Why Does Anything Happen?

Amazingly, almost no one ever stops to think about why does anything happen. Actually, that's not strictly true -- some of us do occasionally stop and think about it. But usually it is only about some specific thing. It is extremely rare to find anyone who is concerned with finding out why do things, all things, happen.

What Do You Think?

So what do you say? Why do things happen? Why is is that anything happens in the first place?

As we go through life, we cannot help but notice that things happen all the time. Things change, and each change is an event that makes us realize that there are things happening all the time.

But why is the world organized that way? When I ask my students about it, they usually tend to split into two extreme camps:

1. Divine intervention -- things happen according to the God's will
2. Random occurrence -- pure chance (or, chaotic changes)

The first camp (i.e. the divine intervention) relies on the existence of a divine, omnipotent being who created the world, and is willing everything that takes place in the world. This theory implies that the world has a beginning, and consequently, will have an end.

The second camp (i.e. the chaos theory) holds that everything is pure chance, a capricious or whimsical outcome of the laws of probability. Some events exhibit higher degrees of the probability pattern, and hence impress upon us the idea of a more or less organized regularity. But most events lack this regularity, and are merely viewed as a random rolling of dice.

Maybe you see yourself siding with one of the two camps we've mentioned above. But if I asked you to abstain from joining either of the two camps and yet taking a stance, what would you say?

What Do We Think?

As dedicated practitioners of the Buddhist Middle Way, we tend to avoid extremes, such as divine intervention, or pure chance. As Middle Way practitioners, we live in a godless world, but at the same time we hold that random, chancey world would not only be utterly meaningless, it would be utterly impossible.

While not relying on divine intervention and yet avoiding the blind chance of a chaotic world, we firmly stand the ground of recognizing that the world is fully ordered. Put slightly differently, we know that nothing ever happens without a very good reason.

Regardless of how many universes may exist in the world, none of them is regulated by a god-like figure, nor is any of them governed by the pure chance. All the possible universes are subject to the strict laws governing the occurrence of any and all events.