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in which all elements organically interact as a whole to give continuous birth to things, then the fact of bad things happening to good people need not be construed as a phenomenon of evil” (Ng, Review of Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane, 337). Thus, suffering is the result of the degeneration of mores, the ritual order, and evil is extrinsic to the world. In the optimistic view of efficacy of human moral agency, any resentment against heaven reflected an awareness of the gap between what ought to be—the mandate of heaven—and what is—ordinary imperfect behavior. The central question was not the problem of evil and suffering, but how to reestablish the moral order.

15. Marchal and Wenzel, “Chinese Perspectives on Free Will,” 374–388.

16. This theme is outside the scope of this essay, and I will mention only a few classical theories. For Spinoza, free will is just a self-deception, it is like “a drunken man [who] believes that he utters from the free decision of his mind words which, when he is sober, he would willingly have withheld” (Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Prop. II). People believe themselves to be free because they know what they want, but they do not know why they want; human freedom thus lies in the ignorance of the causes which determine desires, not on their absence: “[w]e are in many ways driven about by external causes, and […] like waves of the sea driven by contrary winds we toss to and fro unwitting of the issue and of our fate.” (Ethics, Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions, LIX); and “[i]n the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity (Ethics, Part II, Prop. XLVIII). “[People are] conscious of their own actions and appetites, but ignorant of the causes whereby they are determined to any particular desire (IV, Preface) [… they] think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. […] If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own” (I, Appendix). Thus, freedom means acting according to the necessary nature of man, becoming “one” with the world, after being aware of causes by which we are determined. Thus, there can be no absolute freedom of the will because all events in the natural world, including human actions and choices, are determined in accord with the natural laws of the universe. An action