Causality and freedom in Buddhism

Registration ID: IJNRD_182664

Published ID: IJNRD2208149

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Dr. Bimal Chandra Pal

Freedom, Determinism, Samsara, Nirvana, Law of Karma, Suffering, Spiritual insight.

The concept of freedom is prevalent in modern society. It is of a freedom from external limitations or restrictions, including freedom from limitations or restrictions placed by our fellow humans or nature. But this is not real freedom. We want to liberate ourselves from enslavement. It also closely tied with the concept of liberty. From a Buddhist perspective, freedom begins with generosity (dana), which leads to moral living (sila), which in turn leads to mindfulness (bhavana). This is what creates true freedom and happiness in Buddhist philosophy. But some skeptics of free will argue that if our choices are causally determined in accordance with universal law or determinism, then we are not really free. Determinism leaves open only one possible outcome for each event in the series of events necessitated by prior conditions in accordance with unbreakable laws. If only one event is possible in each moment, an agent cannot bring about anything other than what was already determined. And if an agent can never do otherwise (than what he or she was determined to do), then the agent cannot be correctly considered morally responsible for his or her actions. This is the main problem of free will Buddha was seeking for an answer to a key question, which concerned the existential fact of suffering, i.e., why is the human existence visualized as the disease, aging, and death? On the one hand, his teaching gives an open space to many religious practices and also does argue as a kind of philosophy and, on the other hand, teaches us a methodology for self-development. The Buddha’s teaching is related with the problem of suffering (dukkha) that is known as the existential suffering— the suffering of bondage to the cycle of repeated birth and death, and the human suffering can cease from the transient individual manifestations. His teaching is fundamentally related to the four noble truths (cattāri ariyasaccāni)—the intrinsic nature of human existence—which is basically characterized by ‘dukkha’ and the dukkha arises because of the continuous positive and negative desires for something. The most common confusion may arise in Buddhism is, whether the Buddha at all considers the theory of free will or not, due to the anattāvāda—the denial of substantial selfhood.

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Dr. Bimal Chandra Pal (August-2022). Causality and freedom in Buddhism. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NOVEL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, 7(8), 1351-1355. https://ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2208149.pdf

Volume 7 Issue 8, August-2022

Pages : 1351-1355

Paper Reg. ID: IJNRD_182664

Published Paper Id: IJNRD2208149

Downloads: 000122255

Research Area: Engineering

Author Type: Indian Author

Country: Agartala, Tripura, India

Published Paper PDF: https://ijnrd.org/papers/IJNRD2208149.pdf

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