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BSRV 31.1 (2014) 125–140 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (print) 0256-2897
doi: 10.1558/bsrv.v31i1.125 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (online) 1747-9681
© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014, Ofce 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Shefeld, S1 2BX
Mindfulness, Free Will and Buddhist Practice:
Can Meditation Enhance Human Agency?
Terry Hyland
EmEritus ProfEssor of educaTion and Training, universiTy of BolTon
hylandterry@ymail.com
aBsTracT
Recent philosophical and neuroscientic writings on the problem of free
will have tended to consolidate the deterministic accounts with the upshot
that free will is deemed to be illusory and contrary to the scientic facts
(Blackmore 2011; Harris 2012). Buddhist commentaries on these issues have
been concerned in the main with whether karma and dependent origination
implies a causal determinism which constrains free human agency or — in
more nuanced interpretations allied with Buddhist meditation — whether
mindfulness practice allows for the development of at least some poten-
tially free volitions and actions (Harvey 2007; Repetti 2012). After examining
some of the key arguments in this debate, it is suggested that the present-
moment attention and awareness central to mindfulness practice may offer
a way out of the impasse presented by the alleged illusion of free will. The
meditative spaciousness of non-judgmental, present-moment awareness
can help to foster the capacity to transform those mental formations which
constrain autonomous thought and action. This conclusion is informed by
the general thesis that free will is not a given — an innate aspect of the hu-
man condition — but, like wisdom or rationality, a potential quality of mind
which may be developed through training, education and skilful means.
Keywords
free will, mindfulness, self, neuroscience
Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and nd myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2014
126 Terry Hyland
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
“Who Makes These Changes?” — Rumi
Free will: The problem
Susan Blackmore — the psychologist and researcher on evolutionary theory, con-
sciousness and meditation — expresses the central issues in this sphere by quot-
ing Dr Johnson’s famous remark that ‘All theory is against freedom of the will;
all experience for it’. She goes on to observe (2005, 41) that:
With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is
even more against it than it was in his time. So I long ago set about systematically
changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although
the feeling took many years to ebb away.
The ‘theory’ referred to by Blackmore which seems to count so decisively
against the possibility of free will has emerged from two millennia of philosophi-
cal analysis of the central problems. Determinism — the notion that everything
has law-governed cause — was part of the Stoic system of philosophy (Hamlyn
1987, 81ff), and the issues raised have formed part of philosophical speculation
since the time of the Ancient Greeks, nding a mature expression in the atom-
istic theory of Democritus (Sheldrake 2013, 58ff ). Such mechanistic and causal
explanations of the world — including that of human agency — have developed
exponentially with the growth of science and now, as Rupert Sheldrake argues,
go to make up some of the key unquestioned axioms of all scientic activity.
If everything is determined — even our thoughts, beliefs, choices and actions
— how can we be free to think, believe, choose or act in any ways other than the
ways we in fact do? In the Ethics, Baruch Spinoza proposes the classic account of
this philosophical doctrine which, in his system, even denies free will to God, who
is co-identied with Nature. The proposition (1970, 23–25) is that:
In the nature of things nothing contingent is granted, but all things are deter-
mined by the necessity of divine nature for existing and working in a certain way.
The will can only be called a necessary cause, not a free one. Will, like intellect,
is only a certain mode of thinking, and therefore any single volition cannot exist
or be determined for performing anything unless it be determined by some other
cause, and this one again by another, and so on to innity ... Hence it follows that
God does not act from freedom of the will.
Since, for Spinoza, God and Nature were just the same, we are presented here with
the classical picture of the universe as a xed and immutable machine which,
once in motion, can be seen to operate in terms of unalterable laws. This is the
basic premise of the materialistic worldview of science described by Sheldrake
and summed up graphically in the argument by Laplace that, if we knew the posi-
tion, mass and velocity of each particle of matter, we would be able to deduce any
and every event in the history of the universe (Pinchin 1990, 113–114).
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
Of course, even the sort of hard-headed materialists of contemporary sci-
ence taken to task by Sheldrake would no longer maintain such a simplistic and
uncompromising position. The indeterminacy of sub-atomic particles revealed by
quantum mechanics (Greene 2004) and the uncertainty of the cosmological con-
stant revealed in the recent discoveries of an exponentially expanding universe
driven by dark energy and dark matter (Panek 2001) have served to temper some
of this materialistic certainty. However, the deterministic assumptions remain in
much of scientic thinking and the implications for human thought and action of
indeterminism offer (as noted later) very little scope for escape from arguments
against freedom of the will.
Sam Harris expresses the position in stark terms (2012, 5):
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and
intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over
which we exert no conscious control ... Either our wills are determined by prior
causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and
we are not responsible for them.
Given what we now know about DNA, evolutionary psychology and the link
between brain states and emotions, desires and intentions (Pinker 1997; Blackmore
2011), it is difcult to make sense of the notion of people acting ‘freely’, particu-
larly when we add social context, family background and life experiences to the
general picture. Why, then, is there a problem about freedom of the will if there
is very little evidence in favour of it? The answer is hinted at in the Blackmore
quotation cited above. In spite of all the objective counter-evidence, we still have
to account for the subjective feeling that we are free to choose, decide and act in
particular ways, and that — in looking back on past actions and choices — we do
seem to think that we could have acted and decided otherwise. However, this
feeling can be accounted for in historical and anthropological accounts of the
development of social, legal, moral, religious and political systems (Harris 2012)
and it is important to nd out why Blackmore’s project of removing such a feel-
ing from her life is one that has not been attractive to or adopted by more peo-
ple. An interesting question is why it seems to be so difcult (or, at least, not that
easy) to accept her conclusion — made after a lifetime’s study of consciousness
and Zen meditation practice — that there is:
no persisting self, no show in a mental theatre, no power of consciousness and no
free will, no duality of self and other — just the complex interactions between a
body and the rest of the world, arising and falling away for no one in particular.
(Blackmore 2011, 165)
Free will: Possible escape routes
An obvious response to the free will dilemma is to point to the distinction between
voluntary and involuntary thought and action. If we cause harm to others at the
point of a gun or under some other form of duress, this involuntary act is evalu-
ated rather differently from that of causing harm to others in a voluntary and
premeditated way. This distinction is, of course, crucially important in legal and
moral contexts in which the notion of individual responsibility is often decisive.
As Ted Honderich notes, one argument against determinism and in favour of free
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2014
128 Terry Hyland
will turns precisely on this notion; a ‘man [sic] is responsible for an action if his
future behaviour can be affected by punishment’ (1984, 264–65). However, this
merely shows that the ‘freedom’ implied by voluntary behaviour is — as all the
historical accounts clearly show (Diamond 2005) — a fundamental assumption of
legal and moral systems, not that unfettered freedom is actually possible.
This sort of thesis is central to ‘compatibilism’, one of the most common philo-
sophical positions on these matters, which holds that ‘free behaviour exists but
it is just a small corner of the determined world — it is that corner of determined
behaviour where certain kinds of force or compulsion are absent’ (Searle 1985,
88–9). But this view simply amounts to saying that some of our actions (volun-
tary) are caused by our rational wants and desires whereas others (involuntary)
are caused by coercion or irrational psychological impulses. However, on the
basis that we seem to have no more control over our brain activity than we do
over the rate at which our hearts beat, Harris concludes that ‘my mental life is
simply given to me by the cosmos’ (2012, 19). It may appear at times that our
decisions and actions are freely chosen on the basis of our needs or desires, but
we do not choose to have those desires and needs in the rst place. As Harris
explains (2012, 20):
There is no way I can inuence my desires — for what tools of inuence would I
use? Other desires? To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is sim-
ply to say that I would have lived in a different universe. Compatibilism amounts
to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as
he loves his strings. [Original italics]
Harris is here challenging those compatibilist or ‘soft deterministic’ accounts
offered by Dennett (2003), Frankfurt (1971), Searle (1985) and others who claim
that — even though our thoughts, decisions and actions are caused by our DNA,
neurophysiology and life experience — we are free to the extent that they are our
thoughts and actions. This appeal to existential agency, however, relies heavily
on a notion of ‘self’ which may have shaky foundations.
Blackmore’s denial of a separate self, cited earlier (and returned to below
in the discussion of Buddhist conceptions), has a long philosophical pedigree.
David Hume is best known as an opponent of the notion of a unique ‘I’ or ‘me’
and offered the famous observation that ‘I can never catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception’ (1964,
239). Timothy Chappell (2005) reminds us — in his examination of the ‘inescap-
able self’ as it applies to ethics, epistemology and philosophy of mind — that both
Heraclitus and the Buddha had reached broadly the same conclusion as Hume as
long ago as the fth century BCE. Indeed, the notion of the self as a subjectively
constructed narrative can be found in diverse spheres of thought from history to
psychology, political science and literary criticism. As Chappell puts it:
Humean, deconstructionist, Buddhist, Heraclitean, or Marxist historian: all of
these different schools of thought move, in their different ways, towards the same
conclusion about the self. The conclusion is that selves are causally and explana-
torily inert because they do not actually exist as parts of the fabric of the world.
(Chappell 2005, 220)
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
Moreover, recent studies in neuroscience have cast doubt on the concept of
a centre of consciousness, a central and unied ‘self’ or ‘I’ directing all aspects
of our behaviour. Blackmore (2005) discusses the counter-intuitive idea that —
although we make the standard assumption that there is a unied centre to all our
acts and experiences — this feeling is not supported by studies of consciousness.
Neuroscientic research indicates that there are many facets of consciousness
which can be linked to different brain states but little evidence of brain states
which correspond to a single entity or source of consciousness. Certain funda-
mental assumptions — such as the notion of a xed and unchanging self, located
in a conscious mind through which ow a ‘stream of ideas, feelings, images and
perceptions’ — have, according to Blackmore, to be ‘thrown out’ (2005, 128). So
how are we to proceed? Blackmore suggests that we:
start again with a new beginning. The starting point this time is quite different.
We start from the simplest possible observation. Whenever I ask myself ‘Am I con-
scious now?’, the answer will always be ‘yes’. But what about the rest of the time?
The funny thing is that we cannot know. Whenever we ask the question we get an
answer — yes — but we cannot ask about those times when we are not asking the
question. (Blackmore 2005, 128)
Even more intriguing is the ground-breaking work by Libet (2003) using func-
tional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning techniques, which indicates
that activity in the brain’s motor sections — when subjects are asked to perform
actions or respond to sights, sounds or touches — actually precedes consciousness
of such perceptions. If consciousness (in the sense of awareness of the intention
to respond) follows sense perception and action, how can such activity be said to
have been caused by consciousness? Moreover, if we are not in complete con-
scious control of our thoughts and actions, does this not imply that we cannot
be held fully accountable for them since they are in some sense determined by
factors outside our control?
Certainly, the proposition that many of our choices and actions are self-gen-
erated does seem to make sense. However, if the ‘self’ doing the generating is no
more than a subjective feeling in the brains of people who are the product of,
on the one hand, unconscious neurological processes over which they have no
control and, on the other, quantum uctuations in the world in which we oper-
ate, what is left of any putative freedom? In fact, the indeterminism of quan-
tum mechanics and astrophysics may be even more damaging to the argument
for free will than determinism. Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ — the idea
that ‘it is impossible to measure both the position and momentum of a quantum
object at the same time’ (Gribbin 1995, 16) — leads to a probabilistic view of the
world which applies to everything, including people and their brains. If the sub-
atomic behaviour of neurons is unpredictable — or, at least, is characterised by
a randomness which allows only for probabilistic predictions — then the minds
and their contents which are the outcome of this brain activity may be equally
random and probabilistic. The upshot is that we can never really know (in the
sense that, in normal circumstances, it can be said that we have knowledge of
past events) what we are going to do at any one time even though we may feel
that we are acting freely and rationally.
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130 Terry Hyland
If we then move from the inner to the outer world, recent developments in
astrophysics and cosmology also cast doubt on the possibility of free will. The
discovery that the universe was — contrary to previous scientic belief — expand-
ing at an accelerating rate led astrophysicists to posit the idea of dark energy
and matter as an explanation of this phenomenon. As Panek (2011, xv) puts it,
the material is:
not ‘dark’ as in black holes or deep space. This is ‘dark’ as in unknown for now,
and possibly forever: 23% something mysterious they call dark matter, 73% some-
thing even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4% the
stuff of us.
Sheldrake explains how such new perspectives have thrown doubt on the tra-
ditional laws concerned with the conservation of matter and energy. In account-
ing for the observation that more gamma rays were being emitted from the centre
of the Milky Way than could be accounted for, a number of astrophysicists have
suggested that ‘dark matter was being annihilated, giving rise to regular kinds
of energy’ (2012, 68–9). Such anomalies — along with quantum uncertainty and
the staggering notion that 96% of the universe is unknown and unexplained — is
more than enough to take the edge off determinism and render more plausible
the possibility of indeterminism.
As Harris (2012, 30) concludes:
If determinism is true the future is set — and this includes all our future states of
mind and our subsequent behaviour. And to the extent that the law of cause and
effect is subject to indeterminism — quantum or otherwise — we can take no credit
for what happens. There is no combination of these truths that seems compatible
with the popular notion of free will.
However, as argued below, Harris and Blackmore are not actually committed
to a hard determinism which rules out all possibility of freely chosen thoughts
and actions. What they seem to want to say is that, insofar as our decisions and
choices are determined by antecedent phenomena (upbringing, life experience,
DNA, and so on), then they are consequently heavily conditioned, thus circum-
scribing freedom of the will. Yet both are optimistic about the degree to which we
can work with such conditioning and achieve some form of freedom of thought
and action through meditation.
The illusion of free will
Unlike certain existentialist perspectives — and contra Arthur Schopenhauer’s
deeply pessimistic views about the role of the will in generating human suffering
(Schopenhauer 1995) — in which despair and hopelessness take prominence, the
denial of free will may become an optimistic afrmation of the way things really
are, coupled with a positive commitment to ‘improving ourselves and society’ in
‘working directly with nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with’
(Harris 2012, 63). It seems that — although we may be persuaded into a deter-
ministic stance on the basis of the scientic evidence — in terms of our subjective
experience of choosing, deciding and acting, there is scope for positive and opti-
mistic speculation. Notwithstanding their trenchant views on the illusory nature
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
of free will, both Harris and Blackmore appear to end up implicitly adopting a
‘soft’ determinist, compatibilist position in allowing for enough freedom to foster
our potential for intentional and autonomous behaviour.
Blackmore expresses the view, for example, that it ‘is possible to live happily
and morally without believing in free will’ (2005, 41) and has explained in detail
how meditation has personally led to a ‘massive integration of processes all over
the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness’ (2011, 164). How does
all this work? Harris (2012, 47) gives us clues and also provides links to Buddhist
mindfulness in noting that:
Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one’s thoughts and feelings can
— paradoxically — allow for greater control over one’s life ... This understanding
reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab
hold of one of your strings ... Getting behind our conscious thoughts and feelings
can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing,
of course, that we are ultimately being steered).
Elsewhere, Harris (2006, 2010) has noted the efcacy of meditation and Eastern
contemplative traditions in providing a more solid foundation than religions such
as Christianity and Islam for moral, political and legal systems, and there seem
to be clear connections here between the suggested response to the alleged free
will illusion and Buddhist practice.
Buddhism and freedom
It is worth entering a number of caveats here to preface the discussion. Although
the Buddha argued against fatalism (Harvey 2007, 40) the notions of freedom,
determinism and indeterminism are rather too metaphysical and theoretical to
play a predominant role in the essentially pragmatic project of understanding
and relieving suffering. Riccardo Repetti (2012, 135) agrees with Harvey that the
‘Buddha rejected the fatalistic attitude of agential impotence, precisely on the
ground that it would lead to what may be described as a form of volitional cata-
tonia’ and instead:
emphasized the knowledge of cause and effect and the cultivation of mindfulness
of beliefs, volitions, and actions as his basic prescription for what an agent may
do to foster her own liberation and bring about the end of her suffering. Thus, if
dependent origination is deterministic, the Buddha would arguably be more likely
to accept a soft over a hard interpretation of determinism. (2007, 135)
Moreover, it is worth noting that if the complete Buddhist project — the full
journey along the Noble Eightfold Path to achieve nirvāṇa and awakening — is
completed, then the idea of free will or not free will becomes irrelevant. Since
nirvāṇa may be dened technically as the ‘complete silencing of concepts ...
the extinction of all notions’ (Nhat Hanh 1999, 136–37), the notion of free will
would also be silenced, thus rendering many of the arguments redundant. On
this account — indeed, within the framework of some leading Western theories
and systems of morality (Foot 1970) — the concept of freedom is not predomi-
nant and needs to be balanced against other notions such as trust, benevolence,
compassion and respect for persons. However, for the purposes of the present
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2014
132 Terry Hyland
discussion the centrality of free will is taken to be important in the sense that it
informs the notion of autonomous human agency which is assumed to undergird
all thought and action, including that which may lead to mindfulness practice
and hence liberation.
Within Buddhist traditions the notion that we have free will would not be espe-
cially illusory (or rather delusory), but one of the many delusions that humans
are driven to in the attempt to escape from the suffering that is part of being
alive. These delusions are encapsulated in the construction of the (concept of) a
personal and unique ‘self’ that is designed to protect us from suffering and the
realisation that everything is impermanent. As Caroline Brazier (2003, 32) puts it:
The self, according to Buddhist psychology, is the fortress we create to protect
ourselves from experiencing the pain of loss and impermanence. It is our greatest
defence mechanism. It is also our prison. Keeping this fortress in place becomes a
life project, and consumes large amounts of our energy.
As Bhikkhu Bodhi (2000, 1844) expresses this in the translation of the second
noble truth from the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta:
the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed
existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that
is craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.
Such a project is seen to be monumentally counter-productive in that con-
stantly feeding the self-notion through the consumption of sensual experience
merely exacerbates and magnies the suffering which the self-notion was con-
structed to escape from. The prison walls simply grow higher and more impen-
etrable. Thus far, there is agreement with both the philosophical critiques of ‘self’
and the contemporary neuroscientic studies of consciousness. But what of the
more radical claims by Harris and Blackmore that the illusion/delusion of ‘self’
may be connected with the illusion of free will?
The third and fourth noble truths clearly indicate that there is a way out of
suffering and illustrate forcefully what this escape route entails. Does this imply
a commitment to a belief in free will? Certainly the notion of freedom or libera-
tion which is incorporated into many Buddhist writings and commentaries, and
the transformation implied in such contexts seems to presuppose the capacity
to form freely chosen judgments and intentions of the sort associated with free
will. On the third noble truth, Bodhi translates (2000, 1844):
The noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away
and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom
from it, nonreliance on it.
Thus, there is a clear expression here of the human capacity to escape the
thrall of self-delusion, and this implies the possibility of curtailing the endless
cycle of strife through adopting the right track: the noble eightfold path. This
track is ‘right’ in the pragmatic sense that it helps us to achieve the desired end
of reducing or alleviating suffering in ourselves and others. The pragmatic thrust
is highlighted in Stephen Batchelor’s assertion that there ‘is nothing particularly
religious or spiritual about this path’ and that it ‘encompasses everything we
do’ as an ‘authentic way of being in the world’ (1998, 10). In more recent writ-
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
ings, Batchelor (2011, 181) crystallizes his secular existentialist perspective on
Buddhism in the observation that:
Buddhism has become for me a philosophy of action and responsibility. It pro-
vides a framework of values, ideas and practices that nurture my ability to create
a path in life, to dene myself as a person, to act, to take risks, to imagine things
differently to make art.
In a similar vein — writing about the connections between Buddhist ideas and
Western psychotherapy — Jeffrey Rubin (2002, 50) suggests that ‘Buddhism
points towards possibilities for self-awareness, freedom, wisdom and compas-
sion that Western psychology in general, and psychoanalysis in particular, has
never mapped’.
The idea of free will is implicit in all of this talk of personal authenticity,
action, self-awareness and responsibility. How can we be authentic or take full
responsibility for our actions if our decisions and intentions are not to some
extent freely chosen by us? If we manage to escape from the illusion of self to
embrace not-self, is this awareness of our not-self nature more liberating than
the original false conception?
Charles Goodman (2009) has argued that the not-self element of Buddhism
justies determinism and the denial of free will, though Repetti offers a more
nuanced account which distinguishes between delusional notions of self as being
xed and immutable and a rened notion in which a ‘processual’ and ‘self-reg-
ulating’ conception of self can be accepted without endorsing personal identity.
As he puts it (2012, 190):
For one may acknowledge that one’s views, intentions, speech, actions, efforts,
one-pointedness, and mindfulness are ultimately impersonal in origin, on the
one hand, but that together they constitute a tightly clustered causal system that
exhibits system reexive features (system monitoring, system approving or dis-
approving, system revising, and so forth) that ground conventional or pragmatic
attributions of responsible agency to the system, on the other hand, without erro-
neously identifying with them. [Original italics].
Arguing along broadly similar lines, Caroline Brazier (2003, 138–139) suggests that:
The teaching of non-self is not a denial of the existence of the person as a complex
entity, functioning in a complex world. Non-self theory places people in dynamic
encounter with one another and with the environment which they inhabit. It
acknowledges the ever-unfolding social process and the ways in which people
provide conditions for one another... Our society is rmly attached to ideals of
individuality and personal freedom. Ideas of non-self seem to threaten the basis
on which this is founded and to cut the ground from under us. In fact, however,
they offer liberation of a much more profound kind.
The process of liberation referred to here is clearly outlined in all the basic
texts on mindfulness meditation. Thich Nhat Hanh (1999, 75) offers a graphic and
forceful account in his observation that:
Mindfulness helps us look deeply into the depths of our consciousness … When
we practice this we are liberated from fear, sorrow and the res burning inside us.
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134 Terry Hyland
When mindfulness embraces our joy, our sadness, and all our mental formations,
sooner or later we will see their deep roots … Mindfulness shines its light upon
them and helps them to transform.
Given what was said in earlier sections about the illusion of free will, the really
interesting question is whether the liberation and transformation described by
Nhat Hanh can be achieved.
Harvey (2007, 84) offers an afrmative answer to this question in observing
that:
Buddhism accepts ‘freedom of the will’ in the sense that before one acts, one can
and should stop and reect on things ... One should be mindful of emotions and
motives, etc., and guide how they or other factors inuence one’s actions. One’s
willing and action is conditioned but not rigidly determined. Freedom of action
and will is a relative quantity which arises from the open interacting dance of
rapidly changing mental states. Within this, a crucial quantity is the degree to
which this cluster of processes contains good awareness of what is going on in
the cluster and in the world.
Repetti has examined recent Buddhist writings on free will in some detail and
has identied a range of shifting positions. Acknowledging the force of argu-
ments of scholars such as Goodman (2009) and Mark Siderits (2008) which lead
to incompatibilist or semi-compatibilist positions, he concludes (2012, 193) that:
in recent-period scholarship these divisions run more acutely along doctrinal
lines, scholars relying mostly on Pāli (pre-Mahāyāna) sources mostly accept
determinism, but scholars relying mostly on Sanskrit (Mahāyāna) sources seem
to embrace indeterminism. Both such groups agree, however, that Buddhism is
compatible with free will even in the absence of a real self.
The principal reason for this optimistic stance on free will lies in the power of
meditation in maintaining an intentional commitment to the path of enlighten-
ment, and the wisdom and transformation which may result from such a com-
mitment.
Mind, mindfulness and human agency
The basic procedures and processes of mindfulness offer a useful starting-point
in dealing with the more practical issues surrounding freedom and Buddhist
practice. Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale suggest that, rather than
consisting in any particular method or approach, there are ‘many different meth-
ods and techniques’ for cultivating mindfulness. The process implies (2002, viii):
Developing and rening a way of becoming more intimate with one’s own experi-
ence through systematic self-observation. This includes intentionally suspending
the impulse to characterise, evaluate and judge what one is experiencing. Doing
so affords multiple opportunities to move beyond the well-worn grooves of our
highly conditioned and largely habitual and unexamined thought processes and
emotional reactivity.
Repetti (2010, 177) describes the process and outcomes of meditation as fol-
lows:
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
Meditation cultivates an increasing awareness of pre-conscious, impersonal cog-
nitive/volitional forces that fuel distractions, engage and direct attention, and
trigger actions, and it simultaneously cultivates volitional detachment and lib-
eration-oriented volitions and metavolitions. As the practitioner becomes more
aware of behavioral triggers, she becomes more able to refrain from acting on
them. Thus, Meditation is a form of metamental training that increases volitional
self-regulation.
In a similar vein, Siegel observes that a ‘useful fundamental view is that mind-
fulness can be seen to consist of the important dimensions of the self-regulation
of attention and a certain orientation to experience’ (2007, 11). Scott Bishop, et
al. (2004, 232) proposed the following two key stages or elements of the process:
1. The self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate
experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events
in the present moment.
2. A particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present
moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness,
and acceptance.
The qualities of curiosity, openness and acceptance reported throughout
accounts of the prerequisites of mindfulness practice are also especially relevant
to the learning and development involved in responses to the free will dilemma
outlined earlier. It is important, however, to note that the acceptance involved
here — developed fully by Tara Brach (2003) in her theory of ‘radical accept-
ance’ — implies the acceptance of the reality of suffering or negative mind-states
not, of course, acceptance that they be allowed to continue. The transformation
of such unwholesome mind-states is a large part of what mindfulness practice
is about. Siegel’s work (2007, 2010) has demonstrated how mindfulness may be
developed through educational strategies, and there is growing evidence of the
effectiveness of such programmes in schools and colleges (Schoberlein and Sheth
2009; Hyland 2011).
Two other key elements relevant to practice are worth mentioning here as
spheres that need to be satisfactorily accommodated in order to cultivate mind-
fulness: our tendency towards ‘rumination’ and ‘experiential avoidance’. These
gure prominently in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and related
practices and are explained by Rebecca Crane (2009, 11) as follows:
1. Rumination is a particular style of self-critical, self-focused, negative
thinking. It is preoccupied with and driven by the desire to ‘solve’ the
emotional challenge of unhappiness or lowered mood.
2. Experiential avoidance is the attempt to remain out of contact with the
direct experience of challenging thoughts, emotions and body sensa-
tions.
Thus, whereas rumination and avoidance place obstacles in the way of achiev-
ing mindfulness, the cardinal virtues of curiosity, openness and acceptance —
along with the key attitudinal factors such as non-judgement, patience, trust,
acceptance and non-striving outlined by Jon Kabat-Zinn (1990, 33–38) — will,
ideally, help to remove such obstacles.
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136 Terry Hyland
All of these attitudes and procedures are designed to foster what Siegel (2010,
xi-xii) has called ‘mindsight,’ which is dened as:
a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own
minds. It helps us to be aware of our mental processes without being swept away
by them, enables us to get ourselves off the autopilot of ingrained behaviours and
habitual responses, and moves us beyond the reactive emotional loops we all have
a tendency to get trapped in. It lets us ‘name and tame’ the emotions we are expe-
riencing, rather than being overwhelmed by them.
Andrew Olendzki explains this process in discussing the Buddhist concept of
wisdom which is exemplied by the notion that ‘all experience is shaped within a
milieu of cause and effect’ (2010, 79). Awareness of dependent origination allows
us to see the interdependence of thoughts, sensations and emotions; we learn
that when this thought arises, that other idea or feeling arises. In developing
insights through practice, the renement of our inner knowing allows us to de-
centre from these constant co-arisings so that we may create a space between
seeing the desire and aversion and our reactions to such mental phenomena. As
Olendzki expresses it (2010, 79):
When one realizes that the arising feeling is one thing, while the attitude gener-
ated in response to it is something else entirely, the chain of compulsive causation
is broken and a moment of freedom is born.
The clear implication here is that mindfulness helps us to stand back from the
welter of emotions — the stream of thoughts, images and sensations which often
overwhelm our conscious minds — to achieve a form of expanded vision which
allows us access to moments of freedom. Can this present moment level of con-
sciousness enable us to move in the direction of freedom of thought and action?
Neuroscience has shown that mindfulness meditation changes the brain
patterns of meditators (Siegel 2007; Goleman 2003; Doidge 2007; Gilbert 2009)
through increasing left brain activation to enhance positive feelings and emo-
tional resilience. Since meditators have ‘chosen’ to change their brains in this
way, could we say that they have expanded their scope for experiencing the
moments of freedom noted by Olendzki (2010) and Siegel (2010)? This seems a
reasonable suggestion though it does not, of course, answer all the questions
posed by Harris and Blackmore since they could pose the further query concern-
ing the cause of the turn to Buddhist practice or mindfulness meditation in the
rst place. Can mindfulness practice respond to such further questions?
Mindfulness and freedom
Mindfulness practice enhances freedom by expanding the human capacity
for being in the here and now, a state which, arguably, transcends the normal
sequence of past/present/future causality. Much of the time, the mind is in a
state of undirected ux as it xes on one object after another in a seemingly ran-
dom and dissipated fashion. By ‘cultivating mindfulness’, the Dalai Lama reminds
us, ‘we learn rst to become aware of this process of dissipation, so that we can
gently ne-tune the mind to follow a more directed path towards the objects on
which we wish to focus’ (2005, 160). It is important to note that such attention has:
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
a deliberate intention that helps us select a specic aspect or a characteristic of an
object. The continued, voluntary application of attention is what helps us maintain
a sustained focus on the chosen object. Training in attention is closely linked with
learning how to control our mental processes. (2005, 161)
The mindfulness literature suggests that — through this training in attention
— the control of mental processes achieved is as near as possible that humans
can approximate to free will. The move from a ‘doing’ to a ‘being’ mode which
is characteristic of mindfulness might be as near as we can get to circumscrib-
ing worries arising from the past/present/future causal ow of determinism. As
Segal, Williams and Teasdale (2002, 73) put it:
In doing, it is often necessary to compute the future consequences of goal-related
activity … As a result, in doing mode, the mind often travels forward to the future
or back to the past, and the experience is not one of actually being ‘here’ in the pre-
sent moment much of the time. By contrast, in being mode, the mind has ‘nothing
to do, nowhere to go’ and so processing can be dedicated exclusively to processing
moment-by-moment experience.
Adopting a denition of sati, mindfulness, as that of ‘lucid awareness’, Bodhi
views this perspective as providing a ‘connection between its two primary canon-
ical meanings: as memory and as lucid awareness of present happenings’ (2013,
25). It is in these moments of lucid awareness that the employment of skilful
means may provide some access to those moments of freedom in which future-
oriented intentions and volitions can be formed.
Blackmore suggests that the only time that we are fully aware we are conscious
is when we ask the question ‘Am I conscious now?’ (2011, 164–165). Just as we
can only be conscious in the present moment of asking this question, so we can
only experience a form of freedom in the here and now of that ‘mindsight’ which
allows us to stand back and view the internal workings of our mental processes.
Repetti (2010, 195) expresses similar sentiments in arguing that:
In meditation, one practices freedom while being pushed or pulled by rst-order
mental uctuations and volitions and pushing or pulling back against their cur-
rents. Meditation is a practice behavior, like weight lifting, that gradually enhances
mental freedom the more one meditates in action — when ‘chopping wood and
carrying water,’ as a Buddhist adage has it. Each Meditation adds a metaphorical
‘quantum of mental freedom’ to the increasingly-free meditative mind, akin to a
grain of sand added to others in the construction of a heap.
Conclusion: Buddhist mindfulness and free will
The wise attention fostered though mindfulness allows us those moments of
calm ‘mindsight’ in which we can observe and stand back from the past/pre-
sent/future stream of consciousness and thus expand our understanding and
control of possible futures in the ‘here and now’ of meditative spaciousness. Such
‘quanta of freedom’, as Repetti describes them, enhance our capacity for subvert-
ing those aspects of consciousness which constrain or determine thoughts, feel-
ings and actions. Such a capacity is one which — like the fostering of knowledge
and understanding — requires education and development exemplied by those
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138 Terry Hyland
forms of training incorporated in a number of contemporary mindfulness-based
programmes (Crane 2009; Siegel 2007). The internal freedom which may result
from the employment of skilful means in all spheres of life requires forms of
training and inculcation of the sort usually associated with rich and deep ‘thera-
peutic’ educational development (Hyland 2009).
The Buddhist origins of such ideas are exemplied in the ‘Simile of the Six
Animals’ Sutta (Bodhi 2000, 1255–1257) in which the Buddha explains the impor-
tance of mindfulness of the body as a way of restraining unwholesome mental
states. Mindfulness functions as a ‘strong pillar or post’, a way of enhancing pre-
sent-moment awareness by training the senses so that ‘the mind does not pull
in the direction of agreeable mental phenomena nor are disagreeable mental
phenomena repulsive’ (2000, 1257). In commenting on this teaching, Olendzki
(2010, 93) observes:
We are used to thinking of freedom as being free to do what we want, but the
Buddha sees real freedom as being free from wanting. We tend to think of the
post as the fetter, and freedom as being able to obtain agreeable objects of sense
— whereas the Buddha considers the pursuit of pleasure to be the fetter, and mind-
fulness offers us the chance to break free of its bonds. Perhaps internal freedom is
ultimately more valuable than external freedom.
Hard-headed determinists might still want to claim that such states of mind-
fulness must have been caused by antecedent states. In answer to this, we might
say that outside of nirvāṇa (or some fantasy utopia) limitless freedom is an impos-
sible ideal — a chimera that is not worth pursuing. The benets of mindfulness
— validated by over two millennia of Dharma practice and, more recently, by the
data of neuroscience — are achievable ideals and, arguably, as close as humans
can approximate to freedom. Moreover, the qualities produced and choices made
during present-moment mindfulness have been shown to be conducive to the
fostering of compassion, lovingkindness, equanimity and sympathetic joy — all
of which are, arguably, of more lasting value than putative notions of unbridled
freedom.
In answer to the really difcult question noted earlier concerning the chance
nature of the turn to mindfulness practice in the rst place, I would offer the
suggestion that — like knowledge, understanding, morality and general culture
— mindfulness is far too important to be left to the lottery of life chances with all
its attendant vicissitudes and vagaries. It ought to be an essential ingredient, a
part of the core curriculum, of all education systems, and the growth of interest
in mindfulness in schools and colleges in America and Europe in recent years is
highly promising in this respect (Burnett 2011; Hyland 2011). As an inspirational
mission statement for this educational project, it would be difcult to better
Olendzki’s (2010, 158) observation that:
The goal of becoming a better person is within the reach of us all, at every moment.
The tool for emerging from the primitive yoke of conditioned responses to the tan-
gible freedom of the conscious life lies just behind our brow. We need only invoke
the power of mindful awareness in any action of body, speech or mind to elevate
that action from the unconscious reex of a trained creature to the awakened
choice of a human being who is guided to a higher life by wisdom.
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Mindfulness, Free will and Buddhist Practice
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