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FATE, FREE WILL, KARMA AND VASANAS KOSLA VEPA PHD
I was going through an old book that I had picked up from my Mother about 3 or 4 years ago. Itwas titled "Dialog with the Guru', a collections of conversations that the Acharya of Sringeri, SriChandrasekhar Bharathi Swaminah, the late Sankaracharya of Sringeri Matha had with hisdisciples. I was particularly taken by the chapter titled Fate and free will. Note that the Acharyaspent most of his life during the first half of the twentieth century and the book itself waspublished in English probably before independence. But the message remained timeless and inmy opinion there remains considerable misunderstanding of the view that Indics have of theirrelationship to fate, especially in the minds of westerners. So here goes , selected excerpts fromthe dialog. The words speak for themselves, while i have added a few definitions;
FATE, FREE WILL, KARMA AND VASANAS
The subject of free will is an important one that has engaged the minds of philosophers both inthe eastern as well as in the western traditionA false paradigm often attributed to the Sanaatanik ( a votary of the philosophia perennis ,otherwise mischaracterized in common parlance as a Hindu), and perhaps to Orientalphilosophy in general, is the notion of the inevitability of fate and destiny. It is this they arguethat makes Hinduism a supine faith, steeped in passivity and acceptance of conditions withoutactively trying to change them, in contrast to what is allegedly the case in the Judeo Christianfaiths This is astonishing and gargantuan in the scale of the misrepresentation and hasunfortunately been internalized by a large section of the Hindu populace. The Dharma teaches just the opposite, namely that the individual is endowed with free will and the capability andthe responsibility to exercise such a free will and make appropriate choices with Viveka andVairagya. The choices one makes are governed by the Dharma, and the ethical value systemexpounded in another section on this page, without doubt, but it can hardly be disputed thatthey are available and it is false to contend that an individual is rendered helpless and paralyzedby the forces of destiny.I would like to excerpt certain passages from Chapter 4 of the Dialogues with the Guru talkswith Sri Chandrasekhar Bharathi Swaminah, late Sankaracharya of Sringeri Matha Compiled byR Krishnaswami Aiyar with an introduction by Paul Masson Oursel, Published by Chetana Ltd.,Bombay, 1956, with the intention of continuing a discussion in the forum. The publication itself is probably out of print, but I have digitized it under the following heading at my site
EXERCISE OF FREE WILL, VS .FATE AND KARMA
 
 
The first point the Acharya makes is that Fate and free will are two sides of the same coinQuote “Fate is past karma; free-will is present karma. Both are really one, that is, karma,though they may differ in the matter of time. There can be no conflict when they are reallyone.”Ed.note – Pl. refer to the definitions of the 3 kinds of Karma, namely Prarabda Karma, SanchitaKarma and Agami karma. The Tattvabodha defines these Yogas while expounding on theapproach to Jivanmuktah (Man of Realization). The exercise of free will is synonymous withAgami karma. The explanation of the 3 karmas is summarized in my web site in the page on ‘theethical value system of the Hindu’ Fate is associated with past karma and in particular the Sanchita karma. Prarabda Karma isassociated with those events which are outside of our volition and over which we have or hadno control. Our genetic predisposition is a typical example of Prarabda Karma, as are naturalcalamities like an asteroid striking the earth etc.Quote “The present is before you and, by the exercise of free-will, you can attempt to shape it.The past is past and is therefore beyond your vision and is rightly called adrishta, the unseen.You cannot reasonably attempt to find out the relative strength of two things unless both of them are before you. But, by our very definition, free-will, the present karma, alone is beforeyou and fate, the past karma, is invisible. Even if you see two wrestlers right in front of you, youcannot decide about their relative strength. For, one may have weight, the other agility; onemuscles and the other tenacity; one the benefit of practice and the other coolness of judgmentand so on. We can go on building arguments on arguments to conclude that a particularwrestler will be the winner. But experience shows that each of these qualifications may fail atany time or may prove to be a disqualification. The only practical method of determining theirrelative strength will be to make them wrestle. While this is so, how do you expect to find bymeans of arguments a solution to the problem of the relative value of fate and free-will whenthe former by its very nature is unseen!”Ed. Note – That the past is an ’adrishta’, the unseen, is an excellent insight. In fact this is a very
 
common phrase in Telugu (idi mana adrishtamu – this is the consequence of our (past) Sanchitakarma. Of course implicit in this statement is the notion that an individual goes through manylives, most of which he or she has no recollection. In fact the reality of human memory beingwhat it is, our recollection of events in our present life is also spotty and faulty, so one does nothave to invoke many previous lives, in order to accept the truth of this hypothesis.Quote “At the start, you must not be obsessed at all with the idea that there will be anyobstacle in your way. Start with boundless hope and with the presumption that there is nothingin the way of your exercising the free-will. If you do not succeed, tell yourself then that therehas been in the past a counter-influence brought on by yourself by exercising your free-will inthe other direction and, therefore, you must now exercise your free-will with re-doubled vigorand persistence to achieve your object. Tell yourself that, inasmuch as the seeming obstacle isof your own making, it is certainly within your competence to overcome it. If you do notsucceed even after this renewed effort, there can be absolutely no justification for despair, forfate being but a creature of your free-will can never be stronger than your free-will. Your failureonly means that your present exercise of free-will is not sufficient to counteract the result of the past exercise of it. In other words, there is no question of a relative proportion betweenfate and free-will as distinct factors in life. The relative proportion is only as between theintensity of our past action and the intensity of our present action.”The essence of the message is that an individual has the means at his/her disposal to negatethe effects of past (bad) Karma and create new (good) karma, the weapon of choice in thisendeavor being Free-will.Further , the Acharya goes on to expound on the role of the Vasanas that we tend toaccumulate in our passage through lifeQuote“This habit will generate in him a tendency to steal even when there is no necessity tosteal. It is this tendency which goes by the name Vasana. The power which makes you act as if against your will is only the Vasana which itself is of your own making. This is not fate. Thepunishment or reward, in the shape of pain or pleasure, which is the inevitable consequence of an act, good or bad, is alone the province of fate or destiny. The Vasana which the doing of anact leaves behind in the mind in the shape of a taste, a greater facility or a greater tendency fordoing the same act once again, is quite a different thing. It may be that the punishment or thereward of the past act is, in ordinary circumstances, unavoidable, if there is no counter-effort;but the Vasana can be easily handled if only we exercise our free-will correctly.
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