Buddhist Romanticism

and practices and to skillful views—that give rise to skillful states of
becoming (§§11–13). Once these activities have done their work, though,
they have to be abandoned. An image in the Canon compares this strategy
to the act of going to a park: Desire is required to make the effort to go to
the park, but when the park is reached, the desire is abandoned. Another
image is of taking a raft across a river: You hold onto the raft while crossing
the river, but when you reach the further shore you leave the raft there as
you go on your way.
For this reason, there are many stages in the path, a fact reflected in the
two factors of the path that, under the heading of discernment or wisdom,
most directly concern us here: right view and right resolve.
Right view consists of the hypotheses that need to be adopted to follow
the path. These fall into three main levels.
The first level, called mundane right view, adopts the principles that
pleasure and pain result from your actions, that these actions can have
results that carry from one lifetime to subsequent lifetimes, and that there
are people who have practiced well to the point where they know these
principles through direct knowledge, and not just through hearsay (§62).
These principles fulfill two functions. They explain how the path can
work and they also give motivation for following it.
In their function of explaining, they take stands on three major
philosophical issues: the nature of action, the workings of causality, and the
question of freedom of choice.
Action, or kamma, the Buddha identified with the intention motivating
thoughts, words, and deeds (AN 6:63). This is why any attempt to solve the
problem of suffering and stress must focus on the mind’s intentions.
In terms of causality, the Buddha taught that each person’s happiness
and pain result from past actions and from present actions. If everything
came from past actions, nothing could be changed in the present, and there
would be no possibility of following a new path of action (§8). There has to
be freedom in choosing what one’s present actions will be. For there to be
such a possibility, causality cannot be linear or mechanical. The Buddha’s
depiction of causality is a more complex process—he compares it to the
flow of water—in which results can turn around and have an impact on
their causes, just as streams can have eddies and counter-currents.
From the aspiring student’s point of view, freedom of choice has to be
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