’s partner is yelling (he had a booming voice so everyone within half a mile could hear him), “We are going to report you to the Chamber of Commerce, you have no shame. Who do you think you are?!” They made such a ruckus that the manager had to intervene. He took one look at the note and said, very mildly—bless him—“Ma’am, this says, ‘We did the cleaning in your room” Ooops! Asco is something disgusting, aseo means cleaning. My aunt mistook an E for a C and created a whole world out of it. They never went back to that hotel…
But the opposite is also true. We use language and create conditions to foster a skillful or wholesome cause, and the fruits can be surprising.
Ellen Langer is a social psychologist at Harvard University who has spent her life studying mindfulness. She did a very interesting experiment in 1979 which she called “Counterclockwise.” She took a group of 78-79-year-old men and put them in a retreat center that had been retrofitted to look like it was 1959. She asked them to live there for a while as if they too, were 20 years younger.
The men hobbled out of a van, some stooped, some with canes, and walked straight into 1959—the movies, the radio, the décor—everything was 1959. They were instructed to speak in the present tense of things that happened then, and no one did anything to remind them of their age. There were no mirrors anywhere, only photos of their 20-year-younger selves. No one carried their bags, no one helped them to move around or take care of things. By the end, they were playing touch football together, and they felt, and looked, younger than they had in years. Langer admits it was a very small group that she tested in a highly contrived environment, but still, what does this tell us about the power of our perceptions to change our experience?
In another experiment, Langer had a group of cleaning women do their job as a job, and another group do it thinking of it as exercise (not doing it as exercise, they weren’t doing jumping jacks or push-ups in between toilet swabs). She just said, think of it as exercise, since you are really active all day. The result: the women who saw their work as exercise lost weight. Maybe we should try that with zazen, it is very demanding after all. We could advertise that in our brochures: become enlightened, lose weight in the process, people would flock!
Now, the principle of dependent origination which Rahula refers to is encapsulated in the following formula:
When this is, that is
This arising, that arises
When this is not, that is not
This ceasing, that ceases.
This says that every phenomenon is conditional, relative, and interdependent. There are twelve links, twelve interconnected factors that give rise to one another in a continuous loop. This is what makes up existence, what keeps it going. The Buddha said that when you look beyond these factors, what you see is no self, no independent agent. There is just the conditionality itself. That’s why setting our intent, replacing an unskillful thought with a skillful one, isn’t just positive thinking. If we’re practicing, we’re study and realizing the interconnectedness of our experience. We’re seeing that there is nothing about our selves, our experience, that is fixed, that is immutable. And we’re seeing, in all things, the three marks of existence: suffering or unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and selflessness.
As a student recently said who used to teach religious studies in college: Life sucks, nothing lasts, get over yourself. This student also said to me that when you realize that there is no future, there is no next, this moment becomes infinitely more important.
This teaching on interdependent origination takes its most refined form in the Avatamsaka or Flower Garland Sutra. I spoke of it a little in my last talk. This Mahayana Sutra was written in stages, it is thought, starting about 500 years after the death of the Buddha. It was said to be his first teaching and that he offered it while he was still in samadhi after his enlightenment. But, no one understood it, so he dialed it back a bit and began again with the Four Noble Truths. Dushun, the first ancestor in the Huayan school, which was based on the teachings of this Sutra, said:
The manner in which all dharmas interpenetrate is like an imperial net of celestial jewels extending in all directions infinitely, without limit… Because of the clarity of the jewels, they are all reflected in and enter into each other. Within each jewel, simultaneously, is reflected the whole net…. None of the other jewels interfere with this [reflection]. When one sits within one jewel, one is simultaneously sitting in all the infinite jewels in all the ten directions. How is this so? Because within each jewel are present all jewels.
The first description of a holographic universe. Here is one net of bright, celestial jewels and we are sitting within ourselves and one another, while universe upon universe arises and vanishes within our body and mind. This happens within one period of zazen. It happens in every moment. So then, how do we choose how to act? Carefully. With the awareness that what I do here affects not just me, but the whole net. At the very least with some openness to the possibility that my actions may have a much more significant effect than I may be aware of.
In college I had a yoga teacher who, in the midst of a very difficult pose which she would have us hold for a long time would ask, “Do you know where this body begins? Do you know where it ends?”
We’re here to find out what this body is, to find out what this mind is. We’re here to learn to use them well, not just for ourselves, but for everyone.