Free Will
Arguments on Free Will Miss the Point
Personal Perspective: The Buddha understood cause and effect.
Updated March 7, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
During my time at Columbia, my life moved along divergent tracks. I plunged into experimental psychology in the classroom and the lab and immersed myself in the counterculture at home and with friends. As the second track progressed from drugs, politics, and protest to yoga and spirituality, I discovered Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action. The authors of these Buddhist classics knew something about the mind that I longed to understand and that behavioral psychology didn’t even attempt to address. Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche seemed to possess a mastery that I could only dream of—and dream I did. I imagined what it would be like to be a Zen master.
In the summer of 1971, after four years of college, but still many course credits short of a degree, I dropped out of Columbia and hitchhiked to San Francisco to train at the San Francisco Zen Center under Suzuki Roshi. In San Francisco, I learned to sit zazen and attended talks by Trungpa Rinpoche. That winter, after Suzuki Roshi’s death, I became a student of Trungpa Rinpoche.
Trungpa Rinpoche equally emphasized the practice of meditation and the study of the profound views of the Buddhist teachings. Perhaps the most famous encapsulation of the Buddha’s teachings goes like this:
“Of those phenomena which arise from a cause, the Tathagata taught their cause, and also their cessation.”
This statement articulates the deterministic nature of the Buddha’s teachings. It stands in stark contrast to caricatures of Buddhism as a magical and mystical religion—think Tintin in Tibet.
The Buddha’s determinism is not limited to Laplace’s “particles and the laws governing their interactions,” but critically, it includes the phenomena of subjective experience. In the Buddha’s determinism, what you think, understand, and decide does have causal power.
Understanding causes and effects is at the heart of the Buddhist enterprise. The four noble truths,[1] the quintessence of the Buddhist teachings, first explain the causes of suffering, dissatisfaction, and unease, and then the causes of liberation, fulfillment, and ease. For a Buddhist, the question isn’t whether we have free will or not; it is how we cultivate the causes of freedom instead of the causes of imprisonment. This is the sole purpose of the Buddhist teachings.
As humans, we are continually compelled by objective causes and subjective causes. We are compelled by large causes, like a death in the family, and by small causes, like thoughts about lunch. We are immersed in a relentless causal flow. We seldom experience more than a moment’s peace and ease. We are driven from one situation to the next by the fear and pain of sickness, old age, and death, by not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want, and not being able to hold on to what we have. We are driven by time—the force that constantly drives us to the next moment. Doomscrolling illustrates this compulsiveness that continually propels us onward. This is the first of the four truths: suffering is pervasive. We are doomscrolling through our lives.
Like someone drowning in a rushing river, we are so caught up in the causal flow that we can’t step back to see what’s propelling us. The second truth is that craving and attachment provide this impetus. Craving and attachment are subjective phenomena. It seems like we crave and attach to objective phenomena, but this is a misperception. For instance, that person that you like is not the person appearing in your mind. What’s appearing in your mind is your subjective version of that person. Likewise, that person you dislike is not the person appearing in your mind; it’s also your subjective version of that person. In each case, the actual person has more dimensions than you can imagine.
It is always the subjective version of things we are struggling to get and struggling to avoid. We are compelled more by the dreams of things than the things themselves. We crave and cling to mental fabrications. Even the “I” that is seemingly propelled along by this compulsive flow is an endless series of mental constructs. Ignorance of the nature of the phenomena appearing in our minds is at the root of our suffering.
The third truth is that freedom from suffering is possible. This is what the Buddha experienced; in his words: “Profound, peaceful, stainless, lucid, and unconditioned—such is the nectar-like truth I have realized.” Objectively, of course, we need food, shelter, and security. However, suffering and dissatisfaction, hope and fear, stress and delusion are not essential. They can be overcome. This is an audacious claim, but people have been verifying the Buddha’s research for 2,600 years, and generation after generation has confirmed his results.
The fourth truth presents the path to cultivating the causes of freedom. Different traditions offer variations on the path to liberation, but all of these paths encompass three elements: ethical conduct, meditation, and insight. These are known as the three trainings. Ethical conduct reveals and reverses deep habits of self-centeredness. Meditation slows the chaotic flow of the river of consciousness and introduces gaps in the flow that allow glimpses of non-conceptual wisdom to shine through. Insight provides a general understanding of the causes of suffering and liberation and gradually leads to experience, realization, and genuine freedom.
Ignorance is at the root of the craving and attachment that cause suffering. Knowledge and insight are the remedies for this ignorance. The three trainings bring about knowledge and insight by guiding us away from seeking happiness and avoiding sorrow in objective reality and pointing us towards the inner reality where the causes of joy and sorrow truly abide and where absolute freedom can be realized.
No doubt, all of the mental activity involved in training in ethical conduct, meditation, and insight is accompanied by corresponding activity in the brain of the person undergoing the training. However, the neuro-skeptics’ logical fallacy assumes that correlation is causation—that it is always the brain that’s the cause of mental activity and never the other way around.
Truly Free
The free will debate is about what control we have over our actions. Since Buddhists recognize that the self is a series of mental constructs devoid of objective existence, we understand that ultimately no one is free or not free. Yet we also believe in the possibility of freedom—the Buddha’s third truth. What we mean by this is that we can become free from compulsion.
You experience freedom when you recognize that objects of hope and objects of fear are subjective phenomena that are not part of objective reality. Seeing this, you are free to make objective choices based on your understanding of how objective reality functions: The compulsions of craving and attachment do not drive you. This insight is cultivated through the three trainings. At first, these insights are experienced as sudden, short glimpses that are quickly covered over by discursiveness. Gradually, as confidence in this way of seeing develops, freedom begins to dawn.
In many ways, I am still like that naive seventeen-year-old who entered Columbia in 1967. I still have a bit of that same evangelical streak, particularly when it comes to combating materialism (as you’ve just seen). I still dream that I can help beings on a vast scale. I still wish I could be a Zen master, if only to wear those beautiful black robes and utter poetic words of wisdom, like those found in the stories of the masters of old. Maybe I haven’t traveled all that far. Yet I do feel a little more free.
References
This post also appears on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
— Robert E. Buswell, Donald S. Lopez, and Juhn Ahn. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 304.
