- Free Will Worth Wanting: the Buddha's Radical Answer
The free will dilemma: are we mere puppets of our past conditioning? Or are we somehow magically able to rise above all causes to act with pure spontaneity? The Buddha rejected both these alternatives, and provided us with a third answer:…
- Do Buddhists Believe in God?
Buddhism's views about god and gods are paradoxical. On the one hand, all traditional forms of Buddhism accept the existence of deities. On the other hand, Buddhism is fundamentally an atheistic religion. We'll consider this paradox with…
- Is Everything Karma in Early Buddhism?
Is everything we experience due to our karma? I'll look at what the Buddha had to say in several early texts to find out his thoughts.
- The Buddha and Free Will
What might the Buddha have thought about free will? To answer that question we'll look at the history of the concept in Western philosophy, and then consider how it applies to early Buddhism. We will find that the Buddha would have…