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I wrote this as part of a Philosophy of Religion class I took at the local community college, thus the slightly more academic tone. I liked this paper though and thought it might be worth sharing. The prompt was to explain the implications on free will of an omnipotent god. I thought it might be interesting to look at it from the perspective of a nondual, and especially, non-theistic, religion, such as Buddhism.
A monk asked Chao-chou, “Has the dog Buddha nature or not?”
Chao-chou said “Mu.” - The Gateless Barrier, Case 1 (Aitken 3)
Mu is a Zen Buddhist word, which in ordinary Chinese means “does not have”. But the
compiler, Wu-Men, of the koan above does not mean it as a denial. Instead, he warns us
not to think in terms of ‘has’ and ‘has not’. The very question is mistaken because it
contains a binary framework, specifically with respect to possession of independent
essence, that Zen rejects. Mu does not answer the question but collapses it.
In this paper I will argue that nondual religions, exclusively through Buddhist
doctrine (drawing primarily from Mahāyāna sources, particularly Madhyamaka and Zen, but
also some early canonical sources), are not entirely incompatible with free will but do alter
its presuppositions as the frameworks are so different. To wit, nondualists may respond to
the question “Do beings have free will” in much the same way as Chao-chou above. This
answer is not meant to evade the question, and it is especially not anti-intellectual.
Instead, it is simply stating that the context of the question itself within a nondual container
may be unintelligible.
Western conceptions of free will assert that people are independent agents with an
enduring self who can choose between different courses of action through deliberation.
Their action, originating from them and belonging to them, is part of a causal sequence,
that unfolds linearly in time, and therefore, they are morally responsible. In nondual
contexts the presuppositions of free will are destabilized: the endurance of self, a
temporally ordered causal sequence, and the grounding of moral responsibility.
Buddhism is a specific nondual religion that does not claim the existence of a deity,
the existence of a soul, nor the existence of an ultimate ground or “Oneness” such as
Brahman within Advaita Vedanta. Its claims are largely oriented towards directly lived
experience and disciplined phenomenological empiricism. All in all, Buddhism is
metaphysically restrained, reluctant to answer “ultimate questions”. The standard free will
debate usually presumes a backdrop of enduring substance and linearity, but within a
Buddhist nondual container the resolution is more ambiguous. The conversation must
instead open to free will’s compatibility with Buddhist concepts of dependent arising, non-
self, emptiness, and karma. Let’s proceed.
Dependent arising (Pratītyasamutpāda) is the principle that all phenomena, both
mental and physical, do not originate on their own, but rather arise and cease based upon
a network of mutually dependent conditions. The canonical version is usually stated as
something like: “When this is, that is; when this ceases, that ceases.”. A classic example is
the seed and sprout. The sprout arises dependent on not just a seed, but also soil, air,
water, sunlight, and countless other environmental conditions. The sprout does not exist
independently; it is the result of a causal field that has led to arising. All conditions
underlying it also arise dependently, e.g. the seed was created by another plant who also
had a network of conditions, and so on and so forth. Within this causal network, no single
thing can be pointed to as a primary cause, what arises is contingent on all of them. Free
will, on the other hand, posits an agent who represents the primary cause, a sort of
privileged origin point, that will flow out from the agent as events oriented in a temporal
sequence: past → deliberation → decision → action → consequence. Dependent arising
counters this, the agent is one condition in a network of conditions. The agent’s actions
become intertwined with surrounding phenomena. So, who acts? Well, free will would
likely conclude that a choice of direction at a fork-in-the-road is one where the agent is the
decisive origin of the choice. Buddhists would look at all the conditions: the roads leading
in, the billboards at roadside, the weather that day, the fears and memories in the agent…
the action arises dependent on those conditions, not just the agent. It becomes harder to
pin down who acts in a network of conditions like this, much like it’s hard to answer “who is
responsible for a company’s stock price ?” or “where does a wave begin and end?”. The
decision is not uncaused, but conditioned, and the neat temporal structure of free will
seems less rigid under a nondual framework.
It’s important to take one additional step up the chain in the example above: the
agent himself also dependently arises… from his parents, upbringing, environment, food,
and myriad other conditions. The agent himself does not exist independently and is said to
be empty of self (Anattā). The self that conventionally exists is non-enduring; always
dependent on conditions, always changing. This concept can be applied to all things, not
just self, and is referred to as emptiness (Śūnyatā). While dependent arising shows how
things function, emptiness is the logical implication from dependent arising that shows
what things lack. It’s important to state that this designation is explicitly non-eternalistic
and non-nihilistic; all self and all objects are not annihilated but rather re-understood as
dependently originated, including the concept of emptiness itself. Buddhism takes a
Middle Way between two truths (as they call it), wherein the subject-object duality is
deconstructed while still maintaining a conventional reality. This is articulated most clearly
in Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK 24.8-10), where he distinguishes between
conventional truth and ultimate truth, the former grounding the latter and enabling the path
to liberation. In ultimate reality, the enduring self behind free will is empty, dependent on all
other phenomena.
Moral practice presupposes that actions matter. There is a danger within emptiness
and dependent arising that without an enduring agent or an independent causal origin, that
morality might be annihilated, and nihilism would seem a nearer threat. But Buddhism
takes a Middle Way, as usual, and accounts for this with karma… and even the enlightened
can not “evade the laws of cause and effect” (Aitken 21), i.e. karma. It’s important to
distinguish the Buddhist form of karma from popular culture. It is not cosmic bookkeeping,
not “good vibes”, not external fate, not divine justice. In fact, early doctrine, karma is
defined simply: “Cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi”, translated as “It is intention
that I call karma” (Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63).
Because intention conditions action, moral responsibility remains intelligible at the
conventional level. Moral cultivation makes sense as our volition has real consequences,
even when it’s within a framework of dependent arising and emptiness. Karma joins the
causal field of the roads and signs and feelings within the previous fork-in-the-road
example. The groundwork is different here than in typical western frameworks, but morality
remains intact as a conventional truth within this framework. Interestingly, one could frame
karma, on the one hand, as an argument for free will (we have intention and can act) and,
on the other hand, for determinism (our intention is conditioned and part of a causal
network). Ultimately though, both readings require importing an outside metaphysical
framework onto a system that uses an entirely different, nondual, frame.
The presuppositions of free will are destabilized within the context of Buddhism. The
underlying frameworks are not directly commensurable, so certain free will questions lose
their footing. Is there an enduring self that authors action? The self is empty of independent
essence. Are events temporally ordered in a linear chain issuing from that self?
Phenomena arise dependently within a field of conditions rather than from a singular
origin. Do effects belong to an isolated agent as their source? Causation functions, but
without metaphysical ownership.
What of morality, then? Buddhism retains moral responsibility yet relocates it: intention
conditions experience without reifying a permanent chooser behind it. And even this
intention is not exempt from emptiness; it too is conditioned and dependently arisen.
And so, back to the question: Do beings have free will?
Mu.
Works Cited
Aitken, Robert. The Gateless Barrier: The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan). North Point Press,
1990.
Bodhi, Bhikkhu, translator. The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the
Aṅguttara Nikāya. Wisdom Publications, 2012.
Garfield, Jay L., translator. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Oxford UP, 1995.