Free Will, Karma, and the 200-Millisecond Gap | A Teishō on Chinryū and the Rice Pail (Blue Cliff Record, Case 74) and the Prereflective Mind

Sometimes you look at a case, and there’s a delicate bouquet of harmonics that emerges that triggers a whole bunch of karmic selves within you. And this morning is the case I want to talk about that a lot that way for me.

So it’s going to open on a Western philosophical note, because that’s where I was transported when I first looked at it. So there’s a late philosopher — he’s also a neuroscientist — his name is Benjamin Libet. And back in the early ’80s he ran a series of experiments that he called the Readiness Potential Experiments.

They were somewhat simple rather, and subtle and nuanced in what came out of them. But actually, it was earth-shattering in terms of making us look carefully at a debate that’s been going on for a long time: the debate between what’s known as free will and determinism — a debate that many of us in philosophy feel will never get sufficiently answered.

And I think from a conceptual standpoint, we kind of have come to a stalemate. But of course our practice enables us to see through that conceptual stalemate. But it’s not easy to do because those concepts are large.

Here’s what he did. He wired people’s brains with EEG electrodes and gave them a simple instruction:

“I don’t want you to plan anything.
I don’t want you to time anything.
I don’t even want you to anticipate anything.
I just want you to sit there and at some completely spontaneous moment of your own choosing, just do me a favor and flex your wrist and move your finger — a simple thing.
And tell us the exact instant you become aware that you’ve decided to move.”

So they sit and they wait. And at some moment they say “now,” after they move their wrist or their finger — and they move. And Libet has it all. He has the movement, the reported moment of choosing, and he has the brain waves associated with all this choosing.

And what he discovers is this: before people know they’ve decided to move — before conscious awareness ever wakes up and claims ownership — the brain is already ramping activity to the motor cortex. So about 550 milliseconds before movement, neural preparation is underway.

But conscious awareness of deciding only shows up about 200 milliseconds before movement. So, meaning for roughly 350 milliseconds, the body’s already preparing, the brain’s already committed, something is already acting, and yet consciousness shows up late on the scene and says, “Oh yeah, that was my choice. I’m doing that.”

Strange, yeah? Kind of almost sounds a lot like karmic momentum the way we talk about it.

All the conditioning. All the unhealed wounds. All of our fear and trauma, craving, memory — and this really iron, monolithic story. Everything your nervous system is carrying forward. Everything the events in history are carrying forward. Every survival strategy that once protected you but now controls you. All of that’s constantly in motion.

By the time we walk into the moment, the karmic river is already roaring, and we begin to wonder: is the goose already cooked? Yeah?

But as a part of this, Libet also found something else. He discovered that even though the brain starts to fire about 350 milliseconds before we know it, there’s a tiny flickering window — about 200 milliseconds — between the moment we become conscious of the urge and the moment the muscle actually moves.

And in that sliver of time, he found that we have the ability to countermand. We can say “no.” And so Libet calls this free won’t.

We might not be able to stop the karmic wave from rising in the brain, but we have the capacity to refuse to let it reach the shore. And this is the gap. This is the pause.

It means that even if the river of conditioning is very fast — is already roaring — you’re not just a small powerless leaf being swept away. You’re the one who can plant that oar in the water of mind, clear through to the basin of the stream.

You can’t control necessarily what the nervous system suggests, but you can absolutely channel how it manifests through your volition. Sometimes the most awake thing we can do isn’t to dance — right? — but to stop the momentum before that dance and before those steps turn into harm.

We often get lulled into a feeling that Zen is about doing something holy or righteous or wholesome. But in that 200-millisecond gap, Zen is sometimes the courage to not do what the ghost of your past is begging you to do.

And the Christian tradition is also not silent on this. St. Paul says:

“For the good which I would do, I do not;
and the evil which I would not do, that I do.” - Romans 7:19

This is the split. It’s the experience of being dragged by something older and deeper than our decision-making ability.

And then sitting with this, it’s almost as if Jean-Paul Sartre walked into the room. And instead of calming anything down in my mind, he turned the temperature up even higher, because Sartre says we don’t live as detached spectators analyzing our choices. We’re already acting. We’re already revealing ourselves. We’re already engaging in the world.

And this takes us right into the center of what has to be said out loud before reflection, before self-analysis, before explanation, before justification. It’s flowing.

Consciousness is not first an idea. Consciousness is lived. It’s embodied. It’s already in motion.

Sartre says that every act of consciousness toward the world is already accompanied by a non-positional awareness of the self — meaning we are already ourselves in action before we ever think about ourselves in action.

Reflection comes later. It narrates. It excuses. It blames. It spiritualizes. It also lies.

But now Libet, Paul, and Sartre stand in the same storm saying — in three very different languages — freedom isn’t exactly always what you imagine it to be.

You’re not sitting safely above your life making decisions detached from reality. You’re already moving. You’re already committing. You’re already revealing your life before you can explain it or even recognize it.

It’s not theory now whether we’re determined or free or somewhere in between. Ultimately we just have to live. We still act. We still harm. We still inherit suffering. And far too often, we still pass that suffering forward.

So if karmic momentum is real, and if the river is roaring, and if something in us is already acting before we consciously choose — then what is responsibility? What is freedom? What is awakening?

And right there, into that tension, our practice emerges.

There’s a case in the Hekiganroku — the 74th case — called Chinyū and the Rice Pail:

Every day at mealtime, Master Chinyū would personally lift the great rice pail, step out in front of the monks’ hall, and do a kind of joyful dance. Laughing aloud, he would call out, “Bodhisattvas, come eat!”

Setchō said: “For him to act like this, Chinyū was not good-hearted.”

Later, a monk asked Chōkei, “When that old master said, ‘Bodhisattvas, come eat,’ what did he mean?”
Chōkei replied, “It is much like joyful praise at the time of a meal.”

That’s the case.

Simple. But if you sit with it and let it expand inside you, it’s ferocious.

So first, the characters.
The characters aren’t props. They’re living forces. They each bring something profound into the conversation.

Master Chinyū — we don’t have a lot of information about him in the historical record. He isn’t recorded because he gave brilliant talks. He isn’t recorded because he structured a school. We have no remaining written treatises from him. There’s no philosophical framework he promulgated, no astounding exegesis. He just shows up because he embodied something. And generations later we’re still looking at him because of that.

He took responsibility for feeding the community personally, and he became that role. He didn’t just feed them. He didn’t drag his feet into the kitchen muttering about duty. He didn’t present himself as a pious servant-leader in some sad, holy posture. He danced. He laughed. He lifted the rice pail like a sacred offering.

He called out into the world, “Bodhisattvas, come eat.”
He calls them bodhisattvas — not potential bodhisattvas, not theoretical awakened ones. Already bodhisattvas. Already complete and whole as they are.

He doesn’t think about compassion. He doesn’t analyze the virtue of generosity. He doesn’t reflect on what it means to be grateful. He simply is already in motion. He is a living embodiment of what we just explored with Sartre.

Before realization or reflection, before conceptualization, before the mind narrates a pious story — this is life in flesh and bone. This is what service looks like before ego gets hold of it.

And then we have Setchō.

Many of you have been well acquainted with him whether you know it or not. He is the compiler of the Blue Cliff Record. He’s a poet-master who put all that together.

And his role is important here because he refuses to let us sentimentalize Chinyū. If Chinyū is the bright, burning embodiment, then Setchō is the analytical eraser. He comes forward and says, “Don’t get confused. In acting like this, Chinyū wasn’t good-hearted.”

That sounds harsh. What Setchō is doing is preventing us from moralizing the story. Don’t reduce this to, “Isn’t that such a pious activity? Isn’t that sweet?” He fed the monks so nicely and nobly.

Don’t think this is about performance or sacrifice. He’s not going to allow us to turn this into a sermon about being good people. Because when you name it as goodness, you’ve already left the living fire and stepped back into reflection — the reflection that creates ego and reinforces identity, the very karmic machinery that generates suffering.

Setchō is protecting the mystery from becoming domesticated.

And then we have Chōkei.

Chōkei is a master of grounded clarity. He represents calm realization. A monk comes to him later and says, “When the ancient master said, ‘Bodhisattvas, come eat,’ what did he mean?” And Chōkei says, “Much like joyful praise at the time of a meal.”

On the surface it sounds like he trivialized it. But having just walked through Libet and Paul and Sartre — the stream of karmic momentum and the prereflective self — Chōkei’s line lands differently.

He isn’t saying, “Oh, it was cute.”
He’s saying: if you only look at the surface, it looks like joy. It looks like festivity. But don’t be fooled by that.

This is life expressed freely.
This is the world feeding itself.
This is a joy that arises when the self drops away and only nourishment remains.

You can’t manufacture this. You can’t decide to become this. This is what happens when karmic momentum breaks open and we begin to steer wisely instead of being carried mindlessly downstream.

This is what it looks like when a human being is no longer primarily living from reflection but from the prereflective life.

In our tradition we call that embodying our true nature.

Not just glimpsing the face before your parents were born, but actually living from it. A life lived prior to reflection rather than after justification.

That is why we practice. We don’t read these texts and then paint little footprints on the floor showing us how to dance. The dance dances us.

It isn’t something you learn in the usual way. It’s something you yield to. Something you have to get out of the narrative self to allow.

So Setchō says Chinyū is “not good-hearted.” If you interpret Chinyū as a nice guy doing nice things, you’ve flattened the case into virtue and re-created ego.

That’s why the essential part of our practice is sitting and studying the self. Because only by seeing how we construct it do we loosen its grip.

We have to admit we are not in control — in fact, we seldom are. But in that honesty, something else can act.

We don’t become immoral. We become a-moral — not driven by self-image, but by what the situation actually requires.

We stop trying to impose goodness and instead become the response the moment calls for.

That is turning the bull. That is turning karmic momentum into nourishment.

So this week, as things get thick, and the voices say, “You’re not sitting enough. You’re not good enough,” don’t get lost in reflection. Look at what is right in front of you. Look at how you are called to act.

The longer you stay in self-judgment, the farther you drift from your life.

There is a space between perception and reaction. In that space lies our freedom.

And that is the practice.