Thanks for that intriguing, thoughtful response. I see that if Buddhism entails determinism, the kinds of questions I asked might be wrongheaded from a Buddhist perspective. But it doesn’t seem as simple as saying that determinism justifies everything that happens, whether it be enlightened or unenlightened effects of understanding or of delusion, respectively.

I noticed, for example, a tension in your response. On the one hand, you say there’s no leaf or individual self, because everything is united in the quantum field (or perhaps according to some other way of characterizing the cosmic unity). On the other hand, you say, “we do what we do because we are shapes of suchness. We act according to our understanding…We act with compassion for sentient beings because that's how humans tend to behave when they embody clarity of vision.” And again, you say, “Our bodies do what they do.”

So you have recourse to two levels of explanation, first to the determinism of the totalizing, cosmic viewpoint in which “Everything is doing every thing. We are not acting independently and are incapable of doing so”; second, to the local level in which you understand why a leaf and a person behave differently because of their different “suchness” or “shape.”

I’m sure Buddhists have ways of reconciling those two levels. My question would be whether any way of making sense of them wouldn’t imply at least the utility of speaking as though particulars were independent after all. That’s how special levels of explanation arise in the sciences, when we observe local regularities or patterns of activity that have a separate order. We posit natural laws that enable us to predict how those systems unfold under certain conditions, and that’s the empirical kind of understanding.

You seem to be accepting that local level of explanation on at least a pragmatic basis, but I suspect you’d have trouble following through with that, without going as far as to posit some degree of freewill and ego in the case of clever mammals like us.

This is a problem I’ve had with Buddhists and other mystics. They say local phenomena are illusory, but “illusion” is slippery in this context because it doesn’t mean “unreal.” On the contrary, mystics often treat particulars as real enough, as nodes in the quantum field or what have you, that behave differently than the whole field. So a leaf is different from a person. We can understand the differences by positing different natures or “shapes.” For example, we explain human behaviour by positing a mind, a relatively autonomous self. Is that self an illusion or a reality that emerges from natural complexification? And what would be the difference between the two? I don’t see much difference there at all; it’s just that talk of “illusions” enables mystics to dismiss the implications of a multilevel reality.

You also say at a few points that there’s no need to venture into philosophy to understand why things happen as they do, since it’s best to just experience them happening. I assume that line of argument springs from Zen Buddhism’s skepticism about reason. That trust in intuition and first-order experience strikes me as dubious and potentially sinister, however. If we still deferred to our native, prehistoric way of perceiving events, we might be free of certain First World problems, but we also wouldn’t be enlightened in the scientific sense. Scientists were skeptical not just of religion but of human intuitions and biases. They got around those inherent biases by developing a form of objectivity. So it seems to me there are two conflicting forms of enlightenment at issue, both of which may have advantages and downsides.

You compare the behaviour of planets and sunflowers to that of people, but that begs the question. We don’t need the animistic hypothesis to understand how a sunflower works. We don’t need to posit a mind in the flower to account for its way of interacting with everything else, because it doesn’t seem free of whatever system it’s in. Not so with people.

Again, I appreciate that unenlightened people would behave differently than enlightened ones, given that the degree of understanding would be a factor in the causal chain. But the question is whether the causal chain in the brain is so complex that the best explanation of its behaviour ends up positing a relatively free mind or self. You only seem to evade that inevitability by speaking so vaguely of “shapes” and “suchness.” A human brain isn’t just a shape that can be encompassed by geometry. It’s a highly complex, partly spontaneous system that isn’t enslaved to its environment. That’s quite apparent at the local level, so once you accept the merit of that level of explanation, you seem to me obliged to accept the reality of those “egoistic illusions.”