**First Post!** I hope I posted this in the correct spot.
It looks like a great (though difficult) thread topic to me. There's a big scholarly literature on this topic and it's still a major topic of discussion in the academic journals.
So I've posted this question on other sites and never got a definitive answer;
There may not be one. In the Buddha's day the problem of free-will probably didn't exist in the same way that we conceive of it today. For one thing, the ancients didn't exactly share our own contemporary understanding of scientific law, causality or what we think of as scientific determinism.
But they were getting there.
The theory of karma was a kind of loose ethical determinism, since it ascribed the conditions of one's present life to actions performed in the past, and argued that actions performed today will help shape one's condition in the future. But it isn't a full-frontal determinism, since while karma determines the conditions of one's life such as one's parents, sex, nationality, family wealth and so on, it doesn't determine the choices on makes within that life.
The Buddha actually tightened that up quite a bit with his theory of dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada). In its ethical application, this is essentially the theory of karma as described above. But the Buddha seems to have intended pratitya-samutpada to not only be an ethical principle, but an ontological principle as well. This ontological version is the idea that everything that exists is conditioned and transitory, dependent on prior conditions that brought it about. This is the idea that later Buddhists termed 'emptiness', namely emptiness of what Buddhists later called 'svabhava', whose reality they denied. Svabhava is whatever we imagine to be simply because it's that thing's own inherent and internal nature to be that. We see these kind of arguments being applied repeatedly to the self, leading to the conclusion that there isn't any permanent underlying substance or essence (one's soul or atman) that remains the same, self-identical and unchanged throughout the flux of time.
Whats a typical Buddhist's view on Free Will?
Today? I'm not sure that there is any agreed Buddhist consensus on it.
Now some people have told me in the past that there are various types of Buddhism thus their beliefs in the subject vary. But I was reading a article that I googled a while ago, although I guess I cant post links yet, that talked about how the Buddha denied both views and took a middle view? How does that work? I thought we either have free will or we don't. No? :scratchin:
In the Pali canon, the Buddha is portrayed as arguing against what was termed Niyativada. This is the rather fatalist sort of determinism that argues that whatever pleasure, suffering or neutral feeling a person experiences, is entirely conditioned and determined by previous karmic action. So for the Niyativadins, there's no point in striving to or refraining from doing anything, since everything that is going to happen is going to happen anyway. It's all fated and inevitable.
In the Devadaha Sutta (and elsewhere in the Pali canon), the Buddha rejects this version of determinism, on the grounds that it ignores the very real effects of effort and striving.
So the Buddha does seem to take a middle-path on this, as in so much else.
He retains his theory of dependent origination and even applies it to psychological states. (Especially to psychological states, since mindfulness meditation is all about observing how various kinds of psychological states arise and subside.)
But he includes our intentions, purposes, choices and motivations among those psychological states, and doesn't deny their causal efficacy. What we choose to do obviously does influence our present and future state, along with the states of others. We can influence other people for the better by having our effects on them, and perhaps the paradigm of that for Buddhism is the Buddha himself, and his teaching.
Of course, an individual's psychological states, including their motives and choices, are in turn conditioned by previous experience. That's why the Buddha's order started out as a monastic sangha, kind of a spiritual marine corps looking for 'a few good men', those whose previous karma had brought them to that austere but portentuous place of being a sramana. It's why the Jataka tales of the Buddha's countless previous lives place such great influence on the kinds of events, choices and decisions that brought the Buddha to the point of becoming the Buddha. And it's why the later Mahayana emphasized the Bodhisattva path. Becoming a Buddha is conditioned by events in the past, just like everything else. It's the result of a long process, in which an individual's choices and psychological states along the way are central and fundamental, not superfluous and pointless as the fatalists would argue.
Buddhism can be kind of paradoxical, since in Buddhism there isn't any interior self that's making all the choices. Buddhist spiritual pschology is imagined more as an extended temporal process, and all that exists inside us (if only for an instant) are dependently originated psychological states and decision processes, determined by past events and states, and determinative of future states and actions. The difference between this view and fatalism seems to be the Buddha's insistence that these psychological states, the motivations, feelings, ideas, choices and decision processes are the farthest thing from being irrelevant. They are the center and the focus of the whole Buddhist enterprise, even if they in turn have been shaped by previous events and experiences.