ABSTRACT
No stereotype or synopsis can capture all the disputing treatments of the concepts of freedom, will, action, and agency in the widely divergent Indian philosophical traditions over three millennia. Nevertheless, one can ask if classical or modern Indian thinkers did at all have a clear concept of free will as the drive to act responsibly independently of external coercion. To use the meta-philosophical framework of ancient Jaina logic: in a way, they did; in a way, they did not need to; in a way, they did and they did not; and the question does not arise in quite the same way as in Western philosophies. In this overview, I rst consider the pre-systematic views recorded in the early Upanishads and the Maha¯bha¯rata (which includes the Bhagavadgı¯ta¯). Then, starting with early Philosophy of Grammar, Sa¯mkhya-Yoga, Jainism, and Buddhism, I rehearse, albeit not in a strictly chronological order, what a number of different schools of Indian philosophical thought, often in opposition to one another, have to say about human agency to actions, free will and about ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from.’
