Do the workings of karma remove free will or choice? And how can we act with moral intention if all our actions are predetermined by our karmic propensities?
A student writes: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about choice and the whole determinism vs. free will debate in the context of Buddhism, and I’m finding it kind of confusing. On the one hand, we learn that mind is clear awareness, which doesn’t immediately sound like something all that interested in making choices. Of course, there are mental factors like wisdom that allow a “clear” mind to distinguish wholesome from unwholesome and take action based on that distinction, but… if the strength of our wisdom and our delusions are both dependently originated, then it seems like this would leave no room for choice. We would simply take the action that our karmically-determined mental factors cause to appear most prominently, or most strongly, in our minds at a given time. This view seems to fit quite well with what we are trying to do in meditation, but it calls into question things like morality, which are, after all, matters of intention.
