Fate And Free Will

FATE, FREE WILL, KARMA AND VASANAS KOSLA VEPA PHD I was going through an old book that I had picked up from my Mother about 3 or 4 years ago. It was titled "Dialog with the Guru', a collections of conversations that the Acharya of Sringeri, Sri Chandrasekhar Bharathi Swaminah, the late Sankaracharya of Sringeri Matha had with his disciples. I was particularly taken by the chapter titled Fate and free will. Note that the Acharya spent most of his life during the first half of the twentieth century and the book itself was published in English probably before independence. But the message remained timeless and in my opinion there remains considerable misunderstanding of the view that Indics have of their relationship to fate, especially in the minds of westerners. So here goes , selected excerpts from the dialog. The words speak for themselves, while i have added a few definitions;

FATE, FREE WILL, KARMA AND VASANAS The subject of free will is an important one that has engaged the minds of philosophers both in the eastern as well as in the western tradition A false paradigm often attributed to the Sanaatanik ( a votary of the philosophia perennis , otherwise mischaracterized in common parlance as a Hindu), and perhaps to Oriental philosophy in general, is the notion of the inevitability of fate and destiny. It is this they argue that makes Hinduism a supine faith, steeped in passivity and acceptance of conditions without actively trying to change them, in contrast to what is allegedly the case in the Judeo Christian faiths This is astonishing and gargantuan in the scale of the misrepresentation and has unfortunately been internalized by a large section of the Hindu populace. The Dharma teaches just the opposite, namely that the individual is endowed with free will and the capability and the responsibility to exercise such a free will and make appropriate choices with Viveka and Vairagya. The choices one makes are governed by the Dharma, and the ethical value system expounded in another section on this page, without doubt, but it can hardly be disputed that they are available and it is false to contend that an individual is rendered helpless and paralyzed by the forces of destiny. I would like to excerpt certain passages from Chapter 4 of the Dialogues with the Guru talks with Sri Chandrasekhar Bharathi Swaminah, late Sankaracharya of Sringeri Matha Compiled by R Krishnaswami Aiyar with an introduction by Paul Masson Oursel, Published by Chetana Ltd., Bombay, 1956, with the intention of continuing a discussion in the forum. The publication itself is probably out of print, but I have digitized it under the following heading at my site

EXERCISE OF FREE WILL, VS .FATE AND KARMA

The first point the Acharya makes is that Fate and free will are two sides of the same coin Quote “Fate is past karma; free-will is present karma. Both are really one, that is, karma, though they may differ in the matter of time. There can be no conflict when they are really one.”

Ed.note – Pl. refer to the definitions of the 3 kinds of Karma, namely Prarabda Karma, Sanchita Karma and Agami karma. The Tattvabodha defines these Yogas while expounding on the approach to Jivanmuktah (Man of Realization). The exercise of free will is synonymous with Agami karma. The explanation of the 3 karmas is summarized in my web site in the page on ‘the ethical value system of the Hindu’

Fate is associated with past karma and in particular the Sanchita karma. Prarabda Karma is associated with those events which are outside of our volition and over which we have or had no control. Our genetic predisposition is a typical example of Prarabda Karma, as are natural calamities like an asteroid striking the earth etc.

Quote “The present is before you and, by the exercise of free-will, you can attempt to shape it. The past is past and is therefore beyond your vision and is rightly called adrishta, the unseen. You cannot reasonably attempt to find out the relative strength of two things unless both of them are before you. But, by our very definition, free-will, the present karma, alone is before you and fate, the past karma, is invisible. Even if you see two wrestlers right in front of you, you cannot decide about their relative strength. For, one may have weight, the other agility; one muscles and the other tenacity; one the benefit of practice and the other coolness of judgment and so on. We can go on building arguments on arguments to conclude that a particular wrestler will be the winner. But experience shows that each of these qualifications may fail at any time or may prove to be a disqualification. The only practical method of determining their relative strength will be to make them wrestle. While this is so, how do you expect to find by means of arguments a solution to the problem of the relative value of fate and free-will when the former by its very nature is unseen!”

Ed. Note – That the past is an ’adrishta’, the unseen, is an excellent insight. In fact this is a very

common phrase in Telugu (idi mana adrishtamu – this is the consequence of our (past) Sanchita karma. Of course implicit in this statement is the notion that an individual goes through many lives, most of which he or she has no recollection. In fact the reality of human memory being what it is, our recollection of events in our present life is also spotty and faulty, so one does not have to invoke many previous lives, in order to accept the truth of this hypothesis.

Quote “At the start, you must not be obsessed at all with the idea that there will be any obstacle in your way. Start with boundless hope and with the presumption that there is nothing in the way of your exercising the free-will. If you do not succeed, tell yourself then that there has been in the past a counter-influence brought on by yourself by exercising your free-will in the other direction and, therefore, you must now exercise your free-will with re-doubled vigor and persistence to achieve your object. Tell yourself that, inasmuch as the seeming obstacle is of your own making, it is certainly within your competence to overcome it. If you do not succeed even after this renewed effort, there can be absolutely no justification for despair, for fate being but a creature of your free-will can never be stronger than your free-will. Your failure only means that your present exercise of free-will is not sufficient to counteract the result of the past exercise of it. In other words, there is no question of a relative proportion between fate and free-will as distinct factors in life. The relative proportion is only as between the intensity of our past action and the intensity of our present action.”

The essence of the message is that an individual has the means at his/her disposal to negate the effects of past (bad) Karma and create new (good) karma, the weapon of choice in this endeavor being Free-will.

Further , the Acharya goes on to expound on the role of the Vasanas that we tend to accumulate in our passage through life

Quote“This habit will generate in him a tendency to steal even when there is no necessity to steal. It is this tendency which goes by the name Vasana. The power which makes you act as if against your will is only the Vasana which itself is of your own making. This is not fate. The punishment or reward, in the shape of pain or pleasure, which is the inevitable consequence of an act, good or bad, is alone the province of fate or destiny. The Vasana which the doing of an act leaves behind in the mind in the shape of a taste, a greater facility or a greater tendency for doing the same act once again, is quite a different thing. It may be that the punishment or the reward of the past act is, in ordinary circumstances, unavoidable, if there is no counter-effort; but the Vasana can be easily handled if only we exercise our free-will correctly.

AND IN CONCLUSION

Quote“The Sastras enunciate in detail what Vasanas are good and have to be encouraged and what Vasanas are bad and have to be overcome. When, by dint of practice, you have made all your Vasanas good and practically eliminated the charge of any bad Vasanas leading you astray, the Sastras take upon themselves the function of teaching you how to free your free-will even from the need of being led by good Vasanas. You will gradually be led on to a stage when your free-will be entirely free from any sort of coloring due to any Vasanas. At that stage, your mind will be pure as crystal and all motive for particular action will cease to be. Freedom from the results of particular actions is an inevitable consequence. Both fate and Vasana disappear. There is freedom for ever more and that freedom is called Moksha. So, the next time you find yourself concurring with an Occidental that the Hindu is fatalistic , pinch yourself to aver that such is far from the case and that the tradition in fact enjoins us to be activist, pro active and Carpe Diem, and if there are those that who believe that there is nothing they can do in the face of Kismet and that their entire life is written in stone , the instant they are born, it merely indicates that they are not well informed http://kaushal42.blogspot.com/2004/10/fate-free-will-karma-and-vasanas.html