Stoics and Kamma in Lord of the Rings
This past month, as California governor Gavin Newsom was talking about fighting in a more provocative way against the authoritarian process unfolding in the US, he referenced the Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Seneca, saying “It’s not what happens to us. It’s how we respond to what happens to us that matters.” (Conversation with Heather Cox Richardson 8.14.25)
I like a governor who quotes philosophers, even though I wish this one had better positions on both Gaza and trans rights, among many other things. But you might’ve noticed that the Stoics are having a moment. There are new podcasts, influencers, and popular translations appearing. I’m basically happy to see all this—Stoicism is the western philosophy closest in spirit and wisdom to the Dhamma—though of course I wish people would find the Buddha instead. But the approach is as helpful now under our shaky, violent empire as it was under the Roman.
This bit that Newsom was saying is a very Buddhist-adjacent understanding of agency in response to conditions, and very close to the first and second Noble Truths. All sorts of painful and terrible things fill our world. Our responsibility is to our own reactivity and the choices we make moment to moment.
The thing the Dhamma has that the Stoics do not have in the same way is a practice. Although there is similar wisdom throughout the Greek and Roman tradition to what we find in the Buddhist discourses, we don’t find any practices parallel to meditation and absorption. There are a few references to what sound like mystical states, and it’s likely that Socrates had a kind of prophetic inner voice, but none of these philosophers elaborated a systematic program for training the heart and mind that leads to the kinds of states (particularly jhāna) that the Buddha did.
It is this inner training that helps us make increasingly more skillful choices, and the Buddha’s analysis of the nature of the person who makes choices is different, but the teaching on moral agency is essentially the same in the Buddha and the Stoics. Kamma is not so much about what happens to us, but about the agency and moral power that is available to us when conditions allow our best intentions to come forward. The Buddha understood that when we have the conditions to support making clear choices, and we are well taught and not deluded, our choices will naturally be both ethical and incline toward cessation. For without delusion and grasping, there is little left to do besides service of the well-being of others and delight in the beauty of the liberated heart.
The wisdom that we do not get to choose our circumstances, only our responses, is also what Gandalf famously replies to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
LotR is of course a classic binary morality tale, with an absolute evil and the heroes mostly unambiguously noble and good, with a few important exceptions—Boromir, but even more so Gollum-Sméagol. But in all morality tales we see an important aspect of the teaching on kamma: good action leads not necessarily to success and safety, but very reliably to wholesome states of heart and mind. Heroes are good not because they are necessarily skilled at what they are doing, or even successful, but because their hearts are good. The only real crisis in these kinds of stories is when the goodness—the good kamma—of a hero wavers.
If a hero is to be relatable to us—we whose goodness perhaps feels close to wavering all too often—they have to lose their path at some point, which narratives place usually just before the climax, since after moral crisis is overcome any further drama is meaningless. (This is also why the biography of the Buddha is exciting up to his awakening and then pretty boring for the next 45 years—he’s beyond moral crisis, so there’s never any real danger or drama.)
The only real moral crisis for Frodo is at the very last moment of his quest, where instead of willingly throwing the ring into the fire of Orodruin, Mt. Doom, he succumbs to the greed that is the ring’s true power and claims it for himself. He has had such good kamma up to this point—the fruit of his goodness an almost unshakeable perseverance and trust in Gandalf and the elders who sent him on the quest, and perhaps in the creator themself, Ilúvatar—and has felt the fruit of that goodness in both his own state and in Sam’s friendship. But the addictive force of the ring overtakes him in the end, and he is saved only by the other strongest force of kamma in the room: Gollum’s, whose path has been so overcome by the ring that he has lost all contact with the more coherent Sméagol he had come close to stabilizing. Frodo and Gollum are of course mirrors of each other, ancestral siblings, as Sméagol is a hobbit of an earlier age.
In a beautiful Christian reflection by Anne Marie Gazzolo on the spiritual crisis of this moment, “The Ring Claims Frodo,” she quotes Tolkien recognizing that Gollum bestows a kind of grace on Frodo by breaking the ring from him right when Frodo had lost power to do so by his own will.
“[Gollum] did rob him and injure him in the end—but by a ‘grace’, that last betrayal was at a precise juncture when the final evil deed was the most beneficial thing anyone cd. have done for Frodo!” (Tolkien letters 234)
We don’t use the word or concept grace much in the Dhamma, but it’s a good one for the sense that there are moments when our kamma has created conditions where we will be supported beyond our ability for morally skillful volitional responses. Frodo’s goodness all along has been sparing and nurturing Gollum, as Bilbo’s had been in the first moments with the ring. Now it returns mysteriously to him in this moment of final injury and salvation. There is something about the accumulated goodness of a person or system that remains in play even when the will of that system is defeated.
Our world is not, of course, Middle Earth, and our fight against greed, hatred, and delusion is not a binary morality tale. Most of our enemies (all?) are more Gollum than Sauron, corrupted into evil by a power greater than their own will. Maybe Sauron (like his model, Lucifer) is greed anthropomorphized, but grasping (taṇhā) is the ring, encircling our agency with a compulsion foreign to the hearts’ true longing for peace. Resisting it takes significant effort, but the conditions for that effort arising are created by our own past actions, in a virtuous cycle. That virtuous cycle then also affects others and feeds back into ourselves through the actions of others, sometimes exactly when we ourselves are unable to act wisely. Kamma offers not just responsibility for our actions but grace based in our relationships with others.
**
The thing that made me grieve the hardest as a child reading Lord of the Rings was all the elves leaving at the end—leaving the world in the hands of Men (humans, but I’ll leave that gendered)—turning their backs on the world that clearly would become our world: medieval warfare turning inexorably more industrial. By the time tens of thousands of young men are dying in a single day in front of the machine guns of the first world war, the elves have been gone from Europe for a millennium, maybe two. I could tell, as I was just cresting out of childhood into awareness of the larger situation, that the world they left behind had its beauties, but was profoundly grim.
You have only to look at the faces of some of those with the most power in the world right now to know that the ring is never completely destroyed. Its power remains in the world as unquenchable greed that poisons the hearts of all those who touch it. Their actions—their kamma—follows their corrupted state, and they cause pain and loss wherever they go. The Buddha said that there was no conceivable beginning to greed, hatred, and delusion. They are woven through the fabric of saṁsāra, and they are behind what the world gives us again and again.
We have our moral center, born of whatever wise view we’ve grown into, our agency, and Sam Gamgee—spiritual friendship—with which to do the best we can with the time that is given us. And sometimes when all that still isn’t enough, grace comes to us—not from the beautiful, distant, ever-good elves, but from a strange, ancient, cut off part of our self that we’ve refused through compassion to reject.
