The Buddha on Determinism

by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

One of the oddest developments in modern Buddhism is the claim that the Buddha was a strict determinist. Drawing inferences from discourses of the Pali Canon, people argue that the Buddha implicitly believed that—although we may think that we’re making choices in the present moment—all choices are actually predetermined by causes and conditions coming from the past. This means that we’re actually powerless to make choices that go against what has already been pre-determined.

Attributing this doctrine to the Buddha is odd because there’s a discourse—AN 3:62—in which he explicitly refutes the idea that everything you do and experience in the present moment is determined by the past. He was so serious in his criticism of this idea that he literally went out of his way to refute it: Even though he rarely sought out people to argue with them, this was one case when he did precisely that.

To fully appreciate why the Buddha regarded determinism as such a dangerous form of wrong view, it’s worth examining his rebuke point by point.

He starts the discourse by stating that there are three sectarian guilds that, even though they may claim otherwise, are stuck in inaction. In other words, even though they may proclaim the power of human action and choice, their doctrines actually deny that power.

For the Buddha, this was seriously wrong. He had found through his awakening that the choices people make will influence their experience of pleasure and pain, but that they are capable of abandoning unskillful choices and developing skillful ones in their place. This enables them to avoid pain and find pleasure—all the way to the threshold of nibbāna, the ultimate bliss.

In fact, it’s because people can make the choice to abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones that the Buddha taught in the first place. If they weren’t free to make that choice, and if they wouldn’t have benefited from it, he wouldn’t have taught.

If the Buddha had believed that it was all a charade—that people’s choices to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful had been already determined by a chain of causes and conditions stretching far into the past—he wouldn’t have stated, as he did in the first verse of the Dhammapada:

Phenomena are 	preceded by the heart,
			ruled by the heart,
			made of the heart.

He would have said instead that the heart is preceded and ruled by phenomena.

He, too, would have been stuck in inaction, no matter how much he might have claimed otherwise.

But to return to AN 3:62: After stating that the three sectarian guilds are actually stuck in inaction, the Buddha then sets out their views. The view of the guild that teaches determinism is this:

The Buddha then reports that he sought out the contemplative and brahmans who taught this doctrine and asked whether they really taught it. When they affirmed that they did, he delivered his rebuke.

The first point in the rebuke was that, in that case, people’s actions would have to be attributed, not to choices they made in the present, but to influences from the past.

In other words, people couldn’t be held accountable for their actions, and would be powerless to stop themselves from doing unskillful things. For a training such as that offered by the Buddha, which relies on the ability of people to choose and follow a course of action that leads to the end of suffering, this would be totally unacceptable.

The Buddha’s next point is that, if people had no choice as to their actions, there would be no reason for them to cultivate the desire and effort to determine what should and shouldn’t be done. This means that the path factor of right effort, which includes fostering desire to abandon unskillful dhammas—actions, mental qualities—and to develop skillful ones, would have no role to play.

In fact, if there’s no real opportunity to choose what to do, ideas of “should” and “shouldn’t” would have no meaning, because everything that’s done has to be done. This also applies to the past: Everything that has been done had to be done. There would be no way to say that a past action shouldn’t have happened, and no way to learn from mistakes. This would fly directly in the face of the Buddha’s instructions to Rāhula in MN 61 on how to judge his intentions, take responsibility for his actions, and learn from his mistakes. It would also fly in the face of the Buddha’s statement that one of his categorical teachings—true and beneficial in all circumstances—concerned what should and shouldn’t be done:

The consequence of rendering “should” and “shouldn’t” meaningless leaves you bewildered and unprotected.

This would be a serious failing in any teaching related to the end of suffering.

As the Buddha says in AN 6:63, the result of suffering is bewilderment: You don’t understand why the suffering is happening or what you could do to end it. If you can’t choose your actions, you’re unprotected from urges that would cause more suffering. The whole point of the Buddha’s other categorical teaching, the four noble truths (DN 9), is to end the bewilderment that usually follows on suffering, and to propose a path of action that leads to the ultimate safety and protection (SN 43): a goal where suffering totally ceases.

This, the Buddha held, was the signal achievement of a true contemplative life. Which is why he concludes that if one is bewildered and unprotected,

For the Buddha, that’s a strong rebuke.

The fact that he explicitly denounced determinism in such strong terms means that those who try to infer from his other teachings that he implicitly supported it are misrepresenting his teachings by taking them out of context.

We can only guess at what he would have had to say about people who depict him as holding a view that he so strongly denounced.

See also: “Did the Buddha Teach Free Will?” and “The Karma of Now”