ABSTRACT
This chapter sets forth an analysis of the meditation-based grounds for the author’s view that Buddhist meditation cultivates a ‘freedom of the mind’ that includes freedom of the will, upon which mental freedom the author will argue that Buddhism is compatible with all forms of causation and conceptions of the self, contrary to the strongest forms of Western and Buddhist free will skepticism. This chapter also explains why there are problems with agency within Buddhism, despite objections about the absence of explicit discussion of ‘free will’ in Buddhist texts or about the concept being orthogonal to Buddhism’s impersonal orientation. For example, there is a tension between Buddhist aspirants’ cultivation of self-regulative skills and Buddhism’s no-self doctrine, which tension resembles the Western philosophical problem of trying to reconcile agency with the impersonal causation of determinism. A similar problem is generated by the concept of the ‘agentless action’ of enlightened beings, which seems oxymoronic, given that ‘action’, by definition, is teleological and arguably requires an agent. Further, how can enlightened beings in nirvāṇa, which is thought to be unconditioned, participate in embodied engagement with the conditioned world? That resembles the problem of explaining how a free action is initiated by the agent but uncaused. And, among other problems, there are affinities between the no-self doctrine and denials of mental causation, illusionism, eliminativism, and epiphenomenalism, all of which pose challenges to belief in free will.
