Faith in Awakening by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (large extract)

"Any moment of experience consists of three things: (1) pleasures and pains resulting from past intentions, (2) present intentions, and (3) pleasures and pains immediately resulting from present intentions. Thus the present is not totally shaped by the past. In fact, the most important element shaping your present experience of pleasure or pain is how you fashion, with your present intentions, the raw material provided by past intentions. And your present intentions can be totally free.

This is how there is free will in the midst of causality. At the same time, the pattern in the way intentions lead to results allows us to learn from past mistakes. This freedom within a pattern opens the way to a path of mental training, mastered through experience, that can lead to the end of suffering. We practice generosity, virtue, and meditation to learn the power of our intentions and in particular to see what happens as our intentions grow more skillful. To fully test the power of intention, we work at making them so skillful that present intentions actually stop. Only when they stop can you prove for yourself how powerful they’ve been. And where they stop is where the unconditioned — the end of suffering — is found. From there you can return to intentions, but you’re no longer their captive or slave.

In presenting his teachings on karma and suffering, the Buddha offered empirical evidence to corroborate them — noting, for instance, how your reaction to another person’s misery depends on how attached you are to that person — but he never attempted a full-scale empirical proof. In fact, he heaped ridicule on his contemporaries, the Jains, who tried to prove their more deterministic teaching on karma by claiming that all those who kill, steal, lie, or engage in illicit sex will suffer from their actions here and now. “Haven’t you seen the case,” the Buddha asked, “where a man is rewarded by a king for killing the king’s enemy, for stealing from the king’s enemy, for amusing the king with a clever lie?” Even though the basic principle of karma is simple enough — skillful intentions lead to pleasure, unskillful intentions to pain — the dual principle of causality through which karma operates is so complex, like a Mandelbrot set, that you would go crazy trying to nail the whole thing down empirically.

So instead of an empirical proof for his teaching on karma, the Buddha offered a pragmatic proof: If you sincerely believe in his teachings on causality, karma, rebirth, and the four noble truths, how will you act? What kind of life will you lead? Won’t you tend to be more responsible and compassionate? If, on the other hand, you were to believe in any of the alternatives — such as a doctrine of an impersonal fate or a deity who determined the course of your pleasure and pain, or a doctrine that all things were coincidental and without cause — what would those beliefs logically lead you to do? If you acted consistently in line with them, would they allow you to put an end to suffering through your own efforts? Would they allow any purpose for effort at all? If, on the other hand, you refused to commit to a coherent idea of what human action can do, would you be likely to pursue a demanding path of practice all the way through to the end?

This was the kind of reasoning that the Buddha used to inspire faith in his Awakening and in its relevance to our own search for true happiness."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Faith in Awakening"