animitta

"without a mysterious cause"

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free will

Gotama’s teachings do not assume a strict determinism1; there is at least pragmatic free will, whether it meets some philosophers’ criteria or not2. It is enough for Gotama’s premise that suffering (dukkha) can be eliminated through training3. There is no value—within Gotama’s goal of eliminating dukkha—to speculation beyond a natural explanation for our experience. We do not currently understand everything that might be known; we could simply be wrong or ignorant. At the same time, we do things (including thinking, something we do), that affect the future; for example, our intentions affect the future, even if they don’t always determine it exactly4. This does not have to be deterministic (fated or inevitable) to be powerful5. In fact, actually seeing directly how thoughts arise—& how concentration & mindfulness can affect the thought process—is the key to freedom. With training, we can have freedom from habits & painful reactions to the world. We have enough freedom to escape dukkha.

dukkha • kamma • philosophy

  1. See Karunadasa, Y, Early Buddhist Teachings
  2. Gotama refuses to go down philosophical rabbit holes. If you want to say that an individual’s psychology, or even their quantum bits, including exposure to certain teachings, leads someone to practice & find freedom, OK. See Nāgājuna.
  3. See Nāgājuna. ↩
  4. This is why Gotama says that kamma & intention should be understood to be the same.
  5. It is more likely probabilistic. See Asimov, Foundation Trilogy, for example.

habits

Evolution, through our hedonic or pleasure cycle, plays the odds: If something worked before, it will probably work again. Food or sex will be gotten; danger will be avoided. Sensations of pleasant or unpleasant create habits, which improve odds of survival. This adds up—survival literally breeds more survival. This works on broad patterns, such as whole species. But the survival of some patterns is as far as evolution ever reads the story. If human suffering or stress follows, evolution can’t “know” or “care,” even though beings that know & care arise from the process. We suffer a lot because we assume evolution makes value judgments; it makes beings that make judgments. Our values, & our feelings, are parts in a larger process. They are not good or bad in themselves. Habits are the software code that can create tendencies to act in ways that create harm to ourselves & others—or the opposite. Kamma affects us through habits. It is not fate. We can find in our experience the slight gap between sensations & craving. We can avoid mindless clinging, which creates dukkha—suffering & stress. Gotama saw how to use the understanding of patterns to train ourselves to see the workings of habits—even very rapid habits of mental activity (saṅkhāra). We can let go of unwholesome patterns & cultivate wholesome ones. Concentration & insight provide the way.

evolution • free will • hedonic • kamma • practice

hedonic

Evolution uses sensations of pleasant or unpleasant (vedanā), which arise in response to our experience, to enforce our unconscious programming, our underlying tendencies. This is a key mechanism of what Gotama would call kamma. Behaviors are reinforced, or not. Escaping this conditioned reacting is the major skill we need to become liberated. The evolutionary origins of how we experience the world are important to understand; something is not good simply because it is “natural”; evolution is a process, not an agent with either good or bad intent. It is simply part of the way things are. As traditional religions have lost their power to sustain belief in the supernatural, a tendency has arisen to find something else—science, material goods, technology—to fill this gap, to replace “the sacred,” as a way of dealing with the fear at the center of the human condition. Both our suffering & our salvation are more ordinary—if not simpler, in practice—than we like to admit.

evolution • habits • kamma • sacred • vedana

kama

As distinguished from kamma, kama means “sense pleasure” in Pāli. (The Sanskrit equivalent is familiar through the well-known Kama Sutra.) In Gotama’s teachings, clinging to sense pleasure & clinging to views (diṭṭhi, fixed ideas, absolutes) are the two categories of mental events that must be clearly understood & seen, if liberation is to be achieved. Sense pleasure has arisen through evolution as a key way to create behaviors that repeat themselves. These mental events create & support the sense of a solid self, an “I” who feels good (for example) & an “I” who knows (has an idea believed to be completely right, in opposition to all similar or related ideas). If this process is not clearly seen as experience arises, it causes dukkha (stress & suffering).

evolution • kamma • views

kamma

Gotama very specifically re-defines the word kamma as intention,1 radically changing the existing meaning, which was more like “fate” in the culture through which he was speaking. This works with his use of ethics as central to liberation from the human existential problem. He asserts a limited but definite free will, the ability to see one’s conditioned mental events & let go of them (not reinforcing them as habits). Through training, we see that mental events are temporary, impermanent. They are not an abiding self, something that must be obeyed because they are “who we are.” Seeing this clearly, we know we become (through habits) what we do. Past actions condition what arises in the mind in the present moment. In the untrained mind, past actions create similar new actions, reinforcing unconscious tendencies. By clearly seeing the transition of unconscious tendencies into actions, we can let go of them & avoid suffering, dukkha. Kamma is complex, but not mystical & indescribable, or contrary to the laws of nature. Seeing kamma as taught by Gotama helps us see clearly how we create dukkha through unwholesome habits. It is not a mystery but a kind of pattern we need to recognize.

free will • ethics

  1. Nibbedhika Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 6.63):

    “Intention I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.”

    Intention: (Pāli cetana, Sanskrit cetanā) ↩

karma

I prefer the Pāli word, kamma, rather than the more familiar Sanskrit word karma, a word that is both well known in English & very badly understood. Since I explain the meaning in terms of Gotama’s teachings under the kamma spelling, I will describe the most common mistaken understandings here. The familiar word karma is most often thought to mean simply “fate” or cosmic justice, administered by forces unknown. In the rigidly stratified culture of Gotama’s era, it meant doing what was considered correct for someone from one’s social station (determined by sex, parent’s station, & other arbitrary factors). It served to reinforce a rigid social hierarchy. This is not what Gotama meant, for which, see kamma.

free will • kamma