Fate or freedom

Here is the objection that a thoughtful reader has been holding since the fifth chapter, and it deserves the whole chapter it now gets.

If the circumstances of my life are the ripened fruit of deeds I cannot remember, then in what sense am I free at all? Is a human life anything more than the reading-out of a verdict passed long ago, in a court that adjourned before I was born? The doctrine of karma can sound, stated carelessly, exactly like fate. And fate, real fate, was a live option in ancient India, held by serious people. The tradition had to define karma against it, and the definition is the spine of everything the last movement of this treatise will offer.

The road not taken

There were genuine fatalists in ancient India, and the karma traditions knew them and rejected them.

They were the Ajivikas, a movement contemporary with the Buddha, and their central doctrine was niyati: strict, unbending destiny. Everything that happens, the Ajivikas taught, is fixed by an impersonal necessity, and no effort, no discipline, no striving can alter the course a soul must run. The site’s myth-busting journal, what ‘karma’ doesn’t mean, already names this school as the true fatalists against whom the karma thinkers set themselves, and the point bears repeating here because it is so easily lost. Karma is not niyati. The whole karma tradition, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain alike, defined itself in opposition to the doctrine that effort is useless. If karma had meant fixed destiny, it would have been Ajivika doctrine, and the Ajivikas were precisely the opponents.

Hold that historical fact, because it settles the crude version of the question. A doctrine born in argument against fatalism is not a form of fatalism.

The oldest form of the question

The tradition had been asking what governs our lot for a very long time before it had the word karma to answer with.

The Svetashvatara Upanishad, one of the more philosophical of the early Upanishads, opens by laying the whole menu of possibilities on the table. At 1.2, it asks whether the cause of things is kala, time; or svabhava, inherent nature; or niyati, necessity; or yadrccha, chance; or the bhutas, the material elements; or the purusha, the conscious self. Six candidate explanations for why a life goes as it goes, set side by side and weighed. The passage is remarkable for its openness. It does not begin from the answer; it begins from the question, and it treats the rival theories as worth naming.

The tradition’s mature answer, worked out across the schools, is that karma is the true account, and that karma is precisely the option that preserves responsibility, because karma is made by the agent. Time and chance and blind necessity all put the cause outside the person. Karma puts it inside. That is its whole moral appeal, and it is why the tradition chose it over its five rivals. A universe governed by karma is one in which what you are is, at bottom, what you have done.

The strongest case for freedom

No text presses the freedom of the agent further than the Yoga Vasistha, a vast philosophical work cast as the sage Vasistha’s counsel to the young prince Rama. On the question of fate against effort, it is close to militant, and it gives the tradition its boldest anti-fatalist argument.

Vasistha’s move is to dissolve fate into effort. Daiva, destiny, he argues, is not a foreign power ruling over us from outside. What we call fate is simply purushartha, self-effort, from earlier lives: the accumulated momentum of our own past striving, now met as circumstance. Fate is not someone else’s decree. It is your own earlier exertion, returned. And because it is only past effort, it can be overcome by present effort, the way a stronger current overcomes a weaker one. Vasistha’s image is blunt: present self-effort masters the self-effort of the past as a grown man masters a child. When the effort of this life outweighs the momentum of the last, he says, one’s karma is remade.

This is the doctrine of prarabdha pushed to its most hopeful edge. The arrow already in flight must land, yes. But the archer of this life is drawing new arrows with a strength the past cannot dictate, and the sum of a person’s future is not sealed. The Yoga Vasistha leans so far toward freedom that some readers have found it almost reckless, and the treatise should note that its emphasis is not the whole tradition’s. Where the devotional schools stress dependence on grace, and the ritualists stress the inexorability of results, the Yoga Vasistha stresses the sovereign power of the striving self. These are differences of weight, held within a shared frame, and this treatise lets each keep its emphasis.

The reconciliation the tradition actually holds

Put the pieces together and the tradition’s settled position is neither fate nor unlimited freedom. It is a division of the field, and it is worth stating in one line, because it is the answer to the whole chapter.

Of your karma, one portion is fixed and one portion is free. The fixed portion is prarabdha, the ripened karma being lived out as this body and its broad circumstances, the arrow past recall. The free portion is kriyamana, the karma you are making now, with every choice of the three doors. You did not choose the hand you were dealt. You are choosing, this hour, how it is played, and the playing generates the hand of a life to come. Fate governs the setting. Freedom governs the response. And the response, the tradition insists, is where a human being actually lives.

The philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan put the reconciliation as clearly as anyone: the cards are given to us, and we did not deal them, but the way we play them is our own. The past conditions; it does not compel. To read karma as compulsion is to mistake a conditioned freedom for no freedom at all.

There is a whole tradition, though, that this chapter has set to one side, and it is the tradition that surrounds the reader most closely. The doctrine of fate and freedom has been argued so far in terms of the single soul and its own account. But no soul acts alone. Every life is bound up with other lives, and the karma of a person is transacted, mostly, through other people. Before the treatise can ask how anyone gets free, it has to ask why we are so bound to each other in the first place. Why these parents. Why this love. Why this enemy.

That is the country of runanubandha, and the fourth movement of this treatise now enters it.