Life and fate

I'm inspired to write this post after reading a friend's blog article comparing Fate and Life to a game of mahjong. As a sidenote I have many thoughts and reflections which I got too lazy to blog about. Writing something in blog form takes much more effort and time so as to make it easier and nicer to read. But blogging is a good way of sharing (though I have little idea whether anyone other than yours truly visits this blog; its too abstract and complicated for many)

In brief, Kgim likens playing mahjong to living our lives in the sense that we are both subjected to predetermined fate and the fate we make ourselves. A Mahjong players game is very much affected by the tiles he draws and his opponents' strategies, but he can still adapt his game to his environment. Life is partly determined by fate, but you are still the one holding your cards (ahem, tiles).

Another friend's blog which I read sometime ago (can't manage to find it again), she wrote briefly about fate and life. Their are two schools of thought; one says that we control our life (refer to Terminator 2), the other says that our life and fate is predetermined and we cannot change it (refer to Terminator 3). The author prefers the 1st notion, because she doesn't like the idea that we are not in control of our own life.

My point of view echoes that of Kgim, the answer is somewhere between the two schools of thought. Buddhism says our fate is due to our past actions alone, so in other words, we are solely responsible for our own fate. Let me put this in a form of an equation (who says philosophy cannot have maths!?)


where t is the present, and -infinity spans back to an infinite number of lives

Now, if we consider t0 as the point of time when we are born and tDIE as the point of time we die, we can get our fate for this lifetime..



So its clear now that the first term contributes to our predestined fate in a classical sense. Why we were born the way we were, why we were lucky or unlucky in our early stages of life. Only the second term contains actions which we remember. These are the actions we take to shape our lives, to live our lives as we want it. The other_terms on the left side of the equations shows that our actions, past or present, might not contribute to our fate in this lifetime. So good people might not necessarily get a good life in this lifetime; hardworking people might not necessarily be successful.

Anyway, we shouldn't worry about our fate nor how our past actions will affect our future. You have to be enlightened to be able to solve the above equation anyway. What is done is done and we should concentrate on the present rather than dwell on the past.