The Forerunner

of All Things
Buddhaghosa on Mind,
Intention, and Agency
z
maria   heim

1
 3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heim, Maria, 1969–
The forerunner of all things : Buddhaghosa on mind, intention, and agency / Maria Heim.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–933104–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–933103–1
(cloth : alk. paper)
1. Karma. 2. Theravada Buddhism—Doctrines. 3. Buddhaghosa. I. Title.
BQ4435.H45 2013
294.3’422—dc23
2013008728

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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For Steve
Mind is the forerunner of all things. Mind is chief, and they are
mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a wicked mind, suffering
follows even as the cartwheel follows the hoof of an ox.

Mind is the forerunner of all things. Mind is chief, and they are
mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness
follows even as one’s shadow stays near.
— dhammapada  1,2
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1
1. Constructing Experience: Intention in the Suttas 34
2. The Work of Intention: Mental Life in the Abhidhamma 83
3. Culpability and Disciplinary Culture in the Vinaya 132
4. Making Actions Intelligible: Intention and Mind in Stories 181

Conclusion 217
Bibliography 225
Index 239
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 Acknowledgments

one of my favorite passages in the Pāli canon has nanda declaring that
“half” the good life is friendship with good people, companionship with
good people, and closeness with good people, only to be corrected by the
Buddha to the effect that these constitute not half, but the whole of the
good life (S.v.2). The passage is speaking of the religious life, but I have
found that the Buddha’s affirmation of friendship with wise and help-
ful teachers is true for the intellectual life as well. My gratitude for such
intellectual friendship must go first to Charlie Hallisey for his sage advice
over many years, his care for my intellectual development, his perceptive
reading of draft chapters, and his sharing with me his Harvard course on
Buddhaghosa and Buddhist commentaries.
This project progressed only through the thoughtful guidance of
many friends and colleagues who participated in the various forums
in which parts of it were presented, including a workshop at Amherst
College, “Contours of the Moral Person”; the Five College Buddhist
Studies Faculty Seminar; the Harvard Divinity School lecture series and
conference, “Moral Worlds and Religious Subjectivities”; and insightful
audiences at Indiana University and University of Pennsylvania. More
specifically, I am very grateful to Beatrice Chrystall, Sarah LeVine, Steven
Collins, Lilian Handlin, Jock Reeder, Janet Gyatso, Georges Dreyfus, and
Jonathan Schofer for reading parts or all of the manuscript, in several
cases more than once. I am also very grateful for conversations with Aaron
Stalnaker and David Wills. Toward the end of the project, I benefited from
discussions with Buddhist scholars and neuroscientists at a workshop in
Telluride (John Dunne, Thupten Jinpa, Richard Davidson, and others) and
at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institutes. Many thanks also to Jay
Garfield for the time and meticulous care he put into the project reading
drafts and helping me shepherd it through its final stages.
x Acknowledgments

The book could not have been written without the generous material
support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and
two sabbatical leaves from Amherst College. I am grateful for the support
of the Religion Department at Amherst (Diane Dix, Andrew Dole, Robert
Doran, Tariq Jaffer, Susan Niditch, David Wills, and for a time, Jamal Elias)
for the amicable environment to work on the project. And I thank Paola
Zamperini for offering her comments on the manuscript and for her own
distinctive form of Buddhist companionship.
Finally, I  am always grateful to Steve for enduring this project with
good humor and consistently intelligent advice on how to make it better,
and to my little sons, Soren and Zack, just for being there. It is to Steve
that it is dedicated.
 Abbreviations for Pāli Texts

A Aṅguttaranikāya
As Atthasālinī (Dhammasaṅgaṇī-aṭṭhakathā)
Dhp Dhammapada
Dhp-a Dhammapada-aṭṭhakathā
D Dīghanikāya
Dhs Dhammasaṅgaṇī
Ja Jātaka-aṭṭhavaṇṇanā
Khp Khuddakapāṭha
Kv Kathāvatthu
Kv-a Kathāvatthu-aṭṭhakathā
Mil Milindapañho
Mp Manorathapūraṇī (Aṅguttaranikāya-aṭṭhakathā)
Mp-ṭ Sāratthamañjūsā (ṭīkā on Mp)
Nett Nettipakaraṇa
Paṭis Paṭisambhidāmagga
Paṭis-a Paṭisambhidāmagga-aṭṭhakathā
Pj I Paramatthajotikā I (Khuddakapāṭha-aṭṭhakathā)
Ps Papañcasūdanī (Majjhimanikāya-aṭṭhakathā)
Pv-a Paramatthadīpanī (Petavatthu-aṭṭhakathā)
S Saṃyuttanikāya
Sp Samantapāsādikā (Vinaya-aṭṭhakathā)
Spk Sāratthappakāsinī (Saṃyuttanikāya-aṭṭhakathā)
Sv Sumaṅgalavilāsinī (Dīghanikāya-aṭṭhakathā)
Vibh Vibhaṅga
Vibh-a Sammohavinodanī (Vibhaṅga-aṭṭhakathā)
Vism Visuddhimagga
Vism-mhṭ Visuddhimagga-mahāṭīkā
Yam Yamakapakaraṇa
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The Forerunner of All Things
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 Introduction

this book offers a philosophical exploration of intention and motiva-

tion—about what prompts us to do what we do. I offer this exploration by
investigating the ideas of the Buddha and his fifth-century ce commen-
tator, Buddhaghosa, both of whom were, like me, fascinated with what
intentions are, and why and under what circumstances we are inclined
to attribute them to ourselves and others. In a narrow sense, I focus on
Buddhist canonical and commentarial assertions that identify intention
as the central internal component of action, but in a much broader sense,
I explore the moral phenomenology and underlying anthropology in which
early Buddhist theories of mind, action, and morality were advanced and
understood. I argue that Buddhist ideas can contribute to many modern
discussions of intention because they suggest highly sophisticated yet
very different paradigms than we currently have for how we might think
about them.
My motivation in working on these questions stems from a dissatisfac-
tion with the dominant working understanding of moral agency current
today. This conception assumes an agent who acts according to beliefs,
desires, and reasons, but whose psychological depths are seldom alluded
to, much less explored. This agent is largely conceived of as free, rational,
and autonomous; evaluating the morality of her actions is largely a mat-
ter of evaluating her choices. Ethics is envisioned as a project of identify-
ing the right sorts of reasons and deliberations that should prompt her
choices or, in more virtue-oriented approaches, establishing the virtues
or qualities of character (themselves often arrived at via rational delibera-
tion) that should inform moral choice. Insofar as intention is paired with
choice, we are left with a notion of moral agency located in the movement
of the sovereign will.
2 the forerunner of all th ings

This dominant conception of the moral agent has traceable histori-

cal underpinnings in the modern West that have been well documented.1
What is surprising is how such a psychologically thin conception of the
moral agent comes to be imported into Buddhist understandings of
agency. This is surprising not so much for the anachronism it displays as
for the way it conceals a substantial body of psychological resources that
would offer an important counter to it. Buddhist texts, in fact, provide
some of the most complex investigations of moral psychology available in
human intellectual history, more intricate and far-reaching perhaps than
many models of the mind and agency available in contemporary cognitive
science. The moral phenomenology advanced in early Buddhist sources
suggests a complicated moral agency that may better account for the lived
and subjective experience of moral action.
We might also register some surprise at how little work has been done
on the textual resources in Buddhist studies that would alter the domi-
nant vision and, more narrowly, on the textual tradition we refer to as the
Theravāda. The importance of intention’s role in action (karma) in Buddhist
thought has been something of a truism in many modern textbook render-
ings of Buddhist ethics, yet little work has been done to see what this might
have meant in the canonical sources, not to speak of how it was interpreted
at the commentarial level. Texts that richly describe moral phenomenology,
chiefly the Abhidhamma literature, have been largely sidelined in current
Theravāda studies despite their enormous importance to many Buddhists
past and present. Additionally, despite being a monumental figure in the
intellectual history of the Theravāda, Buddhaghosa (and the commentarial
tradition he represents) has been widely neglected, though he offers very
pertinent and probing explorations of human experience. And finally, mod-
ern scholarship remains in the early stages of learning how to read the dif-
ferent genres and layers of Buddhist literature that would help us to learn
from them. This book offers an initial attempt to advance our understand-
ing of Theravāda on many of these fronts.

Learning How to Read

Scholars of Buddhism interested in tracing the development of moral
thought in ancient India have frequently noted, often with considerable

1. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good; Rosenthal, The Era of Choice; Schneewind, The Invention
of Autonomy.
 Introduction 3

admiration and approval, the Buddha’s assertion in the Aṅguttara: “it is

intention (cetanā) that I call action (kamma); intending, one acts by body,
speech, and mind” (A.iii.415). This focus on intention is said to have chal-
lenged and transformed Indic thinking about karma in radically new
ways.2 No longer is karma simply a matter of ritual action (as Brahmanical
tradition is said to have regarded it); it becomes a moral idea. This move,
according to one scholar, “ethicised the universe,” offering a revolutionary
shift toward defining karma in moral terms and then locating morality
in internal processes of motivation and intention within the individual.3
There is less clarity about what the Buddha meant by intention and why he
makes this claim than there is enthusiasm for this program of ethiciza-
tion. How subsequent Buddhist thinkers understood this connection of
karma to intention has attracted less attention than it deserves, as has the
motivation for this link.
If we are to understand how the link between karma and intention was
understood by the tradition, we will need to attend closely to the discursive
contexts in which it found meaning. Our explorations of the defining of
karma as intention are intertwined with the discourses, be they psycho-
logical, narrative, rhetorical, legal, or philosophical, in which this central
idea (and similar claims) are invoked. To know what it means to say that
karma is the chief component of intention, we must know more about the
texts in which this formula occurs. We must learn how to read the differ-
ent genres of Buddhist thought.
Pierre Hadot—to whom I am indebted for many of the ideas that ani-
mate this section—has suggested that “one cannot read an ancient author
the way one does a contemporary author.”4 We cannot understand mean-
ing without appreciating “the rules, the forms, the models of discourse” of

2. Although karma is the Sanskrit version of the Pāli kamma, and I generally use Pāli termi-
nology throughout this study, karma has entered the English lexicon to such an extent that
I use it here without italicization or translation. Karma means, at bottom, action, particu-
larly action that is both the result of previous conditions and brings about future effects for
the agent.
3. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began, 51–52.
4. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 61. My section heading borrows from Hadot (pp. 101–9),
though it is used somewhat differently. Hadot is writing about historical phenomena spe-
cific to Greco-Roman antiquity and the demands that diverse philosophical writings from
this world make on their readers (which will, of course, be very different from the demands
ancient Buddhist texts make on us). What is helpful here is how explicit Hadot is about our
modern ignorance in knowing how to read ancient texts, even as he suggests valuable ways
to learn to read them.
4 the forerunner of all th ings

a text. In studying ancient thinkers, Hadot argues, we must take account

of “all the constraints that weighed upon them,” which included “literary
genres, rhetorical rules, dogmatic imperatives, and traditional modes of
reasoning.”5 It is only through learning to interpret how texts make mean-
ing that we can determine what they mean. This book is as much an exer-
cise in learning how to read different kinds of Theravāda literature as it is
a quest to understand intentional action, for the latter cannot occur apart
from explicit attention to the former.
One way to learn how to read Buddhist canonical texts is to learn how
other thinkers in the tradition have read them, and here we have enormous
resources at our disposal in the commentarial traditions. My approach dif-
fers significantly from many modern treatments of Theravāda texts in that
I  do not go directly to the canonical sources—“Buddha’s words”—with-
out the guidance of the fifth-century figure Bhadanta Buddhaghosācariya,
chief commentator in the Pāli tradition and one of the greatest minds in
the history of Buddhism. In this, I follow more traditional Buddhist ways
of encountering scripture that presume the need for a teacher in gaining
access to what the Buddha said and meant. Buddhaghosa is my guide
in learning how to think about and learn from Buddha’s words. He pro-
vides not only an exposition of word and meaning but also a disciplinary
practice of learning how to read these texts in ways that modern schol-
ars are only beginning to understand. As I  have begun to learn how to
allow Buddhaghosa to train my thinking about what is important, which
problems need to be solved, and the kinds of strategies one can deploy
in resolving them, some of my initial questions about intentional action
have changed and, I think, become more interesting. This book offers not
merely suggestive answers to questions about action and intention, but
new ways of asking questions about them.
Yet even as Buddhaghosa has helped me learn to read both canonical
and commentarial texts, the contours of his own systematic thinking have
gradually come to occupy central stage in my engagement with philosoph-
ical ideas about intention. In this sense, my approach is a departure from
interpretative paradigms that read him in a secondary fashion, solely as
an expositor of more primary and important texts, and more or less con-
fined to and interpreted within the historical tradition we call Buddhism.
For me, Buddhaghosa has become a thinker with whom I  can engage

5. See ibid., 7 (Davidson’s “Introduction”).

 Introduction 5

philosophically about a range of issues relating to intention and moral

agency. Though seldom practiced in South Asian or Buddhist studies,
this is a very ordinary way of reading great thinkers in the Western tradi-
tions, in which Aristotle, Kant, or Marx can be read as interlocutors with
whom modern scholars can engage our contemporary concerns. I  read
Buddhaghosa as a thinker who can help me understand and discuss moral
agency in new and complex ways.
Such an approach entails striving to meet, as Hadot puts it, “two equally
urgent contrary requirements” (67). The first is the requirement to aim for
the ideal of objectivity and impartiality, which entails a rigorous “exercise
of self-detachment,” required to avoid distortion and anachronism. This
involves, as suggested earlier, learning to read ancient texts by interpret-
ing them within the discursive contexts through which they make mean-
ing, as well as situating them within the social, historical, and material
conditions from which they emerged. It entails care and attention to the
form and content of a work in which, to the degree possible, we can come
to discern the intention or sense of the author. At the same time, Hadot
argues that this striving for objectivity makes possible an equally impor-
tant movement in which the interpreter is “in a certain sense implicated
in the interpretation”:

If one tries to understand a text properly, I believe that afterward

one can be brought, almost spontaneously, to discover its human
meaning, that is, to situate it in relation to the general problem of
humanity, of the human, even if it is not edifying at all. Thus one
can basically do as the Stoics did concerning their representations.
First, begin with adequate and objective judgment: this is what is
said. Then, eventually, make a judgment of value: this has a given
significance for my life. This time, one can speak of a return to sub-
jectivity, a subjectivity that, incidentally, attempts to elevate itself to
a universal perspective.6

6. Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 68. Drawing on Gadamer, Sheldon Pollock’s
discussion of the “philologist’s meaning”—the indelible meaning brought to a text by the
reader—is a valuable articulation of similar ideas, though he sees the hermeneutic stage
of applicatio as less a two-part process than Hadot: “Discovering the meaning of such texts
by understanding and interpreting them and discovering how to apply them in a particular
legal or spiritual instance, or even thinking about a work of art in relation to one’s own life,
are not separate actions but a single process” (Pollock, “Future Philology?” 958; Gadamer,
Truth and Method, 335–36).
6 the forerunner of all th ings

Hadot argues that working for the objective meaning of the text, its truth,
becomes a condition for another movement toward discovering subjective
meaning in it, of how it might speak to me and my concerns about being
human. (Importantly, the subjective here leads outside self, to the human
in a more general sense.) This latter sense, what Hadot calls the “actual
sense” of a text, is premised on the idea that explorations of the past can
have a “personal, formative and existential sense.” This sense is not identi-
cal to the author’s meaning:

In fact, the meaning intended by the ancient author is never actual.

It is ancient, and that is all there is to it. But it can take on an actual
significance for us to the extent that it can appear to us as, for exam-
ple, the source of certain actual ideas, or especially because it can
inspire an actual attitude in us, an inner act, or a spiritual exercise.7

When a text becomes the “source of certain actual ideas,” which may not
have been anticipated by the author yet are made possible by the text, we
are poised to explore new truths and understandings.
This set of ideas about how to read has guided my treatment of
Buddhaghosa. Toward the first requirement, the pages that follow attempt
the careful, critical work required to explore, without anachronism, what
both Buddha (as recalled in the canonical texts) and Buddhaghosa meant
and what they were doing. On the basis of this groundwork, there is an
additional layer of potential actual meaning as Buddhaghosa prompts us
to think about moral intention and agency in new ways that can speak to
our own contemporary problems.

Buddhaghosa
Who was Buddhaghosa and what did he do with the Buddha’s words?
Buddhaghosa is, of course, linked to a commentarial tradition much older
than himself, and insofar as his work is based on earlier exegesis (much
of which likely stretches back to the Buddha’s day and was transmitted in
all three councils), it is not entirely creative or original. Buddhaghosa was
the principal translator into Pāli of the ancient Sinhala commentaries. But
his process of edition and translation was taken by the tradition to indicate

7. Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, 68.

 Introduction 7

authorship in an important way; in the postscripts attached to each of the

commentaries, Buddhaghosa is said to have “made” (kata) the commen-
taries just as he “made” his own work, the Visuddhimagga. Buddhaghosa
is thus both the recipient of an ancient tradition and the crafter of a new
version of it that rendered the original version obsolete, for his work sup-
planted the Sinhala versions that are now lost to us. The Sinhala commen-
taries were said to be in disarray when he came to them; Buddhaghosa
brought them to order in service of a vision of a systematic whole, the
scope and breadth of which scholars are still attempting to discern.
In his own account of what he is doing, Buddhaghosa claims not to
“advertise his own standpoint” and only very rarely suggests that he is
offering his own preference in putting forth an interpretation.8 There is a
certain self-effacement in his style that both reflects and promotes a con-
servative approach to, and rhetoric about, knowledge. Buddhaghosa’s com-
mitment to the authenticity of the tradition is suggested by his emphasis
on locating himself merely as the latest in a chain of teachers that goes
back to the Buddha. Yet even as he engages in a certain rhetorical era-
sure of his own originality, he makes evident his creative genius, nowhere
more apparent perhaps than in his own work, the Visuddhimagga, which
the subsequent Pāli tradition rightly celebrates. His success in this project
of conveying authenticity through his own skills in interpretation estab-
lishes his role as the voice of orthodoxy—a status reflected in his monastic
name, Buddhaghosa, the “voice of the Buddha.”
The Mahāvaṃsa’s account of Buddhaghosa emphasizes his monumen-
tal importance to the subsequent Pāli tradition.9 In its account, composed
some 700 years after his lifetime, Buddhaghosa is said to have been from
India, born into a Brahman family, and celebrated for his mastery of Vedic
texts, grammar, and the arts of disputation. In India, he became interested
in Buddhist systems of thought and ordained as a monk to study them

8. Vism 25; Ñānamoli, The Path of Purification, xvii, xxxii. On Buddhaghosa’s role as a criti-
cal editor, see Endo, “Buddhaghosa’s Role as Commentator: Faithful Translator or Critical
Editor?” and “Some Observations on the ‘Introductory Sections’ of the Pāli Commentaries.”
9. Ñānamoli, The Path of Purification, provides a translation of the relevant passage from
the Mahāvaṃsa on pp. xxxiv–xxxv. Ñānamoli also gives a précis of the 15th-century Burmese
work story of Buddhaghosa, the Buddhaghosuppatti, pp. xxxvi–xxxix. The Buddhaghosuppatti
is edited and translated by James Gray. On Buddhaghosa and his work, see also Malalasekera,
The Pāli Literature of Ceylon, ch. 5; Law, The Life and Work of Buddhaghosa; Finot, “The Legend
of Buddhaghosa”; and Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Pāli Canon,” 98–99. For another
traditional source on Buddhaghosa (as well as other Buddhist authors), see the 14th-century
Saddhammasaṅgaha (JPTS, 1890).
8 the forerunner of all th ings

out of intellectual curiosity before becoming persuaded of their truth and

thereafter a committed Buddhist. He was sent by his teacher to Sri Lanka
to learn the Sinhala commentaries because the commentaries in India had
fallen to pieces. He was instructed to translate them into the learned and
translocal language of Pāli, or the “language of the Magadhans,” as the text
refers to it. When he arrived at Anuradhapura, his mastery of the Dhamma
and skill in articulating it were tested by the monks of the Mahāvihāra
before they were willing to give him the texts. (The Mahāvihāra, the “Great
Monastery,” was an important center, sectarian affiliation, and textual lin-
eage within the tradition we now call the Theravāda.)10 They asked him
to provide an exposition of two verses, whereupon Buddhaghosa demon-
strated his skill and knowledge of the Buddha’s teachings by his composi-
tion of the Visuddhimagga, a brilliant explication and summary of the two
verses but also the Dhamma as a whole.11 That Buddhaghosa could expand
at such length—the English translation of this text is over 850 pages—with
an eye for both precision in treating details and systematizing a larger theory,
convinced the Sri Lankan scholars that he could translate the commentaries.
The text then asserts that the teachers of the Mahāvihāra honored him as
“Metteyya” (the future Buddha) and accepted his commentaries as “if they
were the canonical texts themselves” (pāliṃ viya). These extraordinary claims
put his work on par with the Buddha’s teachings.
Subsequent Mahāvihāra tradition holds that all of the main commentar-
ies or aṭṭhakathās were composed or compiled by Buddhaghosa. This is an
enormous corpus of work that includes commentaries on the five Nikāyas,
two commentaries on the Vinaya, and commentaries on the seven books of

10. As Peter Skilling has pointed out, the widespread use of the term Theravāda is a modern
development and does not serve us well if conceived of as a historical identity that premod-
ern Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia used to describe themselves. However, given
its ubiquity in contemporary usage, it is a difficult term to do entirely without. See Peter
Skilling, “Theravāda in History” and “Scriptural Authenticity and the śrāvaka Schools: An
Essay towards an Indian Perspective.”
11. As B. C. Law notes, Buddhaghosa himself says that the Visuddhimagga is an exposition
of just one verse (S.i.13), which reads:  “when a wise man, established in morality (sīla),
develops mind (citta) and wisdom (paññā), then that monk, ardent and intelligent, disen-
tangles the tangle” (Vism 1 and 711; see Law, The Life and Work of Buddhaghosa, 3, 15–18).
This verse indicates a path of practice that Buddhaghosa uses to inform the structure of the
Visuddhimagga: morality (sīla), cultivation of mind (taken to refer to samādhi), and wisdom
(paññā), which are the trainings that disentangle the tangles of our condition of craving and
suffering in saṃsāra.
 Introduction 9

the Abhidhamma.12 Most of these texts bear a shared postscript at the end
that says that they were made by Buddhaghosa. This postscript may have
been appended by the Mahāvihāra monastic authorities as their “sign of

approval,” as suggested by Bhikkhu Ñānamoli. 13

Modern scholars have read the history of authorship of these commentar-

ies quite differently and have been skeptical that all of these commentaries
were, in fact, authored by Buddhaghosa. Many scholars call into question the
idea that Buddhaghosa was the author of the commentaries on the Jātaka and
the Dhammapada, and his authorship of the Atthasālinī is doubted because
in its beginning the author describes himself as having been instructed by
Buddhaghosa to compose it.14 The two Vinaya commentaries have also been
ascribed to other authors, and modern scholars suggest that only the com-
mentaries on the first four Nikāyas were composed by Buddhaghosa. Some
scholars suggest that Buddhaghosa should be seen as the head of a team of
scholars who translated the very large body of material ascribed to him by the
traditional sources, a not unlikely scenario.
As important as this historical critical approach has been for our under-
standing of the production of these texts, it is less useful for understanding
the reception of them and how the attribution of authorship worked in the
Pāli world. It has clearly been important for the Mahāvihāra tradition to
see Buddhaghosa as the translator of a large body of commentary and to
read these many works as, in some important sense, his; as we have seen,
attaching commentaries on all branches of canonical texts to his name
and authority is in evidence in the postscripts of the texts themselves, as
well as much later texts such as the Mahāvaṃsa. Considering what author-
ship meant in the reading and reception of texts can aid us to see that the
proper name Buddhaghosa has more than one signification, only one of

12. These are commentaries on the first four nikāyas, and the Paramatthajotikā on the
Khuddakapāṭha and Suttanipātha, and the Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā; the Vinaya commen-
taries called Samantapāsādikā and the Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī, and the Abhidhamma commentar-
ies: the Atthasālinī on the Dhammasaṅganī, the Sammohavinodanī on the Vibhaṅga, and the
Pañcapakaraṇaṭṭhakathā on the other five books.
13. Ñānamoli, The Path of Purification, xxix.
14. Cousins, “Good or Skilful? Kusala in Canon and Commentary,” 159, n. 14; von Hinüber,
A Handbook of Pāli Literature, 151. There is also the suggestion that the Visuddhimagga and
the Atthasālinī have at least one clear point of disagreement (Endo, “Buddhaghosa’s Role
as a Commentator,” 24). Scholars have argued that the style of the Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā
and Jātakatthavaṇṇanā is so different from the other commentaries that they must have a
different author. See Malalasekera, The Pāli Literature of Ceylon; Law, The Life and Work of
Buddhaghosa; and Mori, “Recent Japanese Studies of the Pāli Commentarial Literature,” for
discussions of Buddhaghosa’s authorship of the various commentaries.
10 the forerunner of all th ings

them the flesh-and-blood individual we imagine who actually sat down,

translated, and edited some or all of these texts. The name Buddhaghosa
also designates the authorship of a systematic corpus of material recog-
nized and celebrated by the Mahāvihāra scholars. The name Buddhaghosa
has a role, a function, as Michel Foucault puts it, that endows a certain
status and authenticity to these texts. Foucault suggests that the author’s
name characterizes “the mode of being” of a text and “manifests the
appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status in this dis-
course within a society and a culture.”15 We have already seen how, in one
quite explicit articulation of this function, the name Buddhaghosa is said
to be, literally, the voice of the Buddha; it is also linked to Metteyya and to
texts that should be received as if they were canonical.
In addition to making powerful claims through designating these texts
the work of Buddhaghosa, the author function signals that they can or
should be classified and read together. According to Foucault, the author
function is a “complex operation” that “constructs a certain rational being
we call ‘author’ ”; this construction is a projection “of the operations that
we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we
establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions
that we practice.”16 When modern historians suggest that the Jātaka and
Dhammapada commentaries cannot be Buddhaghosa’s because they differ
substantially in style from the Nikāya commentaries, they are projecting a
set of choices about authorship along stylistic considerations—fashioning
a set of choices and projections that premodern Sinhalese and Burmese
authorities did not make. For the premodern scholars, in contrast, a wide
range of stylistically heterogeneous texts are classified together under the
same status and authority. Modern scholars may not be wrong in their
choices and assumptions; my point is only that there are different opera-
tions at work in constructing the authorship of these texts, and these opera-
tions have entailments for how we might read them.
When we read the whole body of commentaries attributed to
Buddhaghosa as Buddhaghosa’s, we read them differently than if we see
them as authored by different, unknown authors. Foucault says that the
author function provides “a certain unity of writing” and can serve as a
basis through which “to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge

15. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 107.

16. Ibid., 110.
 Introduction 11

in a series of texts.”17 On this note, and again to rely on the Mahāvaṃsa’s

explicit instructions on how to read, we can observe that the Mahāvaṃsa
attributes to the Mahāvihāra authorities a robust insistence on consis-
tency:  they tested Buddhaghosa’s mastery of the Dhamma by requiring
him to reproduce the Visuddhimagga after the first, and then the second,
versions were lost. His ability to reproduce verbatim the same text each
time was taken as the required evidence of his peerless command of the
teachings and how to communicate them. We, of course, do not have to
accept these claims at face value or to read the texts doubting that inter-
nal contradictions are possible; we need not suppress inconsistencies or
attempt to enforce a homogeneity that is not in evidence in this large body
of material. Rather, the point of recognizing the claims implicit in attribut-
ing these texts to Buddhaghosa is to open up certain ways of reading them
and to do so in a way that is conscious of the choices we make.
Not only does considering the reception of the texts offer one way—but
certainly not the only way—to read them but also evidence internal to the
texts suggests the hand of an author who wrote or edited these commentar-
ies with an eye to how they work within a larger whole. Buddhaghosa, whom
we might refer to in this context as the “implied author,”18 has much to say
about the interpretative choices he is making in particular commentaries
and often directs his readers to other commentaries or to the Visuddhimagga
to read further on a topic or to look to places where he employs a differ-
ent approach. There is a sense that emerges from the texts themselves of
what G. P. Malalasekera has referred to as a “synthetic unity.”19 In addition,
there are large passages that are quoted more or less verbatim in several
different commentaries, appearing in Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma com-
mentaries. These may suggest a single authorial or editorial hand for at least
certain blocks of commentary that traveled widely within and across these
collections.
While focused on Buddhaghosa, on occasion I turn also to other com-
mentators, especially when I  am seeking further views or explications

17. Ibid., 111.
18. Steven Collins uses the language of “implied author” when referring to “the implied sin-
gle authorial voice” of the Visuddhimagga (“Remarks on the Visuddhimagga,” 503). I suggest,
and evidence will follow, that such a voice is apparent across many of the works attributed to
him. See also Collins’s introduction to Wijayaratna, Buddhist Monastic Life, on following the
tradition’s reading of the sources in a synchronic fashion, which can guide us to read them
this way also (xii–xix).
19. Malalasekera, The Pāli Literature of Ceylon, 94.
12 the forerunner of all th ings

of what Buddhaghosa has said. Dhammapāla, who lived perhaps a cen-

tury after Buddhaghosa, wrote subcommentaries (ṭīkās) on many of the
aṭṭhakathās and on the Visuddhimagga and some commentaries on books in
the Khuddhakanikāya, adding a layer of learning and insight to the root texts,
as well as to what Buddhaghosa is up to.20 These practices of continual elabo-
ration then lent themselves to a quite different process, one of contraction,
when students need manageable handbooks like the Visuddhimagga itself,
to rein in the expansion of meaning of the Dhamma. Buddhadatta, per-
haps a contemporary of Buddhaghosa, wrote manuals or handbooks on the
Vinaya and the Abhidhamma that attempt to condense the enormity of doc-
trine in helpful summaries. Another important handbook is Anuruddha’s
Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha, which dates from perhaps the 10th century. Due to
its clarity and mastery of Abhidhamma and its relative brevity, this text has
become the standard primer for Abhidhamma students and the place where
many scholars turn before (or in lieu of) going to the canonical Abhidhamma
texts.21
Before I go on to describe how we can shape our questions about inten-
tional action, it is necessary to articulate my strategy for navigating the
enormous body of work just described. The different contexts and genres
in which the formula linking karma and cetanā is invoked include the
entire early Pāli literature, that is, Suttanta, Abhidhamma, Vinaya, and
narratives. At the canonical level alone, this body of material consti-
tutes, depending on how they are counted, some 30-odd books, some of
them multivolume works. The commentaries attributed to Buddhaghosa
roughly double this corpus, not to speak of the additional layers of sub-
commentary and handbook. Even if undaunted by the sheer volume (and
I certainly make no claims to fully control it), the most intrepid scholar
must be unsettled by the inherently expansive nature of this material.
It is expansive in two senses. First, the writing of commentaries and
the processes of exposition are considered by the tradition to be a process
that can go on indefinitely, and it often seems that it has—the body of
commentarial material one can look at on any particular passage is often
considerable. The texts are also highly intertextual within these layers—
sermons refer to other sermons, Buddhaghosa invokes other passages in
his commentary—and following the web of connections for even one pas-
sage can be consuming (though usually highly rewarding).

20. See ibid., ch. 6, on Dhammapāla and Buddhadatta.

21. Nārada and Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, 1.
 Introduction 13

There is a second sense in which the material is expansive. Buddhaghosa

shows us how to read texts in a manner so as not to close off and settle
meaning, but rather to open and expand it. This is a hermeneutic prin-
ciple that echoes the nature of the Dhamma itself, which, we are told, is
endless. Even the Buddha, when reflecting on the depths of the Dhamma
subsequent to his awakening, grew exhausted and, for all his omni-
science, could not reach the end of it or discern its borders. We can learn
from Buddhaghosa how to see the ways meaning can be expanded upon,
how a single passage may lead in many directions, and how the process of
exposition is itself a creative engagement with the endless possibilities of
the teachings and with the endless possibilities of human experience that
the teachings explore.
To illustrate how Buddhaghosa opens up a text, one can begin to
notice and trace his systematic efforts to contextualize what the Buddha
said. His creating context and setting can be, it sometimes appears, an
endless task. Why did the Buddha give this sermon? To whom? Why
did that person, in particular, need to hear it? Is there a distant karmic
backstory from a previous life that explains the present moment? Or
is it sufficient to describe the immediate circumstances of the present
teaching, which may include particulars of the audience’s biography,
psychology, religious status, and relationships with others? What might
count as the immediate circumstances to which Buddhaghosa anchors
a teaching sometimes surprises us with their narrative scope and atten-
tion to detail. These efforts at contextualizing are always important for
understanding the meaning Buddhaghosa sees in the text and cannot
be set aside. Buddhaghosa also provides exposition of the words of a
teaching, a commentarial service that raises possibilities as much as it
defines, provides editorial functions, and attends to the letter and spirit
of the text. In any of these services, Buddhaghosa may appear to digress
to other topics and bring up other texts that elaborate them, though
what might appear to us to be a digression can always be accounted
for in view of Buddhaghosa’s particular horizon of meaning if we look
closely enough, and it must be regarded as at least potentially important
for us.
To begin to follow some of Buddhaghosa’s leads (and often one simply
cannot follow all of them to all the places they go if one wishes to finish
one passage and take up another) is to find oneself in a heady and exhil-
arating world of possibility. Charles Hallisey has evoked Paul Ricoeur’s
idea of the surplus of meaning in reference to Buddhaghosa’s interpretive
14 the forerunner of all th ings

style.22 Ricoeur argues, in ways similar to Hadot’s ideas about the “actual
sense,” that the meaning of a text is “to be conceived in a dynamic way as
a direction of thought opened up by the text.”23

The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it. It is
not something hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be
understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points
towards a possible world, thanks to the non-ostensive reference of
the text.24

For Ricoeur, the process of understanding a text is a dynamic event in

which a reader encounters “new modes of being,” a new capacity for
knowing oneself.25 Meaning is neither determined by authorial intention
nor projected onto the text by the reader. Rather, interpretation is an active
and dialogical receiving of new possibilities for thought.
Buddhaghosa, we may suggest, treats the Buddha’s words in a similar
vein. His encounter with them discloses particular avenues of possibility
but by no means exhausts them, as he frequently makes clear. His toolbox
of hermeneutical instruments is equipped for opening up different mean-
ings of a text: its phrasing (byañjana) and sense (attha), the ways it was
received by the audience to whom the sermon was originally delivered,
how it might be received in the future, what other texts should be engaged
to interpret this one, the many possibilities for confusion, and the pos-
sibilities for correct understanding. He frequently indicates that much
more could be said on a particular passage but that he is constrained by
the specific purposes at hand to attempt to go further. For Buddhaghosa,
Buddha’s words—the Dhamma—is an endless and dynamic encounter,
checked only by (again, borrowing from Ricoeur) the “finitude of human
knowledge.”

22. This section is greatly indebted to Charles Hallisey, in personal communication and his
course on Buddhist Commentaries (Spring 2009, Harvard Divinity School).
23. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 92.
24. Ibid., 87. See also Gadamer: “all reading involves application, so that a person reading a
text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends. He belongs to the text he is reading. The
line of meaning that the text manifests to him as he reads it always and necessarily breaks
off in an open indeterminancy” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 335).
25. Ibid., 94.
 Introduction 15

We will trace this interpretative stance—which informs my own read-

ing of canon and commentary—in Buddhaghosa’s work. As exhilarating
as this is, there are practical challenges: how might I ever hope to read
enough of this huge corpus of texts to claim some understanding? And
if every detail counts, how might I ever write a book that can be finished?
And perhaps most importantly, how does my own finitude of understand-
ing circumscribe the possibilities I  can see in a text? While these chal-
lenges will be pulling on us throughout, and I will attend to the latter one
in the next section, my strategy at least for navigating the largeness of the
material before me is twofold: my lens centers on matters of intentional
agency (which are often embedded in moral psychology and always depict
a distinctive anthropology), and it focuses on discerning those properties
of discursive form or genre that are important for interpreting ideas about
intentional agency.

Genre and Approach

We can interrogate the complicated phenomenon of intentional agency
in different contexts for very different purposes, as we know from how
intention in our own modern intellectual context is treated. In our own
milieu, intention is understood variously, depending on the discipline or
field in which it is investigated:  different questions and theories about
intention evolve in the context of law than in philosophical circles or in
neuroscience, for example. Folk or narrative accounts of intention do yet
a different kind of work with the idea of intention. Similarly, in the Pāli
sources, questions about moral agency and culpability take on a different
cast when treated in the context of monastic law than they do in lists and
commentaries describing moral phenomenology, which in turn have dif-
ferent concerns than narrative thinking about agency and morality. What
these different methods of teaching are trying to do, whether it is teach-
ing restraint in a monastic context or advancing an analytic account of
human experience in the Abhidhamma context, cannot be separated from
what they are trying to say. We cannot grasp content without attention to
method.
Buddhaghosa has much to say about what the three branches of the
Tipiṭaka—that is, the Suttanta, the Vinaya, and the Abhidhamma—are
doing, and his commentary treats them in a methodologically disciplined
fashion that respects their distinctive approaches. The disclosure of mean-
ing is guided by the formalities of each genre. He considers their different
16 the forerunner of all th ings

methods of instruction, to what sort of people they are geared, their distinct
purposes, and the different ways they are profound. Often, as we will see,
he allowed the range of possible readings of a given passage to be deter-
mined by these considerations.26 In addition to his following closely the
tradition’s divisions of Suttanta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma, Buddhaghosa
sometimes suggested that narrative, what he called “jātaka,” was a dis-
tinctive method of teaching or way of knowing (pariyāya) alongside the
traditional branches.27 Of course, the narrative collections are usually con-
sidered part of the Suttanta, gathered together with other miscellaneous
books, but Buddhaghosa thought that narrative is distinct enough as a
method of teaching that it could sometimes be referred to in this way.
In the organization of my chapters, I have followed Buddhaghosa in his
sensitivity to context and genre and in his treatment of these four ways of
knowing.
Buddhaghosa’s hermeneutical devices show us what the Buddha’s
teachings mean and how they make meaning. But he is also codifying and
creating distinctive models of discourse of his own, of which he is highly
self-conscious. Because he is often very explicit about the rules and con-
ventions of interpretation, he can help us to see certain inner structures
and logics of the canonical sources and his own writings that are indis-
pensable to our understanding of the ideas.
In addition to learning from Buddhaghosa about the rules of discourse
in the intellectual world he is creating, it is important to describe some of
the choices and ideas at work in my dialogic engagement with the sources.
One obvious way to chart these choices and ideas is in the process of
translation, of finding the English terms to describe the Pāli concepts as
we attempt to make them intelligible to us. The study of Buddhist moral
psychology requires some knowledge of Western religious, psychological,
and philosophical systems to articulate with any precision the complexity
of the Buddhist categories. At the same time, I am keenly alert to the very
uneasy fit between Buddhist categories and those of the Western traditions
and particularly attentive to the very many ways in which the Buddhist
ideas cannot be readily mapped onto Western categories. I think, too, that
it is in the very ways that the categories do not fit that we can learn most

26. For example, he has much to say in a large passage quoted in several places on the dif-
ferent methods and styles of the three baskets, and these guide his readings of particular
passages (Sv.i.17–22; As 19–24; Sp 17–24).
27. Sv.iii.883; As 63.
 Introduction 17

from them, but we cannot know how precisely this is so unless we have a
reasonably adequate account of both intellectual histories.
The interpretative process involves more than choices about transla-
tion but also an explicit awareness and engagement with contemporary
currents of ideas on topics that are in some cases similar to, but not
fully overlapping, the ancient Buddhist concerns. We live in a moment
when questions of agency are being scrutinized in very complex ways
in many disciplines. Traditional philosophical treatments of intention
and action continue to develop, even as challenges to them are mounted
from other disciplines. Cognitive scientists are bringing rich and fas-
cinating empirical evidence to our understandings of human agency
that has called into question both folk and philosophical accounts of it.
Agency is also increasingly examined in light of social and institutional
power, both in the concrete ways that forms of power and ideology have
shaped human lives in the past and in some of the startling ways that
modern institutions both make possible and inhibit human agency in
radically new ways. These conversations pull on me as I read Buddhist
texts. Modern worries about agency shape my readings of them in ways
that constrain my interpretations, even as they make possible new evolu-
tions for Buddhist ideas. I read with many problems and questions in
mind about how agency and human nature have been understood and
contested in my historical situation, and these questions animate and
shape the particular ways I explore what the Buddha and Buddhaghosa
can teach us.

Questions of Terminology
While we will be concerned with the whole range of psychological terms
for the springs of action, we can begin with issues surrounding the inter-
pretation of cetanā, a term often translated as “intention.” The history of
translations of this term demonstrates the complexity of the issues before
us in interpreting this moral theory. Reviewing this history also shows the
entanglement of our interpretations of Buddhist ideas with Western philo-
sophical assumptions, regardless of whether this entanglement is always
made explicit. Our work thus requires some attention to Western theories
of the will, intention, and motivation as they are embedded in their own
intellectual histories, in order to clarify the distinctiveness of Buddhist
psychological vocabulary and make space for distinctively Buddhist ideas
to emerge.
18 the forerunner of all th ings

Given her assertion that “Buddhism is so emphatically a philosophy,

both in theory and practice, of the conscious will” and her considerable
attention to the subject, it is fitting to begin with Caroline Rhys Davids’s
interpretation of Pāli cetanā.28 In her early writings and translations, she
interpreted cetanā in very cognitive terms and did not link it immediately
to the workings of conation. Relying on its etymological links to the verbal
roots of thinking and cognition (ceteti), she likens cetanā to “reasoning” or
“deductive inference,” translating it more generally, as “thinking” in her
translation to the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, first published in 1900,29 and she does
not even mention the term in her short piece on Buddhist theories of will.30
In her collaboration with Shwe Zan Aung on the Abhidhammattha-saṅgaha
and at his prompting, she backtracks on this interpretation and instead
finds cetanā to be better rendered “volition or conation.”31 She reverses
course yet again in The Birth of Indian Psychology and regrets translating it
as volition because it is “mainly cognitive.”32
But most other scholars have translated cetanā as “volition.”33 This line of
interpretation sees cetanā as the operation of the will, although some would
distinguish between will and volition. In one of the more useful explorations
of the term to date, W. S. Karunaratna describes cetanā’s range of meaning:

The different aspects of meaning embodied in the term have been

rendered variously as will, volition, intention, motivation, conation,
drive, stimulus, disposition, determination, effort, choice, resolve,
arrangement, organization, aspiration, purposive intellection, men-
tal construction and formative tendency. In its more technical signi-
fication, however, cetanā, unless otherwise qualified, refers only to
the self-centered, goal-directed and result-oriented volitional dispo-
sition which impels the worldly individual (puthujjana).34

28. Rhys Davids, A Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics, lxv.

29. Ibid., 8–9, n. 1.
30. Rhys Davids, “On the Will in Buddhism.”
31. Aung and Rhys Davids, Compendium of Philosophy, 235–36.
32. Rhys Davids, The Birth of Indian Psychology, 276.
33. For example, Sadaw, “Some Points in Buddhist Doctrine”; Ñānamoli, The Path of
Purification; Nārada and Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidamma; Pe Maung Tin,
The Expositor; de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam; Gethin, The Buddhist Path to
Awakening; and Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics.
34. Karunaratna, “Cetanā,” 87.
 Introduction 19

He takes this term to refer to the volition or will that drives human action,
though his essay demonstrates the many complexities of its technical
definition.
A related line of interpretation construes cetanā as moral choice.
Damien Keown likens cetanā to Aristotle’s prohairesis in that it “stands
at the crossroads of reason and emotion.”35 While for Keown no English
word matches cetanā precisely, he describes it as a type of practical reason-
ing or a kind of deliberation and decision about ends. But he also suggests
that cetanā contains some dispositional and affective aspects. In fashion-
ing his comparison with Aristotle, Keown wants to see the mind divided
into the classic tripartite division of cognitive, affective, and conative ele-
ments, where the conative function, cetanā, “is best pictured as the matrix
in which the push and pull of the rational and emotional aspects of the
psyche are funneled in the direction of moral choice.”36 For Keown, as for
many other scholars, “ethics concerns choices” and “the distinctive func-
tion of cetanā is making choices.”37 Phra Payutto similarly says that cetanā
“includes volition, will, choice and decision, or the energy which leads to
action.”38 Michael Carrithers also depicts cetanā as “choice,” as does Paul
Fuller, who also adds “preference,” and this interpretation has found its
way to some of the more popular writing on Buddhist moral thinking.39 In
these modernist interpretations, choice, as a deliberative process of weigh-
ing options and choosing among them, is the distinctive feature of cetanā.
For these interpreters, the Buddha’s elevation of the individual’s capac-
ity for choice liberates the moral agent from a deterministic social and
causal order and assigns human beings a substantial share of freedom
and autonomy.
A similar line of inquiry on cetanā has been advanced by Richard
Gombrich, though he prefers to translate cetanā as “intention.” Gombrich

35. Keown, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, 213.

36. Ibid., 216. In Buddhism and Bioethics, Keown appears to parse cetanā as “moral psychol-
ogy,” without specifying exactly what is meant by this beyond “the psychological factors
which underlie moral choices.” He goes on here to use the language of “moral will” (39).
37. Keown, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, 54, 143. Note Dreyfus’s criticism of Keown’s claims
(“Meditation as Ethical Activity,” 8–9) and also that of Meyers, Freedom and Self Control,
169–74.
38. Payutto, Good, Evil and Beyond, 6.
39. Carrithers, The Buddha, 67–68; Fuller, The Notion of Diṭṭhi in Theravāda Buddhism, 150;
Misra, An End of Suffering, 197–98.
20 the forerunner of all th ings

has written extensively on intention and its significance in Buddhism. For

him also, the Buddha’s emphasis on cetanā makes space in Buddhist theories
of karma for freedom of individual choice and self-determination: “since
ethical value lies in intention, the individual is autonomous and the final
authority is what we would call his conscience.”40 According to Gombrich,
the Buddha’s equating karma with intention revolutionalized moral think-
ing in his context because it interprets karma as an individual’s mental
decision making rather than as collective Brahmanical ritual activity. In
particular, by liberating karma from a ritual framework and endowing it
with a sense of free will,41 the Buddha “turned the Brahmin ideology upside
down and ethicized the universe.” He argues that the Buddha’s equating
karma with intention was far and away one of his most significant teach-
ings, since it introduced a radical notion of individual moral responsibility
to ancient India, an idea that he says has rarely been accepted in human
history.42 Gombrich does not see how “one could exaggerate the impor-
tance of the Buddha’s ethicisation of the world,” which he regards “as a
turning point in the history of civilization.”43
In his work on Abhidharma, Herbert Guenther comes to these ques-
tions from a quite different direction and disputes the translation of
cetanā as volition or choice. For him, the English word volition “designates
merely the act of making a choice or decision, but it rarely suggests the
determination to put one’s decision or choice into effect.” Emphasizing
the active nature of the process of cetanā, he prefers something like “our
idea of stimulus, motive, or drive.”44 Cetanā is not a process of making
autonomous and deliberate choices, but rather is the psychological drive
that projects and sustains human activity in the world. James McDermott
also wants to include some aspect of motive or drive with his rendering of
cetanā as “intentional impulse.”45

40. Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism, 68 and quoted verbatim in What the Buddha Thought,
13; see also Precept and Practice, 170; How Buddhism Began, 48–56. Keown also insists on the
role of “personal conscience” in Buddhism (The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, 15).
41. Gombrich, Precept and Practice, 170.
42. Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought, 22.
43. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began, 51. Note, however, that Steven Collins has suggested
that already in the Upaniṣads a shift toward a more ethical, rather than purely ritual, inter-
pretation of action was underway (Selfless Persons, 82), and Nalini Devdas shows that the
Upaniṣads had quite complex and sophisticated ideas about volition (Cetanā and Dynamics
of Volition in Theravāda Buddhism, ch. 1).
44. Guenther, Philosophy and Psychology in the Abhidharma, 43–46.
45. McDermott, “Scripture as the Word of the Buddha,” 27.
 Introduction 21

Very recently, Nalini Devdas has contributed substantially to our

understanding of cetanā. Though she often translates cetanā as “purpo-
sive impulse,” she resists a single translation, demonstrating its “protean”
character and range of meaning in the Suttas and Abhidhamma. For her,
the central question about cetanā is whether it is understood “primarily
as a cognitive function of assessing possibilities and deciding on goals,
or as a motivating function that initiates goal-oriented activity” or if it
somehow functions both cognitively and conatively, how the texts describe
this synthesis.46 She shows that cetanā does not act as a sovereign will or
decision-making process, but rather as a volitional process that intends,
initiates, and directs action toward fulfilling a goal. It has both cognitive
and conative functions, but it always operates with and through the myr-
iad factors at work in dependent origination.
Of course, all of these English terms—will, volition, intention, motive—
come to our aid with complex histories and genealogies of their own, and
most scholars acknowledge that none of them matches the nuances of Pāli
and Sanskrit cetanā. Although determining how best to understand cetanā
and other terms essential to Buddhist conceptions of moral agency will
unfold in the following chapters, a closer look at the English vocabulary
will help us begin to refine our terminology. To translate the Pāli terms
effectively requires us to clarify the genealogies and contemporary mean-
ings of the English terms in question, to locate with some precision areas
of both overlap and divergence.
A developed doctrine of the will (Latin, voluntas) first appeared in
Western traditions in the work of St. Augustine. Although the Greeks had a
number of different terms for certain aspects of conation—chiefly, boulēsis,
a desire for an end judged to be good; prohairesis, a rational choice involv-
ing deliberation as to the best manner of achieving one’s end; and various
appetitive forces—they kept them conceptually distinct.47 Augustine was
the first to bring together diverse aspects of conation and describe them
as a single faculty, reducible to neither cognition nor appetite. He does so
in the context of theodicy and in an effort to absolve an omnipotent God
from responsibility for the fallen human condition and for sin. Richard
Sorabji shows that Augustine associates the will with the rational aspect

46. Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 369.

47. Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity; Kahn, “Discovering the Will.” For an
account of the freedom of the will in Augustine’s de libero arbitrio, see Harrison, Augustine’s
Way into the Will.
22 the forerunner of all th ings

of the soul, assigns it freedom and responsibility, connects it to the idea

of willpower, finds it present in all action, and develops the notion of the
perverted will. For Augustine, the will has many tasks. It

performs some of the functions of paying attention. It unites percep-

tion with the perceptible, memory with internal vision, and intellect
with objects taken from memory. It is responsible for imagination.
Faith is also due to will. Belief depends on the assent of the will.48

Finally, as Aaron Stalnaker has argued, the will may be understood “as the
sum or collection of a person’s loves, which aim at delighting in some end
or ends.”49 The clustering of these diverse functions and ideas under one
faculty invented for it a robust role in morality, religion, and psychology
unprecedented for any single term related to conation in previous phi-
losophy. In Augustine’s hands, the will acquired tremendous importance
in the religious and moral life. As Albrecht Dihle puts it, for Augustine
the “will became the point of reference in the doctrines of intellect and
sensual life, freedom and determination, moral evaluation of purpose and
action, and, above all, in that of fall and redemption.”50 The human will for
Augustine was modeled on the divine will with its capacities for creative
action and freedom of choice.51 Augustine’s intense interest in the will
emerged from his own tormented self-examination and centered on the
will’s obedience and conformity to God’s will. It is the errant human will
that is responsible for evil, and so management of the will, aided by God’s
grace, became a central focus of much Christian moral thought.
It is on Augustine’s scaffolding that medieval and early modern theo-
ries of the will were constructed. While retaining a strong conception of
the human will modeled on the divine will, Thomas Aquinas departed
from Augustine in returning to classical conceptions of the rule of the
intellect over the appetites and, thus for him, over the will.52 In this intel-
lectualist position, the intellect commands the will; cases of moral error or
sin are not the result of a wayward will but of a mistaken understanding

48. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 337.

49. Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil, 101–4.
50. Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 127.
51. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 235, 259.
52. Fiering, Moral Psychology at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 110–14.
 Introduction 23

of the good. Against this view, the voluntarist position, associated with
Augustine and later Christian figures, argued that the intellectualists falter
on the classic dilemma known as the Medean paradox: “I see and approve
the better course; I follow the worse.” This problem, although expressed
here by Ovid, was also a central worry of both St. Paul and Augustine.53 For
the voluntarists, the dilemma seems to point to an unruly and intractable
will that is not governed by the rational mind. For voluntarist Christian
thinkers, the will is not closely connected with the intellect, and it can
be mastered by the passions and appetites; sin is not a matter of rational
error but of a perverse will.
The workings of the will and the passions went on to become cen-
tral preoccupations for many Christian thinkers in the early modern
period. Norman Fiering demonstrates that in Christian moral anthropol-
ogy of the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a remarkable expansion in
the exploration of the inner life; he describes a “renewed religious con-
cern with the whole man, an immersion in the problems of the inner
life, the realm of appetites, affections, passions, and inclinations, which
the pagan moralists, by comparison, had only touched on.”54 In this con-
text, the will becomes “almost synonymous with the inner essence of the
whole man, the battleground of God and the devil,” in which the “per-
sonal drama of salvation is enacted.” Human salvation is seen as entirely
dependent upon the quality of one’s will, on the “fundamental disposi-
tion of his heart.”55 This “new moral science of the inward man,” initiated
by both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, led to further developments a
century later in Christian morality and theology (most notably perhaps
in Jonathan Edwards’s treatment of the will) and, in a more secular or
naturalistic direction, to the British moral sense theorists who began to
develop a psychology of motivation untethered to the idea of the will.
Although the principal intellectualist and voluntarist debates about the
will lost their vitality by the end of the seventeenth century, and the notion
of the will itself became increasingly called into question in secular philos-
ophy, certain legacies of these debates still influence modern thinking on
intention, even in the study of Buddhist ethics. For example, the question

53. Ibid., 115. It is also one version of the classic problem of akrasia, referred to in modern
philosophy as “weakness of the will.”
54. Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context, 5.
55. Fiering, Moral Psychology at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 117.
24 the forerunner of all th ings

of whether cetanā is largely a matter of cognitive or rational decision mak-

ing, or whether it is chiefly about emotion or impulse, may be a distant
echo of the intellectualist-voluntarist dispute. But perhaps less obviously,
this tradition of Christian thinking has bequeathed to us a certain set of
presuppositions about the inner dimensions of moral knowledge that
continue to inform modern treatments of Buddhist thought. Since the
language of conscience has been invoked in reference to cetanā, it does
not take us too far afield to examine it briefly here. Although the concept
of a conscience as a special faculty (rather than simply a kind of moral
knowledge) goes back to the 13th century,56 early modern Protestant theo-
logians elaborated an idea of, as Fiering puts it, a “determined construc-
tion of a sacrosanct personal inner space” that bears witness to and judges
our actions.57 While more recent conceptions of the conscience may have
parted with their overtly Christian moorings, they nevertheless retain a
sense of conscience as an inner guide to decision and action that is highly
autonomous and individualized: each individual possesses within his or
her own innermost resources a capacity for moral reflection and choice.
In this conception, moral agency occurs as the individual consults his or
her conscience and makes “free” choices accordingly. This is a very par-
ticular conception of human nature that has its own religious and intellec-
tual history, and it may not have direct analogs outside the West; it is not,
I argue, present in the Pāli sources.58
But to return to the will:  Enlightenment scholars grew increasingly
skeptical about the will as a separate faculty of human agency and about
the tripartite division of faculties into the emotive, rational, and cona-
tive. John Locke dispensed with the notion of the will as a faculty as a
“distinct being” or “distinct agent within us” and refashioned the will or
volition merely as “a power to begin or forbear, continue or end several
actions of our minds, and motions of our bodies.”59 Hobbes had already

56. The term conscience is a translation from Greek syneidesis, which describes a judgment of
the mind concerning the moral value of a particular act.
57. Fiering, Moral Psychology at Seventeenth-Century Harvard, 55–56.
58. David McMahan offers an excellent analysis of the many different sides of the subjective
turn in Western thought and its grafting onto Buddhist thought (The Making of Buddhist
Modernism). The “inner light of the self” becomes the chief resource for morality not only via
its Christian heritage but also through Romantic, rationalist, and psychological conceptions
of the self developed in modernity (200).
59. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, ch. 21, 5–6.
 Introduction 25

reduced the will merely to “the last appetite in deliberating,” an appetite

or aversion leading to action, something in fact shared with the beasts.60
Subsequent philosophy has more or less discarded a conception of the
will, favoring a simpler idea of volition, defined as “an inner, mental event
or act of consciousness which is the cause, accompaniment, or necessary
condition for any outer action, that is, for any voluntary movement of the
body.”61 While the will was reinvigorated in the hands of some—in its role
as self-legislation in Kant’s thought and in the robust senses granted to the
will in the 19th century by both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—in general
it gave way to various systems of moral psychology that replaced a singu-
lar sense of the will with more diffuse sources of motivation. Throughout
much of the 20th century, philosophical accounts of action tended to
reduce volition or will to a matter of practical reasoning about beliefs and
desires62 or abandon it entirely in favor of other accounts of action.63
We have good reason to put some distance between Buddhist cetanā
and the concept of the will as developed by Augustine and subsequent
Christian thought. Augustine’s clustering of so many psychological func-
tions around the will and his investing it with so much religious and moral
value bear little resemblance, as we will see, to cetanā; moreover, his vision
of a unified self with separate competing faculties does not sit well in
light of Buddhist theories of nonself. The pervasive division of cognitive,
affective, and conative faculties, elemental to premodern Western moral
philosophy, feels forced when read back into Buddhist thought. Cetanā
is not a faculty or set of abilities that may be posited independently of
any particular action, nor does it ever act as sovereign over or apart from
the dynamic conditioned and conditioning factors that constitute human
experience as described in dependent origination. Cetanā is not a site for
battles of the will; nor is it the site for discussions of free agency. It is not
appropriate to inquire into the weakness of cetanā, as one might in wor-
rying about the moral problem of the weakness of the will (akrasia); nor
would traditional Buddhist systems connect cetanā to the notion of will-
power. All of these usages, so familiar to us in talking about the will, do
not transfer in any clear way to Buddhist ideas of cetanā.

60. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, 45.

61. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 235.
62. As, for example, Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events.
63. Ryle, The Concept of Mind.
26 the forerunner of all th ings

It is also worth noting that the question of free will, for reasons that
by now should be increasingly apparent, is not my main entry point into
Buddhist theories of agency. Although how this philosophical problem as
it might apply to Buddhist ethics has sometimes been taken up in modern
scholarship,64 it is not the chief way in which the Buddhist sources them-
selves examine questions about intention or, for that matter, human free-
dom. The preoccupation with the will’s freedom is an artifact of particular
Western philosophical reflexes initiated by Augustine.65 It is not a ques-
tion considered directly by the Buddhist texts: abstract formulations about
human freedom are not attached to the term cetanā. Questions of freedom
in Buddhism are best treated independently from the idea of the will or
intention, and we do not want to tie questions of human freedom to this
one term.66 This is not to suggest that Buddhists were not concerned with
the tension between the conditioned nature of human thought and action
and the measure of freedom required for morally accountable action, and
these worries are a key theme of this study. But these concerns are articu-
lated in ways quite apart from the language of free will.
Thus, while it may be that the notion of the will (and its modern corre-
late, volition) is too heavily freighted with Western religious and philosoph-
ical assumptions to offer a useful entry into our interpretation of cetanā,
we do have other options. Since Guenther identifies cetanā with the idea of
motive or stimulus, it is important to clarify this vocabulary. Motivation as
it is used in current philosophy is connected to needs, wants, and desires,
whether this is articulated in a straightforward kind of psychological hedo-
nism (all actions are motivated by a desire for pleasure and the absence
of pain) or a more nuanced account of the varieties of drives, desires, and
emotions that prompt action. The psychology of motivation refers, in a
most general way, to all mental factors that stimulate and sustain behavior.

64. See, for example, Gómez, “Some Aspects of the Free-Will Question in the Nikāyas”;
Wayman, “Discussion of Frederick Streng”; Harvey, “Freedom of the Will”; and Federman,
“What Kind of Free Will Did the Buddha Teach?” Most successful in this approach is Karin
Meyers’s Chicago dissertation, Freedom and Self-Control: Free Will in South Asian Buddhism.
65. Kahn, “Discovering the Will,” 251.
66. Sorabji argues that questions of freedom in Western thought, too, are best treated
apart from the notion of the will (Emotion and Peace of Mind, 340); see also Murdoch, The
Sovereignty of Good. Current work in neuroscience also complicates traditional notions of
freedom of the will, particularly those studies that describe brain activity toward movement
as occurring before such movement is registered in consciousness. See Pocket, Banks,
and Gallagher (Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?) for a useful volume on neuroscience’s
advances in our understanding of agency and some of the implications of these findings.
 Introduction 27

Its modern history may be traced to the flourishing of the psychology of

motivation in the 18th century, when various philosophers, in part react-
ing to Locke’s empiricism and Hobbes’s pessimism about human nature,
developed complex accounts of the “springs of action.”67 Diverse senses,
sentiments, and affections, advanced first by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson
and later by Hume and Smith, described human beings as constitutively
endowed with moral and benevolent feelings that prompt action, a move
that made religious authority in morals unnecessary and reason’s role
largely supplementary. Their accounts of the moral sentiments are rich
and complex, and while they do not directly map onto the language of
cetanā, it may be fair to suggest that from a broader perspective of overall
approach, the 18th-century moral sense theorists offer more direct analogs
to certain Buddhist theories of motivation, emotion, and intention than
many other Western systems.
Nevertheless, the term motivation would seem to be a good deal
wider, strictly speaking, than is what is meant by cetanā. In the context
of Buddhist moral and religious psychology, desire and feeling, though
far from irrelevant to intention, are covered by quite different categories.
A central question for this study will be how cetanā is related to the vari-
ous feelings, desires, and promptings that are suggested by the English
term motivation. There is considerable language in the Pāli sources for
varieties of desire in reference to action and effort (chanda, the desire to
do something; adhimokkha, resolve; viriya, vāyāma, effort). There are also
factors of the mind that suggest motivational impulses or groundings of
actions (hetu or mūla, the causes or roots, often very deeply planted, of
action), as well as motivations concerning reward or punishment through
karmic effects (vipāka, phala, result or fruit; puñña, merit). Feelings are
described in many contexts and are in many instances the chief prompts
of action and vital indicators of its moral value. And of course, there occur
in diverse contexts in the Buddhist literatures many terms for disposi-
tion, character, and virtue, all of which may be seen to influence action.
Although we will come to see the diverse ways all of these factors play
into action, the term motivation will be used in this study primarily for

67. The term “springs of action,” while perhaps most notably appearing in Jeremy Bentham’s
A Table of the Springs of Action (a fascinating taxonomy of the sources of motivated action),
was frequently used in this period to describe the fonts of action. See McReynolds, Four
Early Works on Motivation, xxxi. This volume makes available two of Hutcheson’s works on
motivation, Jeremy Bentham’s Table and An Enquiry into the Origin of the Human Appetites
and Affections, attributed to James Long.
28 the forerunner of all th ings

the motivational roots (hetu, mūla), which prompt intentional action but
should not be conflated with cetanā.
As already suggested, our closest match for cetanā may be the English
word intention, though here, too, important divergences exist. Cetanā, like
intention, is by definition connected to action.68 This makes it narrower
than desire or motivation, which can have many different types of con-
tent: one’s motivation can be money or love, for example, whereas one’s
intention is always to perform some particular action. Intention’s history,
in English, begins around the 14th century, when it conveyed “the action
of intending or purposing; volition which one is minded to carry out; pur-
pose” and, a century later, “the aim of an action.”69 Today, a useful working
definition of intention and intentionality can be taken from Malle, Moses,
and Baldwin: intentionality is “a quality of actions (those that are inten-
tional or done on purpose), whereas intention is an agent’s mental state
that represents such actions.”70 We can modify this definition to fit cetanā
more precisely to suggest that intention refers to the mental processes
that constitute (rather than represent) purposeful action. Cetanā, as we will
come to see, is creating and performing a purposeful and (usually) mor-
ally relevant action. Notice that it is the creating and doing of action; in
the quotation with which we began defining action as intention, one does
not occur without the other. In this it may bear some limited affinities
with a recent construal of intention as “adopting a course of action.”71 But
it does not refer merely to what are referred to as “future-directed inten-
tions,” or the planning aspects of action, as in Michael Bratman’s theory
of intention.72 Buddhist texts have ways of talking about planning action,
but they do not usually use cetanā to name that activity. Nor are there
ready parallels in cetanā to the desire-belief model of intention that held
sway in the latter half of the 20th century in Western philosophy until
Bratman’s work. And intention in the sense of wish or aim, or in the sense

68. Malle and Knobe, “The Distinction between Desire and Intention,” 47.
69. Oxford English Dictionary.
70. Malle, Moses, and Baldwin, Intentions and Intentionality, 3. This book is a collection on
recent interdisciplinary work that takes intention as an object of empirical research.
71. See Scheer, “The ‘Mental State’ Theory of Intentions,” 123; also “Intentions, Motives, and
Causation” and “The Origin of Intentions.”
72. Bratman, Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason. Bratman acknowledges the importance
of present-directed intentions, but for him, “the future-directed case is central” (4).
 Introduction 29

of authorial intention or intended meaning, is covered by entirely differ-

ent language in Pāli: adhippāya.
One advantage of the use of the term intention for cetanā is that it can
suggest the phenomenological sense of intentionality, which concerns the
property of a mental state that makes it about an object. If we develop the
idea of this aboutness to consider the particular ways mental phenomena
are related to and intertwined with their objects, there may be intriguing
elements of this idea evident in cetanā. Martha Nussbaum is interested
in the way intentional mental states are about their objects “not from a
mechanical sort of directedness” but rather from one’s “active ways of see-
ing and interpreting.”73 As we will see, cetanā often refers to the complex
ways the mind actively interprets (and indeed constructs) its objects.
It is also worth noting at the outset that since cetanā is so closely tied
up with karma, that is, morally relevant action, it is not easily separated
from moral questions; this makes it difficult to treat it as a thing apart
from ethics, as G. E. M. Anscombe and Donald Davidson do, for exam-
ple, in their treatments of intention. Modern treatments of action inves-
tigate intention and action generically and then consider ethical action
as a subset of action, if it is considered at all. The Pāli sources generally
classify action, or karma, immediately into good, bad, and neutral action,
as distinctions useful for thinking about how to live well and for thinking
about the effects of action; to consider intention means that one is already
immersed in questions of ethics or morality so conceived.74 In addition,
cetanā plays a very important role in Buddhist soteriological doctrines, an
issue I will defer discussing to the next chapter.
Although it is not my aim to discern which, if any, Western system
or thinker might best match Buddhist theories of moral agency, much
less to engage systematically with modern theories, conceptual clarity has
required reviewing, even if only briefly, the ways these terms have been
understood in Western philosophy and psychology. All of these terms are
part of historical traditions, and it would be surprising if they shared the

73. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 28. On the phenomenological view of intentionality

in Brentano, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, see Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology.
74. The adjectives moral and ethical are used throughout the book in broad and general ways
to get at the some of the ideas we will see introduced in the beginning of the next chapter
concerning how to live well. These can then be juxtaposed against neutral values, on the one
hand, and against soteriological values, on the other. But they do not indicate a single unified
natural category that maps onto modern Western treatments of moral judgments as a single
category. This will be discussed more thoroughly in chapter 1.
30 the forerunner of all th ings

same meanings, given their particular genealogies and the vicissitudes

of the diverse contexts in which they were attributed meaning. The best
we might hope for is to achieve a language that is analogous enough to
bring us close to the ideas in the Buddhist sources, while we stay on guard
against assuming an overly uncritical equivalence. All of the English
terms considered thus far may illuminate certain aspects of Buddhist
moral psychology, even as they serve as points of departure for our evolv-
ing interpretations of it.
There is much at stake for ethical inquiry in these considerations about
translation. Depending upon how scholars have translated the key word
cetanā, they have also characterized Buddhist moral thinking more gener-
ally. For those who see in cetanā a sense of choice or rational deliberation,
Buddhist ethics (still unfortunately treated in a holistic fashion by many
scholars) is seen to be principally a matter of means-ends decision mak-
ing. Those who see cetanā as a matter of conscience center Buddhist ethics
more generally around a notion of an autonomous inner guide or set of
moral convictions, often uncritically presuming a certain conception of
moral agency that may be in evidence only in modern Western thought.
A more fine-grained grasp of moral psychology as it is articulated in the
various genres of Theravāda discourse will yield a more promising por-
trait of at least certain dimensions of this tradition of Buddhist thought.

Structure
As a term subject to technical definition and precision, cetanā, and related
terms for conation, find their meaning and significance in diverse contexts
and genres of Buddhist thought. Buddhaghosa describes the three branches
of canonical texts—the Suttanta, the Vinaya, and the Abhidhamma—in a
manner that can, in part, structure our own explorations of intention. He
describes the Suttas—that is, the teachings of the Buddha in his many ser-
mons—as teachings in the everyday or colloquial idiom that are straight-
forward and geared to people of various dispositions, inherent tendencies,
and behaviors.75 They are concerned with questions of meaning as it con-
cerns self and other, with how the processes of mind and thought work,
with how to abandon problematic states of mind and the defilements of

75. The following discussion is from a passage found in three places: Sv.i.17–22; As 19–24;
Sp 17–23.
 Introduction 31

craving and ignorance, and with the refutation of wrong views. Where
the Suttas are about colloquial meanings, the Abhidhamma, according
to Buddhaghosa, is the teaching of the Buddha that analyzes things in
their ultimate sense, and it is in this genre that we find the most technical
meanings of the terms and ideas under consideration. The Abhidhamma,
focused as it is on the “higher” wisdom of the Buddha’s teaching, treats
the ultimate factors of experience through analysis and defines the names
of things and the physical forms of them. It is for those who see in the
various factors of a person a robust sense of self and ownership, and who
need to be disabused of this conception, since in the ultimate sense a
human person is nothing more than “just a pile of factors” (dhammapuñ-
jamatto).76 The Vinaya or the monastic code is described as the Buddha’s
injunctions or commands about offenses and faults. Its strictures involve
restraint on behavior, the higher morality of monastic practice, and the
transgressions that imperil that practice. Concerned solely with monks
and nuns who have taken the monastic vows, it instructs them about their
faults and defilements in conduct.
Despite some overlap among genres, particularly in the commentar-
ies, on these different emphases, we may look to these genres for quite
distinctive treatments of intention. The Suttas and their commentaries
provide us with several key passages on intention that form the core of
our investigations in chapter 1, and we learn that cetanā is, in fact, a quite
technical term even in the Suttanta. This chapter investigates some of
the general ways in which the mind creates actions, referring not only to
intentions but also to motivations, causes, and elements of disposition and
temperament. Since moral considerations are almost always connected to
discussions of cetanā in this literature, we also spend some time trying
to understand what is meant by good (kusala) and bad (akusala) inten-
tions, both in formal definitions of these terms and in actual actions. This
chapter also locates cetanā in larger psychological frameworks in which
intention is a chief component of the constructive activities (saṅkhāra) of
the mind and considers the implications of this for Buddhist soteriology.
While there are similarities in content in the Sutta and Abhidhamma
texts, there are differences in method. We turn in chapter  2 to the
Abhidhamma texts and commentaries for our most technical and scho-
lastic treatment of intention. In Abhidhamma, we find a catalog of mental
factors that undergird moral agency; the commentaries on the canonical

76. As 21.
32 the forerunner of all th ings

sources produce a complex moral phenomenology describing how moral

and immoral actions occur. Our challenge in this chapter is to examine
Abhidhamma styles of definition, including its prolific use of lists and
metaphors, to interpret the processes of conation. Here we find cetanā
not as an autonomous faculty of mind, but embedded in a matrix of pro-
cesses, such as attention, feeling, and motivation, that condition and
constitute action. The canonical Abhidhamma does not treat persons as
such; rather, it treats the phenomena that comprise experience. It offers
theories of action and mind that depict various mental factors working
together through complex interrelations to produce actions. Intention is
understood variously in this chapter: as the key constructive element in
action, as a workmanlike mental activity that integrates and stimulates
other processes of mind, and as one essential, if not sufficient, causal fac-
tor of moral action. This literature also provides a morally and soterio-
logically inflected psychology: factors of mind can be good, bad, or neutral
according to a clear set of criteria.
Chapter 3 takes up the legalistic treatment of intention in the Vinaya
and its commentaries. The Atthasālinī says that where the Abhidhamma
teaches the discrete psychological factors (dhammas) that go into expe-
rience—perception, feeling, intention, and so on—in the Vinaya it is
enough to talk more generally of “mind” or “thought” (citta) without feel-
ing one has to parse the intricacies of the interior conditions that make up
action.77 Because much of this literature is concerned with infractions of
the monastic code, the Vinaya treats intention largely from a legal stand-
point. Often the intentional element in legal reasoning is an omission,
or recklessness, or it is simply enough to say whether an act is done with
knowledge or consent, and nothing more needs to be said about it as a
psychological state. Since this material is highly attuned to the language of
culpability and blame, and penalties are meted out according to intent, the
Vinaya and its commentaries develop a highly nuanced set of presupposi-
tions about the relation of actions to mental events. These presuppositions
find expression in the interpretation of particular cases.
Other considerations occur in the Vinaya that are not as explicit as its
concern with matters of culpability, but come to be readily apparent when
we identify the texts’ various techniques of self-formation. By its own
account, the Vinaya governs acts of body and speech and does not regulate

77. As 68.
 Introduction 33

mental actions. At the same time, its rules and institutional norms cre-
ate a certain type of sensibility and subjectivity in ways that the texts are
sometimes quite explicit about, and thus, at least at the level of the ideal,
the Vinaya creates or conditions a model type of moral agency. Thus in
addition to attending to the way the Vinaya considers intention in matters
of culpability, I also chart how the texts understood the ways that social,
religious, and institutional processes shape intention.
Finally, in chapter 4, we turn to narratives. The narrative collections,
of course, do not formally constitute a fourth piṭaka, but we do have some
precedent with Buddhaghosa understanding them as a distinctive form
of teaching, as I have already suggested. In particular, stories provide the
very settings and histories that identify—and constitute—intention and
action.
Many stories are interested in human intention and motivation—what
makes people do what they do—but, like the Vinaya literature, they do not
always use the language of cetanā to describe them and often speak more
broadly of “mind.” We turn in this chapter to the diverse ways that narra-
tives treat the causes, reasons, and explanations for why people do what
they do. What makes a good account of people’s actions? The stories pro-
vide rich and varied possibilities for exploring how and why people ascribe
intentions to others; bystander monks are almost always interested in fig-
uring out why people do what they do, though they are often corrected in
their interpretations by the omniscient Buddha, who knows all minds and
can frame actions in a larger scope of time and personal narrative. Minds
and intentions are negotiated in these stories by the characters’ conversa-
tions. Intentions in this chapter are thus not so much a matter of private
inner thoughts, but rather products of narrative and dialogue. I  borrow
from scholars in cognitive science, cultural psychology, and anthropology
who see intention less as a psychological state of mind and more as an
emergent social process, an irreducible unity of self in action with others,
and a matter of negotiated social meaning.
Thus, while we begin our study with cetanā and other relevant fac-
tors of action, our interest in agency and intention extends substantially
beyond exploring these terms and the system of moral phenomenology in
which they operate, and it moves into the ways that social and discursive
processes construct, mediate, and describe intentional action.
 1

Constructing Experience
intention in the suttas

in an important teaching on the nature of karma, the Buddha encourages

people to ask wise recluses and brahmans the following questions:

What is good, what is bad? What is blameworthy, what is blame-

less? What should be practiced, what should not be practiced?
What, when done, leads to my lasting harm and suffering, and what
when done, leads to my lasting welfare and happiness?1

The sermon occurs, Buddhaghosa explains, when a young man is ponder-

ing the nature of rebirth, having been shocked to learn that his miserly
father became a dog after his death, and that after his dog life, he will jour-
ney on to hell. The Buddha explains the workings of karma, how actions
create the disposition and temperament that determine future births.
Beings are, the Buddha explains, the “owners of their actions, the heirs of
their actions; they originate from their actions, are bound to their actions,
and have actions as their refuge.”2 Actions, in a fundamental way, create
and condition and determine who and what beings are and are at the cen-
ter, we might say, of their nature or identity. Because action makes us who
we are and what we will experience, it is a matter of great urgency to ask
wise people about what kinds of actions we should do. Buddhaghosa says
that this is something one must inquire about because, “if one does not
ask, one will not know what is to be done.”3

1. This is the sutta on the Shorter Analysis of Action, M.iii.206. (This passage also occurs at
D.iii.60 as advice about the kinds of questions a Cakkavatti king should ask and at D.iii.157
as describing the questions the Tathāgata asked in his previous lives, resulting in his eventu-
ally achieving the 32 marks of a great man.)
2. M.iii.203.
3. Ps.v.14.
 Constructing Experience 35

Much of the Theravāda thought we will be concerned with can be

located in this quest for happiness:  how can I  know what to do so that
I can be happy and avoid sorrow? The search for knowledge about what is
good and beneficial for human beings indicated here is not just a theoreti-
cal exercise, but is driven by pragmatic concerns, by people who want to
discover and do what will lead to happiness instead of sorrow, what leads
to good rebirths instead of hell. Buddhist reflection about what we would
call morally relevant intention and action is located in this yearning to
avoid the bad, the blameworthy, and the harmful and to practice the good
and the blameless in order to find happiness. These concerns reflect some
of the range of questions one might ask while engaged in what has been
called in the Aristotelian tradition ethics—questions about how to live. It is
in this spirit that the use of the adjectives ethical and moral throughout the
book can be located; I do not use them to indicate a single unified category
of morality that the book tries to unearth or glean from Buddhaghosa.4
Although this passage and others like it advise us to frequently turn to
wise people with such questions, in another sutta we see a more empirical
approach, suggesting that people can figure out for themselves what is
good and which actions they should perform. We can come to know what
is good for human beings through experiential study and observation, and
this idea is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the well-known Kālāma
Sutta, a favorite text of many modern interpreters (though Buddhaghosa
appears to have been considerably less interested in it). This teaching cap-
tures the Buddha at perhaps his most empirical, where he invites this
particular audience to come to know for themselves what is good and bad
and to not rely on oral report, tradition, hearsay, scripture, logic, infer-
ence, reasoning, speculation, convention, or the authority of a teacher.5

4. As Charles Hallisey has argued, Theravādins often resisted a notion of offering general-
izable criteria that would serve as a rationale for constructing a single category that would
match anything like modern categories of “morality” (Hallisey, “Ethical Particularism in
Theravāda Buddhism” and “A Reply to Kevin Schilbrack”). This is not philosophical laziness
on their parts, but a distinctive choice in the direction of what Hallisey calls “ethical plural-
ism.” It is also in keeping with what Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues from the perspective
of neuroethics, which is that morality is not a single unified category (“Keynote”).
5. As important as it has been to modern interpreters, the Kālāma Sutta was not discussed
much by Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla, who do little but gloss its terms. I  agree with
those scholars who insist that the Kālāma Sutta must be taken in context as advice offered
specifically to the Kālāmas, a well-educated but skeptical community of people who were
not yet the Buddha’s followers. To his own followers, the Buddha did not recommend a
freewheeling empiricism of simply following one’s own moral preferences (as this sutta has
sometimes, anachronistically, been read).
36 the forerunner of all th ings

A key part of what one will discover, the sutta suggests, when one attends
empirically to one’s action and its results is something about intention.
The Buddha offers, among other things, a number of assurances to the
Kālāmas about the way that moral action leads to happiness, one of which
brings up the equivalence of intention and action and suggests one impor-
tant role it plays in how karma is interpreted. The Buddha sets up the
assurance as a rhetorical question: “Suppose while acting, evil is done, but
I did not intend (cetemi) evil for anyone. Since I did not do an evil action,
how can sorrow touch me?”6 This suggestion offers a sense of assurance
or comfort: only what I mean to do is morally relevant and karmically fruit-
ful. I may inadvertently bring about an evil effect while acting, but if I did
not intend the evil, then a morally relevant action, that is, evil karma, did
not take place, and I will not experience the sorrow that would otherwise
follow it. This assurance responds to the anxieties one might have in a
karmic reality in which one is acting all of the time and, all too often,
doing actions that are morally problematic. What it appears to assert, on
the face of it, is that the karmic laws of cause and effect are attuned to
human intention. Moreover, the assertion is suggested in a larger teaching
on discovering such things for oneself: one can observe that only what one
intends is of moral consequence, leading to one’s benefit or harm.
This is by no means obvious, for often it seems that bad consequences
flow from even well-intended actions. The suggestion that karma is mor-
ally equivalent to intention may be regarded as positing something new or
potentially controversial in its context. The idea that action is, at least for
the sake of moral evaluation, solely a matter of mental processes (rather
than the effects of action) is a bold one. The implications of this view are
considerable for understanding the workings of karma and investigating
how the tradition assigns moral culpability. Chiefly, though, they point us
inward to discover just what those mental processes are that are deemed
morally significant. It is through looking to the inner moral landscape of
the mind that we can come to see how and why the Buddha thought that
experience will demonstrate that it is what we intend to do that matters in
creating our present and future condition.
We thus begin psychologically. The Buddha invites the Kālāmas to
see what happens when they make their thoughts “free of enmity, ill will,
corruptions, and pure,” and thus he turns our gaze inward to discover how

6. A.i.192.
 Constructing Experience 37

happiness and welfare follow from a purification of thought. But what is

pure thought and intention? The Suttanta (and the Abhidhamma in an even
more refined manner) provides a complex moral phenomenology to explore
thoughts and intentions and how they are related to (what we would call)
emotions, motivations, and dispositions. This phenomenology is part of a
larger moral anthropology that investigates the moral capacities and limita-
tions of human nature.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the amount of textual material in the
Suttanta branch of the Pāli canon is huge—and doubly so when we consider
the commentarial sources as well. Moreover, the interest this material dis-
plays in what might be very generally termed the “springs of action”—that
is, the entire range of emotions, motivations, dispositions, and intentions
that lead to action—is considerable. This chapter does not attempt to survey
everything that relates to intention or motivation in this body of literature.
Rather, I focus on several central passages about cetanā, investigate relevant
ideas and terms raised in those passages, and then discuss other important
usages of intention and how they can help us to understand moral thought
in this branch of Pāli literature.

Cetanā
We begin with two important canonical passages that deal centrally with
intention (cetanā) that can begin to guide us into how the Pāli tradition
understood and used it. It is perhaps most appropriate to start by looking
more closely at the well-known quotation from the Aṅguttara that opens this
study where the Buddha links karma to cetanā. As we recall, the Buddha
asserted that intention is karma and that, intending, one does karma with
body, speech, and mind.7 What exactly does this mean, and what is the con-
text in which this assertion occurs?
According to this sutta, the Buddha taught this idea in a teaching
described as a “penetrating method” (nibbedhika-pariyāya); the sutta is called
“Penetrating Sutta.” Buddhaghosa takes this to mean that this method
causes penetration; it “pierces and penetrates” that which has not yet been

7. A.iii.415. Cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi. Cetayitvā kammaṃ karoti—kāyena

vācāya manasā. Karin Meyers quite rightly calls this line a “mahāvākya,” a “sacred announce-
ment” as it is used in modern scholarship on Buddhist ethics to encapsulate a modern-
ist and Western preoccupation with reading karma in terms of inner freedom and moral
responsibility, which she then criticizes (Freedom and Self Control, 138, 156–57).
38 the forerunner of all th ings

pierced and penetrated.8 It is a teaching expressed in analytical terms, punc-

turing through what had not yet been comprehended. And so we begin our
study quite technically (rather than colloquially). The sutta defines and ana-
lyzes five topics in addition to action (karma): desire (kāma), feeling (vedanā),
perception (saññā), the depravities (āsavā), and suffering (dukkha). These six
topics are fundamental aspects of human experience, offering a somewhat
expanded version of the five aggregates,9 which itself is an analysis attempt-
ing to categorize all possible experience.
The text penetrates each of these phenomena by defining the phenom-
enon itself, its origin, its varieties, its fruit, its cessation, and the path to
its cessation; this is a mode of analysis familiar to us from that of the
Four Noble Truths. If we understand each of these as something that is
present to us as a phenomenon and that can be analyzed according to its
arising, its cessation, and the path to its cessation, we can see it in both
temporal and soteriological lights. Karma and the other five phenomena
are things that arise from certain conditions, bear fruit, and cease, a tem-
poral sequence within a conditioned reality of other things that is crucial
for interpreting what they are. Finally, the path to cessation for each of
them is the Noble Eightfold Path, a soteriological trajectory that indicates
that these experiences are undesirable and can be ended. This is not the
only way these six things can be analyzed, and indeed the modes of analy-
sis provided by lists are usually not intended to be comprehensive. But
recognizing this mode of analysis goes some distance in helping us to
understand each of these phenomena.
In addition, for each topic the text is concerned with the inner, subjec-
tive aspects of the phenomenon and says nothing about the external aspects
of it; for example, in the case of desire, the sutta specifies that it is referring
to desire as a person’s passionate thoughts and not desire’s objects or the
ways it is expressed in the world.10 The text is explicitly signaling that it is
not offering an exhaustive definition of any of these items and instead is
concerned solely with the interior or subjective aspects of each experience.

8. Mp.iii.406.
9. The six topics can be said to correspond to the five aggregates (rūpa, vedanā, saññā,
saṅkhāra, and viññāṇa) that comprise human experience, with kāma corresponding to rūpa,
āsavā and karma corresponding to saṅkhāra, and dukkha to viññāṇa. I am grateful to Steven
Collins for pointing this out, as well as other key insights about this sutta in the following
two paragraphs.
10. A.iii.411.
 Constructing Experience 39

When he comes to karma, the Buddha first asks, “What should be said
regarding karma?” And then he defines karma as cetanā: “I say that karma
is cetanā” and that “intending, one does karma with body, speech, and
mind.” We can also translate this as “one does karma intentionally with
body, speech, and mind,” which offers a slightly different sense. Regardless,
here we see the inward turn in defining the phenomenon according to the
subjective dimension of physical, verbal, and mental actions. (Intention’s
relationship to mental action, which also is internal, requires further
exploration.) The Buddha goes on to identify karma’s “origin” as arising
from sensory contact with the world and its “varieties” as the experiences
that are had in hell, in animal lives, in ghost lives, in human lives, and in
the divine realms. In this designation, the variety of action is something
to be known or experienced (vedanīya) in these various locations in the
rounds of rebirth. The sutta goes on to say that karma’s “fruit” can occur
either in the present, in the near future, or at some later time, its “cessa-
tion” as occurring at the ceasing of sensory contact, and the “path leading
to its cessation” as the Noble Eightfold Path.
While what exactly the Buddha meant by intention here may be unknow-
able, Buddhaghosa offers a definition that suggests at least how he came
to understand it: “here cetanā should be taken in the sense of arranging,
in that it collects everything together.”11 He glosses the absolutive intend-
ing to mean that “an intention occurs at the doorway,” which refers to a
theory about action, discussed more thoroughly later, that involves cetanā
occurring or located at a doorway or site of action according to whether the
action is mental, verbal, or physical. But what does it mean that an inten-
tion “arranges” and “collects everything together”? Dhammapāla, author
of the subcommentary, says that collecting everything together means
cetanā holds together what is good or bad and that the “sense of arranging”
means that its characteristic is arranging associated factors (dhammas).12
These definitions are, of course, quite technical and even obscure at this
point in our study and will require many pages in this and the following
chapter to understand.
Another commentary on this passage, though brief, is worth mention-
ing here. In a section on a passage from his commentary on the Upāli
Sutta in the Majjhima (a sutta later discussed briefly), Buddhaghosa quotes

11. Mp.iii.408.
12. Mp-ṭ.iii.139. Good (kusala) and bad (akusala) are discussed at length later, and dhammas,
the momentary factors of experience, are treated in the next chapter.
40 the forerunner of all th ings

this passage in the Aṅguttara. He brings this up in the context of a dis-

cussion on whether karma or intention is foremost. He says that some
suttas say that karma is foremost (or the leading, prior part, dhura), and
others say that cetanā is foremost. So what did the Buddha mean when he
said that karma is cetanā? The answer, he says, is that cetanā is “the ori-
gin from which action springs” (cetanāmūlakattā kammassa), attempting
to state more precisely their exact relationship.13 The issue here, I think,
is a subtle one, but it exposes a suppressed tension in these sources: is it
mind that makes action (as the epigraph of this book suggests in iden-
tifying the mind as the forerunner of all things), or is it action that is
prior and mind inherits its effects (as in the passage on humans as the
“heirs of their actions” with which we opened this chapter)? Both are, of
course, true when we consider an agent across time, but here, and I think
most often, Buddhaghosa comes down on the side of intention being the
root of action, suggesting its priority (priority in terms of importance,
not temporal relation, since they occur simultaneously). But this tension
should be noted when in evidence, and there will be certain moments in
which actions are evaluated independently and prior to the intentions that
constitute them.
The second passage we will consider here, the Intention Sutta in the
Aṅguttara,14 offers a more extensive treatment of cetanā. In a general way,
this sutta, too, is concerned with the arising and ceasing of action and
the subjective dimensions of it. It asserts that pleasure and pain arise
subjectively as they are conditioned by intention in all three types of
actions: physical, verbal, and mental. They cease at the cessation of igno-
rance. The sutta is also interested in how one’s own and others’ intentions
create one’s experience of pleasure and pain, recognizing that one’s experi-
ences are often conditioned by others’ intentional actions. Finally, it says that
these processes may be either deliberate (sampajāno) or not and yet still have
the same effects in producing pleasure or pain.
We will parse each of these claims in turn, but first it is important to
discuss the distinction invoked in both suttas between physical, verbal, and

13. Ps.iii.54.
14. Subsequent passages are quoted from this sutta, the Sañcetaniyavaggo (A.ii.158–60; the
commentary is Mp.iii.143–48 and Mp–ṭ.ii.345). This sutta does not describe a context of the
circumstances of its teaching, and the commentators do not provide one. Compare this
passage to S.ii.34–40 and Spk.ii.56–58, where a similar passage occurs in the context of
explaining dependent origination, and to M.iii.209, where the aim is to show how pleasure
and pain arise. Sañcetanā and cetanā are used synonymously.
 Constructing Experience 41

mental action, as it is pervasive in the tradition’s thinking about action. The

threefold division of action appears to have been part of the intellectual land-
scape of the Buddha’s day, though the precise workings and moral weight
put on each of the types were often points of contention, at least as matters
are represented in the Buddhist texts. The Buddhist texts regard themselves
as distinctive among their rival teachers, especially Jains, in emphasizing
mental action as the most important of these, though all three are morally
significant in the sense of being karmically fruitful.15
According to the account of action sketched in the Pāli sources, one has
an intention that manifests itself at one of three doorways—body, speech, or
mind—resulting in three types of action. Buddhaghosa took this quite liter-
ally to mean that intention is occurring in movements of the body in the case
of bodily actions and in the movements of the jaw for verbal actions, while
mental actions occur invisibly in the mind.16 Sometimes he offers the exam-
ple of giving a gift. A mental action of giving involves thinking of or planning
an actual gift and recipient entirely in one’s mind, a verbal action is when
one orders someone else to give on one’s behalf, and a bodily action is giving
the gift oneself. Each of these is considered an action with an intention that
occurs at the doorway of its respective location.17 Buddhaghosa attempts to
define how this works quite technically, specifying that cetanā is the accumu-
lating of what should be collected together at the three doorways of action.18
The meaning of this sentence is not fully explained here, but we will come

15. The Upāli Sutta describes a discussion between a Jain ascetic and the Buddha about
evil action, where the Buddha argues that mental action is more morally significant (in the
sense of leading to present and future effects) than verbal or bodily actions, whereas the
Jain emphasizes bodily actions (M.i.372–78). See Devdas for a careful comparative treat-
ment with Jains on issues of intentional agency (2008, ch. 2). Another sutta in the Majjhima
describes Buddha arguing with a teacher who has misrepresented the Buddha’s view to the
effect that only mental actions are real. In this sutta, the Buddha reaffirms the significance
for one’s experience of all three types of actions and their future consequences (M.iii.207–15).
16. Ps.iii.104.
17. As 77–81 provides extensive examples like this; it says, too, that in the case of mental
actions, “one would later do the actual verbal or bodily deed” so that it is not just a thought
(77). This passage also makes a distinction between Vinaya and Abhidhamma exposition,
suggesting that Abhidhamma takes mental actions more seriously than Vinaya does; the
latter, as legal discourse, is concerned solely with verbal and bodily actions.
18. Mp.iii.145. “Accumulating” is a specialized sense of āyūhana, connected with the pro-
cesses of “making a heap, making a pile” (rāsiṃ karoti piṇḍaṃ karoti) elsewhere (Mp.ii.191)
and discussed by Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 342, n. 2; Cone, A Dictionary
of Pāli, 323; and Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 345–49. As we will see, accumu-
lating indicates a key function of cetanā of gathering together other mental factors in initiat-
ing action; this has karmic implications because it is the gathering together of conditioned
42 the forerunner of all th ings

to see that cetanā is the gathering together and animating of other mental
factors in the construction of experience through action.
It is important to note that a mental action (manokamma) is not identi-
cal to cetanā; rather, one has cetanās for each of the three actions. Certain
types of purely mental activity are considered mental actions and have
karmic results even if there is no bodily or verbal behavior involved. In
particular, there are six types of mental actions:  covetousness, malice,
wrong view, the absence of covetousness (such as one might experience in
planning a gift), the absence of malice, and right view. This can be confus-
ing because these mental actions, though considered complete actions,
can also (though they need not) have motivational force leading to bodily
or verbal actions in addition to the mental activity. But they are not to be
conflated with cetanās, which are the central component of all three types
of action.19
This location of intention in body, speech, and mind closes the gap
between action and intention. Intention does not come first and then cul-
minate in action; intention cannot fail to issue in action.20 If intention is an
essential element of action, I cannot say things like this: I intended to get
to class on time but then stopped and chatted with a friend and so failed to
do so. Intention and action are joined at the hip, as it were, making philo-
sophical discussion around intention very different than the treatment of
it in certain modern Western philosophical treatments, where, following
Bratman, for example, we can speak of future-directed intentions as the
planning part of an action but not the actualization of it.21 Here, cetanā is
part of every karmic action and does not occur independently of action;
action, however, will have other components as well.

experience that keeps us in the round of rebirth. Devdas suggests that in addition to its
specialized meaning of accumulating, āyūhana’s sense of striving or exertion should be
preserved in translating it. However, in this passage (idāni tīsupi dvāresu āyūhanacetanā
samodhānetabbā), the idea is that cetanā is accumulating and gathering together other men-
tal processes to galvanize action at the three doorways. This is further discussed later.
19. As 87–90. Devdas is helpful on this, and she shows how the Theravādins’ view was
regarded as controversial among other Buddhist schools (Cetanā and the Dynamics of
Volition, 371, 387–96).
20. Note that his close link between intention and action at this level of theory will be in ten-
sion with how intention is treated practically in the Vinaya sources.
21. Bratman, 1987. Since the Buddhist conception identifies action with intention, a whole
host of philosophical problems that would only occur if the two were deemed separate, such
as akrasia, do not come up.
 Constructing Experience 43

The Intention Sutta goes on to emphasize that there are feelings “sub-
jectively” or “inwardly” (ajjhattam) experienced in these three types of
action: “there arises subjective pleasure or pain” caused by each of these
three kinds of intentions. Intentions produce effects experienced as feel-
ings, and the nature of the intention determines whether one feels plea-
sure or pain. The idea that intentional actions produce felt experience (a
basic “hedonic tone,” pleasurable, painful or neutral) and that those feel-
ings are to be noted by those who seek a guide for their actions is echoed
elsewhere. The feelings accompanying an intentional action are crucial
in this moral psychology: in performing an action, if one feels pain, one
can know directly and empirically that the action leads to bad results. For
example, according to a similar passage in the Majjhima, one who kills
living beings feels a kind of pain that is in keeping with the violence of
the act and its results for the agent facing future karmic repercussions.22
Moreover, the Intention Sutta asserts, these intentions are ultimately
conditioned by ignorance. In this section, interestingly, the term saṅkhāra
(“mental constructions”) and a verbal form of it, abhisaṅkharoti, are used
interchangeably with cetanā, pointing to an equivalence or overlap that
will occupy us at some length later.23 For now, it is enough to note that
the language of saṅkhāra and the references to cetanā being bound up
with felt experience and ignorance signal cetanā’s role in two essential
doctrines—the five aggregates and dependent origination.
The sutta then goes on to make a further set of distinctions about
cetanā. Intentions may occur either on one’s own or another person’s ini-
tiative: “either one intends one’s own bodily intention and subjective plea-
sure or pain arises from that condition, or others intend a bodily intention

22. M.iii.209–10. This text says that feelings associated with actions can be pleasurable,
painful, or neither. The subjective nature of our experiencing the fruits of karmic action was
an issue contested by other Buddhists; the Theravādins insist that karmic fruit is subjective;
that is, it is how we experience our actions and what they lead to. For more on this as it was
debated in the Kathāvatthu, see McDermott, “The Kathāvatthu Kamma Debates,” 426.
23. In addition, once the language of saṅkhāra is introduced, Buddhaghosa and Dhammapāla
tally up the numbers of different kinds of mental, verbal, or bodily saṅkhāras or sañcetanās
according to whether they are good or bad, whether they are located in the realm of sense
desire or the realms of form and formlessness (the latter only in the case of certain mental
intentions), and whether they are “prompted” (sasaṅkhārika). We consider these distinc-
tions further in the Abhidhamma chapter, but a helpful manual to them can be found in
the Abhidhammasaṅgaha (see Nārada and Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma,
32–40). On the 20 bodily, 20 verbal, and 29 mental volitions, see Bodhi, The Discourse on
Right View, 65.
44 the forerunner of all th ings

and subjective pleasure or pain arises from that condition.” This is sur-
prising:  how can someone else’s intention shape my action and experi-
ence of it? While the sutta itself does not elaborate, Buddhaghosa explains
that people can do things by “being aroused and commanded by others.”24
Moreover, the sutta goes on to say that other people’s intentions can deter-
mine our rebirth.25 How can this be so? Buddhaghosa describes how dei-
ties in one of the lower heavens become envious of one another; unless
one is protected from such envy, it spreads to both sides.26 When this hap-
pens, both deities fall from that heavenly state. He goes on to suggest that
this phenomenon is even more serious among humans who “fall due to
their own intentions and others’ intentions,” because their anger can lead
to actual violence. This suggests that our intentions are shaped by others’
intentions in a direct way. Although not elaborated with as much precision
and detail as we might wish, this recognition of intersubjectivity, occur-
ring either in one acting at the prompting or command of others or in the
way the text sees one’s own fate as bound up with the intentions of others,
may be striking to readers accustomed to seeing intention as a principal
site for autonomy and self-determination.
The sutta draws a further distinction about intentions:  they may be
either deliberate or not. What does this mean? Buddhaghosa says that act-
ing deliberately means that one knows that what is good is good and that
what is bad is bad, and what the effects or fruits are of one’s actions.27 He
illustrates this with the example of young children who, copying their par-
ents, worship shrines and the Saṅgha, make offerings, and so on, without
really knowing that what they are doing is good. And animals, too, seem
to listen to Dhamma talks and worship shrines and the Saṅgha without
really knowing what they are up to. Conversely, children can do mischief
without knowing that what they are doing is bad. Such behavior, while not
deliberate or done knowingly (jānanta), is still intended, and its effects are

24. Spk.ii.57 explains that when acting on one’s own initiative, one acts with an unprompted
mind (asaṅkhārikacitta), and when acting by another’s initiative, one acts with a prompted
mind (sasaṅkhārikacitta). Bhikkhu Bodhi suggests that this passage may be the basis for the
Abhidhamma distinction between sasaṅkhārikacitta and asaṅkhārikacitta, which we will take
up in the following chapter (Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 749).
25. There are four ways of attaining birth as a living being: through one’s own intention,
through another’s intention, through both, and through neither (A.ii.159; cf. D.iii.232).
26. Mp.iii.147.
27. Ibid. Again, the terms here for good and bad are kusala and akusala, to be discussed later.
 Constructing Experience 45

experienced. Dhammapāla’s subcommentary on this passage emphasizes

that knowing here refers to whether one is aware of the karmic fruits of
action. Children act from a readiness (kammañña) to imitate their parents
without knowing that their actions have future consequences.28
It is worth pausing briefly to notice the presence of deities, children,
and animals in these interpretations. We discover the nature of ordinary
mature human intentions by considering these cases. When even deities
in their heavenly conditions act out of envy and anger, we learn something
about human intersubjectivity, since humans are even more prone to such
failings engendered by contact with others in our fraught and messy social
world. Children do not have full mature moral agency, and we can see
in their behavior intentions that lack deliberation and knowledge.29 This
tells us that intention does not have to entail deliberation and that moral
agency varies in the course of human development. (We might be aware
that many empirical investigations of mind and agency in our own time
also focus heavily on children.) And the doings of animals, a rich object of
moral reflection in the Pāli literature, also help us discern what is uniquely
human in our experience while we see that we share much with them,
even in their limited moral capacities.30
From these two suttas and their commentaries, which together give
the most extensive discussion of cetanā in the Suttanta, we learn several
things about intention. First, we see that cetanā tends to be discussed in
rather technical treatments of psychological factors of experience. Cetanā
is a mental activity of collecting and arranging mental experiences in the
performance of bodily, verbal, or mental action. Cetanās are accompanied
by subjective feelings of pleasure or pain for their agent and may occur

28. Mp-ṭ 2.345.
29. Mil 310–12 discusses the moral and religious capacities of animals and young children.
Both can practice well, even though they have no comprehension (abhisamaya) of the
Dhamma. The minds of children under seven are weak, powerless, limited, small, little, tri-
fling, ignorant, and without clarity, and they cannot grasp the profundity of nibbāna. At the
same time, children do not have passion, hatred, delusion, conceit, wrong view, discontent,
or thoughts concerning sensual pleasure. Indeed, it is for these very reasons that the child is
unable to discern what is good or bad or to comprehend the Dhamma; that is, lacking pas-
sion and hatred, for example, they do not have enough in their experience to discern what
is good (kusala) or bad (akusala). The Milindapañho also says, in the context of a discussion
about whether Vessantara’s children were old enough to consent to his giving them away,
that until age seven, children are not old enough to properly to give their consent (Mil 275).
30. See Jaini, “Indian Perspectives on the Spirituality of Animals,” 252–66, on the moral
capacities of animals in Indian literatures.
46 the forerunner of all th ings

at either the agent’s own or by another’s initiative. Finally, intentional

actions occur with or without deliberation; one can perform an intended
act without knowing its moral significance.

Constructing Experience
It is highly significant that the Intention Sutta uses the term saṅkhāra
synonymously with cetanā. This usage gives us the opportunity to further
investigate this important term, which is one of the most challenging in
Buddhist thought, and to work out its exact relationship to the processes
of intention. It should be mentioned at the outset that while on certain
occasions cetanā and saṅkhāra are used synonymously or interchange-
ably (as here),31 they do not always overlap entirely, and the two terms
should be held conceptually distinct even as we become aware of where
they intersect.
Here is not the place to review exhaustively the entire range of
saṅkhāra’s meaning, but we may outline the main contexts in which it is
used.32 If we look chiefly at its etymology, saṅkhāra is derived from the pre-
fix saṃ and the verb karoti, which means “to put together, construct, and
compound other things, and the things that are put together, constructed,
and compounded.”33 The Samyutta says that saṅkhāras “construct the con-
ditioned,” where “the conditioned” refers to the five aggregates, or the

31. De Silva suggests that they are often synonymous (An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology,
20). Karunaratna says they are “equivalent” and that “the fourth aggregate saṅkhāra is
directly and unambiguously defined in terms of cetanā” (“Cetanā,” 87). Bhikkhu Bodhi sug-
gests that saṅkhāra, when understood as an aggregate, is treated as an “umbrella category”
where cetanā is “mentioned only as the most important factor in this aggregate, not its
exclusive constituent” (Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 1065). This is affirmed
in the commentary on the Abhidhamma text the Vibhaṅga, which says that “cetanā is the
principal saṅkhāra” because “of its well-known sense of accumulation” (VibhA 20). S.iii.60
defines saṅkhāra in terms of the six types of cetanā: cetanās regarding forms, sounds, odors,
tastes, tactile objects, and phenomena (dhamma). A.ii.232 describes a person intending
(abhisaṅkharoti) a bodily, verbal, or mental saṅkhāra; later, the sutta mentions this process in
terms of cetanā and its commentary glosses kāyasaṅkhara as kāyadvaracetanā, an intention
that occurs at the doorway of the body (Mp.iii.312). Beginning with Vibh 170, the Vibhaṅga
repeatedly identifies saṅkhāra with both cetanā and what is intended (yā cetanā sañcetanā
sañcetayitattaṃ ayaṃ vuccati saṅkhāro).
32. For more exhaustive treatments of saṅkhāra, see Jayatillake, “Some Problems
of Translation and Interpretation,” 208–24; Boisvert, The Five Aggregates; Payutto,
Buddhadhamma; Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 44–47; and Devdas, Cetanā
and the Dynamics of Volition.
33. Bodhi, The Connected Discourses, 45.
 Constructing Experience 47

compounded things that make up human existence.34 Saṅkhāras are also

said to be the intentions (cetanā) connected to each of the five senses and
the factors of mind; saṅkhāras put together the sensory data and factors
of thought, and refer to the things so constructed.35 A. B. Keith suggests
that saṅkhāra “denotes the making ready or complete something for an
end” and also “the result of the activity when achieved.”36 It is purposive
activity aimed at an object or end that it constructs, as well as those con-
structed objects. Nalini Devdas shows how saṅkhāra can refer both to con-
ditioned responses and habits and to the dynamic capacities for creative
and goal-oriented action.37
Drawing on these basic senses, scholars have used various terms to
translate it:  formations, volitional formations, determinations, compounded
things, and constructions. Phra Payutto is perhaps the most concrete in his
treatment of saṅkhārā. They are the “mental formations, predispositions
or volitional activities” that are the

psychological compositions, or the various qualities that embellish the

mind making it good, bad, or neutral, and they have intention (cetanā)
as their guide. Put very simply some of these good and bad thoughts
are as follows: confidence (saddhā), mindfulness (sati), moral shame
(hiri), moral fear (ottappa), loving-kindness (mettā), compassion
(karuṇā), joy (muditā), equanimity (upekkhā), wisdom (paññā), delu-
sion (moha), ill-will (dosa), greed (lobha), conceit (māna), perspective
(diṭṭhi), envy (issā), and avarice (macchariya), for example.38

The term captures at once the psychological forces and activity of the mind
as it makes sense of and acts in the world, as well as the existing disposi-
tions, habits, memory traces, and patterns that predispose us to construe
the world in the way that we do. In a general way, it has the sense of both
occurrences and dispositions.39

34. S.iii.87.
35. S.iii.60. The next chapter on the Abhidhamma lists the 52 factors of mind (dhammas)
that the saṅkhāras put together and that are then also called saṅkhāras. They include disposi-
tions, emotions, habits of thought, and, of course, cetanā itself.
36. Keith, Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon, 50.
37. Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 121–28.
38. Payutto, Buddhadhamma, 54.
39. De Silva, “Theoretical Perspectives on Emotions in Early Buddhism,” 110.
48 the forerunner of all th ings

While I translated it as “intention” where it is used synonymously with

cetanā, I  prefer to translate saṅkhāra in its general sense as “construc-
tion,” which points to the feature of the mind that creates our experience
through putting together and compounding other things. Construction
also conveys in one word both saṅkhāra’s active and passive senses—that
which constructs and that which is constructed. Like karma, saṅkhāras are
both tendencies inherited from the past and the activity of creating new
experiences. In this, both karma and saṅkhāra imply both patiency (our
experience is acted upon and shaped by past constructions) and agency
(our minds construct experience), and different contexts bring either of
these senses to the fore.40 Through both of these rubrics, the category of
saṅkhāra allows us to see a person as a temporal process. The mind is
a changing dynamic of shifting factors, not a static enduring collection
of states. Change is a matter of previous conditions constructing present
experience, which in turn is an active process of creating the future.
In perhaps its most prominent role, saṅkhāra is one of the five aggre-
gates, that is, the main collections of events and factors that make up a
person, which we further discuss later. In this context, Buddhaghosa takes
saṅkhāra primarily in its active sense as collecting and constructing what is
compounded. He defines its characteristic as “constructing,” its function
as “accumulating,” its manifestation as “work,” and its proximate cause as
the other aggregates. He also says that saṅkhāras are good, bad, and inde-
terminate.41 We see now quite clearly saṅkhāras’ links to the idea of cetanā,
in particular in how the first commentary we considered defines cetanā
as that which “collects everything together.”42 Buddhaghosa makes this
explicit when he says that saṅkhāras are manifested as cetanā, and these
same processes—accumulating, working, and so on—are common to
both.43 Elsewhere, he glosses bodily saṅkhāra as an “accumulation of cetanā
at the doorway of the body” and says that the verbal form abhisaṅkharoti is

40. Sometimes the texts talk about “old karma” and “new karma.” Old karma is what is gen-
erated by karma, and new karma is what one does now (S.ii.65, iv.132, for example). Other
passages assert that one is the heir of one’s past actions and encourage a subjectivity of see-
ing oneself as the result of previous actions (M.iii.202, 206; A.iii.72).
41. Vism 462. Here I  follow the Mahāṭīkā, which glosses vipphāra as vyāpāra, “work”
(Vism-mhṭ 484).
42. Mp.iii.408.
43. Vism 528; Vism-mhṭ 571.
 Constructing Experience 49

working, making a heap, accumulating.44 The Milindapañho suggests that

cetanā is distinguished by “abhisaṅkharaṇa,” which may be best under-
stood in this context as “making a preparation,” since the text offers a
simile of an intention being like a man preparing poison by taking and
mixing other stuff, and drinking it himself or making others drink it. This
action would lead to bad future results because what has been concocted
or accumulated is harmful.45 Cetanā and saṅkhāra are the active processes
of the mind that accumulate experience and thereby construct reality.
Saṅkhāras are placed at the heart of Buddhist teachings about the per-
son and the nature of human experience in saṃsāra. Since, according
to Buddhist thought, all experiences except nibbāna are constructed and
compounded, saṅkhāra in its widest sense has very broad scope indeed.
As Bodhi puts it, “this notion of saṅkhāra serves as the cornerstone of a
philosophical vision which sees the entire universe as constituted of con-
ditioned phenomena.”46 Passages that assert the impermanence of, and
the suffering entailed by, all conditioned things use this term.47 Saṅkhāra
in this broad sense leads us directly to the soteriological project of the
Buddhist path, which is to gain insight into the nature of our suffering and
to find release from it. That which is conditioned, constructed, and imper-
manent ultimately entails loss and frustration; the religious path seeks
what is not conditioned and thus leads to the final cessation of sorrow.
There are two main doctrinal contexts in which saṅkhāra functions that
situate it in the context of the soteriological teachings of the tradition: as
a link in the chain of dependent origination and as one of the five aggre-
gates. In the context of dependent origination, saṅkhāra is the second
link in the 12 links that determine our existence in saṃsāra.48 Produced

44. Mp.ii.191:  Kāyasaṅkhāranti kāyadvāre cetanārāsim. Abhisaṅkharotīti āyūhati rāsiṃ karoti

piṇḍaṃ karoti. In the context of rebirth, these processes of “making a heap” and accumulat-
ing are considered a specialized sense of āyūhana, which also means “doing work” (vyāpāra)
according to the Mahāṭīkā (Vism-mhṭ 571; on āyūhana see Bodhi, Connected Discourses, 342,
n. 2; Cone, A Dictionary of Pāli, 323). Mp.iii.312 says that abhisaṅkharoti means to accumulate
(āyūhati) and combine (sampiṇḍeti). See also note 18 here.
45. Mil 61.
46. Bodhi, Connected Discourses, 46.
47. Sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā (S.i.200; D.ii.157).
48. The 12 links are, of course, ignorance (avijjā), saṅkhāra, consciousness (viññāṇa),
mind-and-form (nāmarūpa), the six sense bases (saḷāyatanā), sensory contact (phassa), feel-
ing (vedanā), craving (taṇhā), clinging (upādāna), becoming (bhava), birth (jāti), and decay
and death (jarāmaraṇa) (S.ii.1–11).
50 the forerunner of all th ings

by ignorance, saṅkhāras in turn generate consciousness. Ignorance drives

the process of putting together the factors of experience that allow us to be
aware or conscious of the world and to react to it.
It is significant that consciousness is not prior here to either igno-
rance or the intentional momentum of constructing experience, but is, in
fact, generated by them. In an explication of dependent origination, the
Saṃyutta elaborates on saṅkhāra’s role in generating conscious experi-
ence explicitly through the language of cetanā and adds to it the notion of
biases or latent tendencies (anusaya). It says that “intending (ceteti), plan-
ning (pakkappeti), and having biases (anuseti)” establish consciousness.
The mental activities of intending and planning, which are the very con-
structing and fashioning of the objects of conscious experience, as well as
the underlying proclivities or obsessions that underlie or accompany such
intentions, establish conscious experience.49 This suggests that this prior
putting together of the world makes consciousness possible and gives it
its object.
But saṅkhāra is conditioned not only by ignorance; like all the links of
the chain of dependent origination, saṅkhāra is conditioned by and con-
ditions all of the other links and is embedded in a complex and mutu-
ally conditioned system. Saṅkhāra is the work of our minds, which take
our sensory data and thoughts, motivations, feelings, and other psychic
phenomena and put them together to create our conscious experience,
through the radically causal processes of dependent origination. It is a
process impelled by ignorance and confusion and is a fundamental opera-
tion of the mind that traps us in saṃsāra. Bhikkhu Bodhi explains:

As the second factor in the formula of dependent origination,

saṅkhāras are the kammically active volitions responsible, in con-
junction with ignorance and craving, for generating rebirth and
sustaining the forward movement of saṃsāra from one life to the
next. Saṅkhāra is synonymous with kamma, to which it is etymo-
logically related, both being derived from karoti.50

The restless, active nature of saṅkhāra/cetanā to collect sensory and psy-

chic data and thoughts to construct our experience is the very karma that

49. S.ii.65; Spk.ii.70–71.

50. Bodhi, Connected Discourses, 45.
 Constructing Experience 51

propels saṃsāra. In this regard, passages that see cetanā as a kind of food
(āhāra) get at this sense of how our intentions nourish and fuel our exis-
tence, trapping us in a conditioned and compounded reality.51 The path
to nibbāṇa involves ceasing craving for this food. Another passage sees
intention (cetanā) and aspiration (patthanā) as keeping humans estab-
lished in the realm of rebirth.52
In this sense, saṅkhāra/cetanā/kamma are highly problematic from a
soteriological standpoint. Because of this, the cessation of saṅkhāra and
the cessation of karma are identified with achieving the Noble Eightfold
Path that brings our turmoil in saṃsāra to an end.53 When we stop our
intentional activity, we cease constructing and grasping our conditioned
and thus impermanent fabrications, and suffering ceases.54 An awakened
person (arhat) no longer generates or is subject to cetanā or karma in
this sense.
As we have seen, the other main doctrinal context in which saṅkhāra
plays a starring role is as one of the five aggregates (khandhas) that make
up a person. Briefly, a person is comprised of nothing more or less than
five constantly changing and conditioned collections:  body, feeling, per-
ception, saṅkhāra, and consciousness. Saṅkhāras’ role as an aggregate
consists of all intentional activity pertaining to the six senses.55 This doc-
trine of the five aggregates is another way of describing the nonself teach-
ing; it dismantles any notion of a permanent self by defining a person as
nothing more than these complex bundles of constantly changing and
conditioned phenomena. There is no self beyond these five processes; no
person or self stands apart from the five aggregates and directs the show,

51. There are said to be four “nutriments” or “foods” (āhāra): food for the body, contact with
the world, mental intention (manosañcetanā), and consciousness. Themselves arising from
craving, they nourish and sustain our experience (M.i.47; S.ii.11–12; S.ii.98–100; D.iii.228).
Buddhaghosa says that these foods are the special conditions for the continuity of existence;
just as material food is the fundamental condition for sustaining the body, intention is the
special condition that sustains consciousness (Ps.i.209); see also Bodhi, The Discourse on
Right View, 41–45, for a translation of this passage of commentary.
52. There is an extended metaphor being worked out here: karma is the “field,” conscious-
ness is the “seed,” and craving is the “moisture” that together make us exist in saṃsāra. For
beings hindered by ignorance and yoked to craving, intention and aspiration (that is, our
ceaseless grasping and goal-oriented constructing of the objects of experience) keep us in
the lower realms of saṃsāra (A.i.224).
53. S.iii.60; A.iii.415.
54. S.ii.65; S.ii.81–83.
55. S.iii.60.
52 the forerunner of all th ings

as it were. Nor should one identify with any of the five; none of them con-
stitutes some sort of essential nature of a person.56
For these reasons, saṅkhāra is not seen as a site for a sovereign or
autonomous agency; one sutta recounts how when one identifies with
saṅkhāras (or any of the other aggregates), one has no power over them so
that one could say, “Let my constructions be thus, let them not be thus.”57
Even when we identify with our intentional processes, we have little con-
trol over them. They are not what they are just for the willing of them, just
as our bodies and feelings and other compounded experiences are the
results of previous conditions, even as they are dynamic shapers of our
present and future experiences. Though saṅkhāras are the constructive
and agentive capacities of our minds, their creative work is conditioned
(though not exhaustively determined) by the other causal factors in depen-
dent origination.
These considerations locate saṅkhāra/cetanā as a psychological process
that occurs quite a few steps before choice and decision making. Rather
than imagining the mind as possessing a faculty or capacity that stands
apart from various options, deliberating, weighing, and choosing among
them, these texts see moral agency as occurring at a deeper and more
elemental level of constructing experience in a radically conditioned way.
Experience is constructed and shaped through the processes of depen-
dent origination. Additionally, as we saw in the Intention Sutta, it occurs
even without our explicit deliberation or knowledge, and it can occur as
the result not only of one’s own initiative but also at the promptings of
others. The Buddha’s equivalence of karma with cetanā identifies this col-
lecting and managing sensory and psychic experience with action, and it
is these processes that determine, as karma does, our present and future
experience.

“Good” Intentions
The foregoing discussion has alerted us to the idea that intentional pro-
cesses are, from a soteriological point of view, at the heart of our condition
of suffering in saṃsāra. They are, as indeed karma is, the problem that

56. S.iii.2–5 describes how the ordinary person falsely and obsessively identifies with each
of the five aggregates as oneself.
57. M.i.233.
 Constructing Experience 53

the Buddhist path addresses: how to cease our endless construction and

manufacturing of experience that only compounds ultimately ephemeral
things, producing yet further constructions that are themselves imper-
manent and subject to decay and discontent. The solution is the Noble
Eightfold Path of retraining our orientation to the world (right view and
thought), transforming our actions (right speech, action, and livelihood),
and developing effort, mindfulness, and concentration.
Yet, from an ethical point of view—which is our central interest—
cetanā, saṅkhāra, and karma can all be said to be good, bad, or neutral,
and many passages are preoccupied with describing intentional action in
such terms. The distinction between the ethical and the soteriological is
a complex one. We do not want to always hold them apart, and certainly
sometimes they are seen as part of the same continuum. Yet the tradition
does make a distinction between mundane (lokiya) and supramundane
(lokuttara) thought and action, and thoughts and actions can be ethically
good at the mundane level, in that they conduce to a life well lived, with-
out necessarily embodying advanced levels of meditative and spiritual wis-
dom or achievement.58 The Eightfold Path is religious or supramundane
action;59 as one passage puts it (which we consider later at some length),
this path is karma that is neither bright nor dark and thus leads to the
destruction of karma.60
One place in which the distinction between ethical and spiritual
accomplishment is particularly sharp is in the Brahmajāla Sutta, where
“ordinary people”61 are said to praise the Buddha for “small and mundane”
matters concerning moral precepts (sīla), but wise people will recognize

58. For example, Vism 13 says that virtue (sīla) subject to the depravities (āsavas) is mundane;
virtue free of āsavas is supramundane.
59. Sometimes a distinction is made between the mundane (lokiya) and supramundane
(lokuttara) levels of the Path factors (M.iii.72–78); the mundane are affected by the taints
(āsavas), considerations of merit, and how they ripen into rebirth, while the supramundane
are noble, without taints and free of considerations of rebirth and merit.
60. A.ii.234.
61. Often the term “ordinary people” (puthujjana) is used derogatorily because as regular
folks (not on the Buddhist path), they are still mired in the depravities, wrong views, and
so on, but in fact there are different types of them. For example, some are “blind,” while
others are “virtuous” (kalyāṇa); of the virtuous, there are two kinds: those virtuous due to
their actions and those virtuous due to inner reasoning. Still, even these good folks practice
a low dhamma that contravenes the Ariyan dhamma, and they keep with common or vulgar
custom (Sv.i.59).
54 the forerunner of all th ings

and praise him for his spiritual insight into deep and subtle matters.62 The
“small and mundane” matters of morality are then said to include follow-
ing the 10 precepts and ideals of monastic decorum and livelihood, points
of practice that are by no means treated as minor in other contexts, but
here pale in importance on a scale of value that considers the Buddha’s
religious achievements. We are thus alerted to shifting scales of value;
sometimes from a soteriological perspective—when the texts are inter-
ested in the pursuit of nibbāna or trying to communicate the Buddha’s
level of insight—workaday ethical concerns of good (kusala) and bad
(akusala) action get minimized. In other contexts, however, as the pas-
sages with which we began this chapter show, it is fitting and appropriate
to ask how to be good, to be concerned with moral precepts, and to learn
how to eschew actions harmful to one’s worldly happiness.
But what then is meant by good in these texts? What are good inten-
tions? The term kusala, translated here as “good,” and its opposite, akusala,
“bad,” are of paramount importance both in the sources themselves and
for our understanding of how intention is interpreted. Kusala and akusala
are usually used to describe cetanā, karma, conduct (ācāra), and more gen-
erally the dhammas, or factors of experience (which we discuss at much
greater length in the next chapter).63 One can also ask in a general way,
as does the Dīgha passage with which we began this chapter: “what is the
good (kusala), what is the bad (akusala)?” This is a question that the omni-
scient Tathāgata can answer, but so can the wise “wheel-turning emperor,”
a repository of knowledge on primarily temporal affairs.64
In an extended discussion of the term in his commentary on the Dīgha
Nikāya, Buddhaghosa says that kusala should be understood as fivefold: the
state of health, the state of blamelessness, the state of arising from profi-
ciency (or skillfulness), freedom from distress, and bringing about pleasant
results.65 Good thoughts and actions are faultless, salutary, skillful, and free
of trouble, and they produce felicitous results. In contrast, akusala thoughts

62. D.i.3–13.
63. It is surely significant that the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, which describes all the factors of experi-
ence, frames its entire discussion in terms of asking which factors are good, bad, and neu-
tral (Dhs I).
64. D.iii.157, iii.62.
65. Sv.iii.883–84. The terms in question here are: ārogya (health), anavajja (blamelessness),
kosallasambhūta (produced by proficiency or skill), niddaratha (freedom from distress), and
sukhavipāka (pleasant results). (Compare to As 38 and Paṭis-a i.205, which drop niddaratha).
 Constructing Experience 55

and actions are quite the opposite—unskillful, blameworthy, and leading to

bad and insalubrious results, misfortune, and disease. Notice that these dis-
tinctions do not map in any clear way onto modern Western distinctions
between moral and immoral. I agree with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong that it
is not useful to see morality as a “unified natural category” and that Buddhist
thought, like current work in neuroethics, does not support significant uni-
versal generalizations about the category of morality as such.66 Here we see
a broader category of kusala, where nonmoral values—health and freedom
from distress—are included that do not offer any obvious rationale for being
considered as comprising a single category of morality. Good and bad work in
a more general way to get at the range of possibilities suggested by kusala and
akusala, some of which are not, strictly speaking, moral. Abandoning a quest
for morality as a unified category will help us avoid many tangles in trying to
shoehorn Buddhaghosa into categories that developed in the modern West.
In the Atthasālinī—here we glance ahead to an Abhidhamma commen-
tary—he defines kusala with its standard fourfold hermeneutical device
of stating kusala’s characteristic, function, manifestation, and immediate
cause,67 and he adds as well a quality of purification and the attribute of
being caused by careful attention:

[Kusala’s] characteristic is its blameless and happy result, its func-

tion is the shattering of what is bad (akusala), its manifestation is
purification, and its immediate cause is careful attention (yoniso
manasikāra). Alternatively, kusala has blamelessness as its character-
istic because of its being opposed to blame, its function is the arising
of purification, its manifestation is a pleasing result, and its immedi-
ate cause is as was already mentioned [ie. careful attention].68

66. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Keynote.” He argues that Buddhists’ failure to make a dis-
tinction between moral and nonmoral as natural categories (in the ways that are often taken
for granted in the modern Western tradition following from Kant) “is not a bug, but a fea-
ture.” We return to this point in the discussion of the 10 good and bad deeds.
67. This standard device employed by the commentaries and derived from the Nettippakaraṇa
defines a word by explaining its characteristic (lakkhana), function (rasa), manifestation
(paccupaṭṭhāna), and immediate cause (padaṭṭhāna); these terms are defined at As 63. Note
that rasa, a term with a wide semantic range in Indic systems, has a technical meaning in
Pāli commentary:  Buddhaghosa defines it as “duty” or “function” (kicca) or “attainment”
(sampatti).
68. As 62–63:  ārogya (health), anavajja (blamelessness), and kosallasambhūta (produced by
proficiency). A second definition gives ārogya, anavajja, cheka (skillfulness), and sukhavipāka
(pleasant results) (As 38).
56 the forerunner of all th ings

This definition adds elements of careful mental cultivation to the term—

learning to attend to the world properly69 and a purifying or cleansing of
bad experiences and mental dispositions.
Keeping in mind that there are usages of kusala that are nonmoral,
as when it refers to skillful artists,70 and usages that are soteriological, as
when referring to the factors of enlightenment (bodhipakkhiyadhamma),
collectively these definitions of kusala constitute a large part of what we
could call ethically good in Buddhist thinking. When kusala/akusala mod-
ify karma, intention, and conduct, they are reflecting ethical concerns of
how one should act and think in mundane life. Moreover, kusala is some-
thing discerning people can come to know directly because actions that are
kusala or akusala have results or fruits. Certain passages in the canonical
sources assert that kusala is something ordinary people can know about
their actions. As we have seen, in several passages, including the Kālāma
Sutta, the Buddha suggests that people can know for themselves whether
actions are kusala or akusala, blameless or not, and whether their effects
are pleasing or not.71
An important instance of the Buddha teaching that people can figure
out the differences between good and bad actions occurs in a conversa-
tion he has with his son, Rāhula.72 This passage suggests that reflection
is a way to discern good and bad actions. The Buddha begins by asking
Rāhula: what is the purpose of a mirror? Rāhula answers that reflection is
the purpose of a mirror. The Buddha then says that actions of body, speech,
and mind should be done with reflection. One should reflect on whether
the action will lead to affliction for self or others and on whether it is kusala
or akusala due to leading to happy or painful results. One should reflect
about these things before, during, and following the action. As in English,
the Pāli term for reflection (paccavekkhana) can mean the reflection of a
mirror and reflection in the sense of considering and reviewing, but there

69. Yoniso manasikāra, careful attention, is attention that involves right means and the right
path and sees the impermanent in the impermanent (Ps.i.64). See also Bhikkhu Ñānamoli’s
n. 19 in his translation of the Khuddakapāṭha, 260, where he emphasizes that yoniso means
“from the womb” or from its origin or cause, and thus yoniso manasikāra means attention to
conditions and to the conditionality of existence. We will discuss attention more thoroughly
in the next chapter.
70. The Atthasālinī suggests that kusala in the sense of health can refer to physical health,
and professional singers and dancers can be said to be kusala in the sense of skillful (As 38).
71. A.iii.65; A.ii.190.
72. M.i.416–20.
 Constructing Experience 57

is also a sense here in which the two senses come together: actions shine
back their effects in a visible way. Buddhaghosa says that one uses a mir-
ror for looking at a blemish on the face.73 Similarly, the faults in actions
will shine back at us.
Lance Cousins has argued that in the earliest layer of the canonical
tradition, kusala referred to the skillfulness of meditation practices, which
connects it to wisdom and the soteriological path, and that the moral sense
of kusala came later. But he does acknowledge that even in the canonical
Suttanta there are “a considerable number” of contexts in which kusala is
associated with karma, good conduct (sucarita), and sīla, and in “the great
majority of cases” when other terms are associated with it, the term imme-
diately next to kusala is blameless, an apparently ethical concern.74 That
kusala should sometimes be restricted to meaning skillful in a contempla-
tive sense, as when it is referring to factors (dhammas) that conduce to
awakening (bodhipakkhiya), is a point well taken. But given the numerous
instances in the canonical sources in which kusala is referring to conduct,
intention, and karma in what is clearly a sense of blamelessness and good
results, I am not persuaded that the sense of good, blameless, and salu-
tary was only a later development occurring at the Abhidhamma or com-
mentarial stages.75 Nor should we always hold skillfulness and ethics apart
conceptually; there are ways that moral sensitivity and awareness can be
conceived of as skillful, and ethically good action as well crafted.76 Again,

73. Ps.iii.128.
74. Cousins, “Good or Skillful? Kusala in Canon and Commentary,” 147–48; on Cousins’s
genealogy, see Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, 42–43; Clayton, Moral Theory in
Śāntideva’s Śikṣāsamuccaya, 67–72. All are, of course, correct to reject Keown’s linking of the
idea of skillfulness to utilitarian approaches to ethics and his subsequent position that there-
fore kusala cannot mean “skillful” in most ethical contexts (Keown, The Nature of Buddhist
Ethics, 118–20).
75. Examples of kusala/akusala modifying karma, conduct (ācāra), or sīla with this clear ethi-
cal sense can be found in descriptions of the 10 good and bad courses of action (M.i.415f.;
M.i.489f.; M.i.46), the good conduct rulers are interested in (M.ii.114f; D.iii.157), bodily,
mental, and verbal karma (A.i.104; A.i.292; M.i.402), and other examples of good and bad
deeds or habits (M.ii.104; D.i.115; and M.ii.26, all modifying sīla).
76. For example, in Robert Desjarlais’s ethnographic work among Buddhists in Nepal,
morality and skillfulness are closely linked: “virtuousness and virtuosity go hand in hand”
(Sensory Biographies, 262). While wanting to see skillful as morally valuable, Gombrich takes
a different tack:  skillful is the primary sense of kusala “because good moral choice is an
intelligent and informed choice” (What the Buddha Thought, 15). In this view, skillful means
something like informed and reasonable moral decision making, which is taking it in a
different direction than Cousins’s treatment of it as a contemplative skill and Desjarlais’s
seeing it as an aesthetic aptitude.
58 the forerunner of all th ings

using the terms ethical and moral in a more provisional sense of being
associated with living life well keeps us from having to impose artificial
boundaries around terms like kusala, and we can attend more sharply to
the tradition’s own distinctions.
For example, despite the Atthasālinī’s passage about attention and
purification, there are places in which its sense of skillfulness (and its
connections to wisdom) appears to fall by the wayside. There emerged the
curious fact that one can have kusala intentions that are without knowl-
edge (or undeliberate), as we saw in the Intention Sutta commentary, for
example. In addition, and as Cousins also points out, while skillfulness’s
connection to knowledge and wisdom is prevalent throughout the sources,
the Pāli Abhidhamma does allow for kusala consciousness that is without
knowledge.77 The Atthasālinī recognizes that this may be a problem: how
can what is disassociated from knowledge be called kusala (since knowl-
edge seems to be implicit in the idea of skillful)? Buddhaghosa offers two
answers to this. The first is that one can take kusala in a figurative or
popular sense. Just as people call even fans not made of palmyra leaves
“palmyra fans,” so, too, kusala can apply even when knowledge is absent.
The second, nonfigurative answer is that kusala is used in this case only in
the senses of blameless and healthy, not skillful.78
Buddhaghosa thought that some senses of a term are appropriate in
some contexts but not others and that context will determine which sense
is appropriate. His exegetical choices favor relevance, whereby he likes to
put in front of him all the different meanings a term can have and then
decide which is relevant, on the basis of context, in a particular instance.
He lists the full range of possibilities for the meaning of a given term, but
then his sensitivity to context will guide him to argue which meanings are
appropriate in each case. We can say that he favors a contextual approach
to deciding the meaning of terms rather than a historical chronological
approach of the sort that Cousins sketches out. Buddhaghosa also uses
general guidelines for which sort of contexts or even genres of knowledge
favor which meanings. For example, he argues that the different kinds of
instruction in the different genres favor one or the other of the senses of
kusala—the sense of healthy prevails in Jātaka instruction, the sense of
blamelessness in the Suttanta, and the senses of skillful, free of distress,

77. Dhs 147; Cousins, “Good or Skillful?” 142.

78. As 63.
 Constructing Experience 59

and producing pleasant results prevail in the Abhidhamma.79 Note that

this characterization of the diverse meanings of the term does not map
easily onto Cousins’s chronology of the development of kusala. Moreover,
it emphasizes the quality of blamelessness (rather than skillfulness) for its
meaning in the Suttas.

Good Intentions and the Path to Nibbāna

If the idea of good and bad intentions developed into an interest in pri-
marily ethical matters rather than soteriological concerns, what then is the
relationship between kusala intentions and actions to the Noble Path and
nibbāna? Do morally good intentions and actions lead to arhatship? And
how do we understand the activity of arhats (awakened people)? Are they
performing intentional actions when they do good things in the world?
Can they be said to be doing good actions, or are they somehow beyond
such dualistic considerations? The tradition’s treatment of these questions
is more highly textured than is usually allowed in modern scholarship on
them, and, in fact, the canonical sources seem to suggest conflicting views
on how to characterize the intentional actions of arhats and those on the
Noble Path. One important passage says yes, good action (kusalakamma)
leads to the cessation of karma and does not lead to the arising of further
karma,80 which indicates that kusala action can lead to nibbāna (though
it does not describe an arhat’s actions in the language of kusala). But
other passages suggest that the Noble Path is about ceasing even kusala
thoughts and habits.81 If, as we have seen, kusala is defined in part as
productive or generative of pleasant results (sukhavipāka), then how can it
properly define an arhat’s activity that does not generate, nor is generated
by, karmic results? An important passage, which we will discuss at length
later, describes a kind of karma that is beyond the usual distinctions of
morality, and the commentators tended to favor and develop this line of
interpretation.

79. Sv.iii.883. This is not, however, a hard-and-fast determination of meaning, and As

62–63 sees it differently; Cousins has commented on this passage (Cousins, “Good or
Skillful?” 140).
80. A.i.263. Unfortunately, Buddhaghosa does not discuss this passage with any detail.
81. M.ii.26–27; Ps.iii.268–70. “Thoughts” are saṅkappo, and “habits” are sīla.
60 the forerunner of all th ings

There is also the deeper issue of whether it is appropriate to describe

the activity of arhats in terms of the language of cetanā and karma at
all. It would seem that the direct connections of cetanā and karma with
saṅkhāra, the constructing activities that are constitutive of life in saṃsāra,
would preclude an arhat’s involvement in them. Intentions are that very
purposive constructing of experience that keeps us in saṃsāra, and arhats
are surely free of them. And since cetanā is principally defined as “accu-
mulating” experience, how can it be an agency that leads to freedom from
karma? But in fact, there are certain moves that the texts make to allow for
distinctive types of karma and cetanā that are conducive to and constitu-
tive of nibbāna.
The key canonical treatment of this issue is a distinction made about
four different types of karma that occurs in two places in the Suttas.82 Action
can be dark (kaṇha), bright (sukka), both dark and bright, and neither dark
nor bright. Dark actions lead to dark or afflictive results in future lives,
and bright actions lead to bright or nonafflictive results; the Aṅguttara says
that violating the five precepts are dark actions, and refraining from vio-
lating them are bright actions, while the Majjhima commentary says they
are the 10 good (kusala) and bad (akusala) deeds respectively.83 Actions that
are both dark and bright lead to mixed rebirths. These first three kinds of
actions are firmly located in a strict karmic logic of like-begets-like: one
will be reborn according to one’s actions. And the Buddha repeats sev-
eral times, “Beings are the heirs of their actions.”84 Moreover, both suttas
use the language of saṅkhāra in these processes, which by now should be
expected: action is the constructing of intentions.85
The fourth kind of karma is action that is neither dark nor bright; as
such, it does not lead to either dark or bright fruits, and both suttas say
that this kind of karma leads to the destruction of karma. The Aṅguttara
goes on to say that the karma that leads to the destruction of karma is

82. The passage in the Aṅguttara concerns a close treatment of karma (A.ii.230–36); the
passage in the Majjhima occurs in a debate with a non-Buddhist ascetic about karma and its
fruits (M.i.389–91).
83. We will discuss the 10 kusala and the 10 akusala deeds below.
84. M.i.390–93.
85. For example, in the case of committing a bodily action, the text equates karma with
saṅkhāra, saying “one constructs a bodily intention” (kāyasaṅkhāram abhisaṅkharoti). And
likewise for constructing verbal and mental saṅkhāras, all of which then can be seen as dark
or bright or neither (A.ii.232–33; M.i.390–91).
 Constructing Experience 61

following the Noble Eightfold Path. Both suttas say that this kind of karma
is the “intention for abandoning”86 dark and bright and mixed actions
with their dark and bright and mixed results. The Majjhima commen-
tary says that action that is neither dark nor bright is action that has as
its intention (cetanā) the four paths leading to the destruction of karma.
(The “four paths” refers to the soteriological goals culminating in arhat-
ship: stream-entry, once-return, nonreturn, and arhatship). What both the
suttas and this commentary indicate is that there is a type of intentional
action that involves abandoning morally good and bad intentions, actions,
and their fruits. And this action is conducive to the highest religious path
and goal, which entails the destruction of karma. This move was necessary
in part due to the inherent logic in saṅkhāra/cetanā/karma that defines
them as “accumulating”;87 ordinary karma is the relentless accumulation
of experience in saṃsāra, and so some other kind of agency of a very dif-
ferent order must occur to break this logic of grasping and constructing
further experience.88
If we take this seriously, we have to conclude that approaching the high-
est soteriological goal involves intentional action that is not, strictly speak-
ing, evaluated as morally good or bad (at least in terms of the distinctions
between dark and bright in the canonical passage or kusala and akusala for
Buddhaghosa).89 The path to nibbāna is not paved with good intentions.

86. Tassa pahānāya yā cetanā (this is also stated at Ps.iii.105).

87. In addition to the passages we have already seen that use the language of accumulating
(āyūhana), A.v.292, for example, says that intentional actions performed and accumulated
cannot be wiped out without experiencing their results. Also Ps.i.211 states that because
cetanā involves accumulation of good and bad actions, it nourishes our condition in saṃsāra
(this is the commentary on the Sutta on Right View, in its discussion of cetanā as a food).
88. In another place in which this issue comes up, Buddhaghosa says that all courses of
action, good and bad, are the Noble Truth of suffering, and their roots are the Noble Truth
of the arising of suffering. And, he says, the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering is the
nonarising of both good and bad courses of action (Ps.i.205). We will discuss in the next
section what is meant by the good and bad courses of action (kusalākusalakammapathā).
89. Another place that the idea that the Noble Path and arhatship do not entail kusala actions
is in the commentary on the Intention Sutta that we have already considered (A.ii.156–57;
Mp.iii.147). The sutta says that for arhats there is no body, voice, speech, mind, field, object,
occasion, or reason whereby the subjective pleasure or pain associated with karma could
arise. “Field,” Buddhaghosa elaborates, refers to kusala and akusala actions that give rise to
fruits; thus arhats are not operating in the field of good and bad actions and are not engaged
in “productive action” (karaṇakamma). Buddhaghosa is strikingly at odds on this point with
modern interpreters like Keown, Velez de Cea, and Adam who want to see kusala karma
as “nirvānic.” In his treatment of the sutta on bright and dark actions, Adam says that the
fourth category of neither bright nor dark actions are kusala actions, which is simply not a
62 the forerunner of all th ings

The idea of an “intention for abandoning” refers to an intention that has

as its purpose or object the abandoning or destruction of karma (which is
equivalent to arhatship). Buddhaghosa speaks of “desire-realm cetanās”
and “Path cetanās” to distinguish them, and desire-realm cetanās can char-
acterize one’s experience in some of the meditation stages, but they will
not be present in achieving the Noble Path.90 He says that Path intentions
are neither dark nor bright and that they are different from even the “whit-
est” mental factors (dhamma). “Path cetanā” is a specialized sense of cetanā
that is not the same as the cetanā identified with the constructing activities
(saṅkhāra) that keep us in saṃsāra, nor is it the cetanā that the Buddha was
referring to when he identified karma with it. It should be kept conceptu-
ally apart from kusala and akusala distinctions about action.91
None of this should be taken to suggest that the Noble Path does not
involve other morally relevant factors of mind (kusaladhammas) or skillful
meditation states; rather, it does not entail kusalakamma or kusalacetanā.92
In the context of factors of mind, Buddhaghosa distinguishes between two
meanings in kusala: one that leads to the round of rebirths, the other refer-
ring to the 37 factors (dhamma) of enlightenment that lead to the destruc-
tion of rebirth.93 Nor can it be said that an arhat behaves in a manner that
cannot be described, in some important sense, as moral; in fact, arhats
and the Buddha are said to be virtuous (sīla).94 My suggestion is much

tenable notion for Buddhaghosa, as I argue throughout this section (Adam, “Groundwork
for a Metaphysic of Buddhist Morals”; Velez de Cea, “The Criteria of Goodness”). Keown
ignores this sutta and argues that “all kammic actions stand in a relationship to the summum
bonum and the moral status of this relationship is defined by the terms kusala and akusala”
(Keown, Nature of Buddhist Ethics, 127).
90. Ps.iii.105. All four jhānas abandon akusala intentions, but it’s only in the second jhāna
that the cessation of kusala intentions occurs (see also M.ii.28–29 for more about how the
second jhāna involves the cessation of kusala intentions, and Ps.iii.54 for more about the
distinction between Path intentions and meditation intentions).
91. See also Karunaratna, “Cetanā,” 94.
92. For example, M.ii.116 states that the Tathāgata has abandoned all akusaladhammas and
possesses all kusaladhammas.
93. Sv.iii.848. This passage is a commentary on the Cakkavatti Sutta, where Buddhaghosa
is commenting on the general question “What is the good?” As Premasiri argues about
this passage, the sense of kusala that is conducive to the round of rebirths invokes the term
puñña, meritorious action (Premasiri, “Interpretation of Two Principal Ethical Terms in
Early Buddhism,” 72–73). Buddhaghosa also says that for kusala in this sense there is the
seeing of results, emphasizing two matters that I have stressed here: kusala actions have vis-
ible results that shine back their effects, and rebirth kusala is all about results, which cannot
characterize the Noble Path or arhatship.
94. D.i.174. Since sīla is the absence of any wrongdoing, this is to be expected.
 Constructing Experience 63

narrower: some of the canonical texts and certainly Buddhaghosa resisted

the language of kusala to describe intentions and actions in characteriz-
ing the activity of the supramundane Path and arhatship. Instead, when
describing the intentions and activity of a highly advanced practitioner,
they devised a particular kind of Path karma and cetanā that does not have
all of the constructive and constructed associations that these terms’ usual
linkages to saṅkhāra bear. Moreover, this kind of action involves abandon-
ing the habits and constructions of accumulating and gathering experi-
ence. I suggest later additional ways in which the Noble Eightfold Path is
articulated in terms of abandoning, desisting, and leaving off.
There is more to say about Path karma and intention as it developed in
the hands of the Abhidhammikas and the commentators. The commentary
on the Majjhima passage does some important work with these ideas in
pointing to a doctrine that was developed in the Abhidhamma. This doctrine
asserts that some kinds of factors of mind, called kiriya, are fruitless; that is,
they are neither the fruits of action nor do they lead to further fruits.95 At the
very start of the commentarial passage on the fourfold division of bright and
dark actions with which we began this discussion, Buddhaghosa asks, “Why
did the Buddha undertake this teaching?” He answers that the Buddha taught
it so that kiriya will become clear, and he says that this teaching is arrived at
through the notion of a certain type of karma called kiriya.96 Moreover, know-
ing this teaching is suitable for those who take refuge, those who ordain, and
those who have attained arhatship. Although Buddhaghosa does not define
kiriya here, his immediate move to connect these four types of karma with
the idea of kiriya and his insistence on its relevance for all types of practitio-
ners suggest that for him this theory of fruitless intention was important and
its meaning was well-known enough to require no explanation.
Kiriya factors of mind, we learn from the canonical Abhidhamma and
the commentaries, are neither the result of karma nor productive of it. As
Lance Cousins puts it, the term “designates a type of mentality which does
not take part in the kammic process.”97 Path intentions and karma are thus

95. I follow Gethin in not translating it in order to signal that it is a highly technical term
(Wijeratne and Gethin, Summary of the Topics, xx). Translated, it can mean acting, doing,
or merely acting, and, as we will see, is getting at action that is not karmically produced or
productive.
96. Ps.iii.102. See also Spk.ii.57, where he says that the action of arhats is neither good nor
bad, but is kiriya because it is fruitless.
97. Cousins, “The Paṭṭhāna and the Development of the Theravādin Abhidhamma,” 26–27.
For more on kiriya, see Wijeratne and Gethin, Summary of the Topics, xx, and also throughout
64 the forerunner of all th ings

one kind of kiriya karma. Kiriya is further clarified in a list of four types
of intention that differs (but in certain overlapping ways) from the four
dark and bright karmas we have just seen. The four types of intention are
good (kusala), bad (akusala), resultant (vipāka), and kiriya. The distinction
is also mentioned in the aṭṭhakathā on a different sutta,98 where it appears
in the context of the Buddha arguing against various non-Buddhist teach-
ers who argue either that pain and suffering are entirely predetermined
by previous karma, that they are the result of divine power, or that they are
purely random events. Here Buddhaghosa brings up this fourfold distinc-
tion about the four kinds of intention. He argues that the Buddha rejected
the first position, that of determinism, because it only accepts the notion
of cetanā as a result and denies the view that cetanā can also be productive,
that is, good or bad, and it denies the possibility that karma can be neither
produced nor productive of results, that is, kiriya. Part of this distinction
may be understood in terms of my language of patiency and agency: some
cetanās are best understood as agentive in that they are productive of good
and bad experience, and others are patient in that they are the fruits or
results of previous actions (which is what determinists hold about all
intentions). Yet others, namely, kiriyā cetanā, are neither: they are neither
the result of previous karmic causality nor productive of it. Kiriya actions
are mere actions or pure activity without all of the purposive constructions
we bring to our usual karmic action.
This idea was developed because Buddhist thinkers grew increasingly
curious about how to characterize properly the action of arhats. Surely
arhats have some sort of intentional agency and are seen to do good
actions. But by definition, they must also be entirely free of the karmic
process constitutive of saṃsāra. Dhammapāla states and resolves the issue
succinctly:

When an arhat worships shrines, preaches the Dhamma, or attends

to a meditation subject, why is there no bodily karma for him?
Because there is no condition of being resultant. For karma done

their translations of the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha and its commentary; see also Karunaratne,
“Cetanā,” 94; and Carter, “Beyond ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’ ” 50–51. In the Abhidhamma,
which I treat in the next chapter, kiriyā dhammā are morally indeterminate (avyākatā) (Dhs
566, 568). The fourfold distinction is mentioned at Dhs 993, where kiriya factors are neither
kusala, akusala, nor the fruits of karma (Cf. Vibh 106, 182).
98. A.i.173; Mp.ii.274.
 Constructing Experience 65

by an arhat is not kusala, nor akusala, nor resultant, but is merely

kiriya.99

Arhats are engaged in intentional actions that are neither the results of
previous karma nor generative of further karma. But the category also
provides a name for actions by nonawakened people that are morally neu-
tral, and it is somewhat surprising that more is not made over this use of
the term, given how much activity this category would presumably cover.
Surely we do actions all the time that are not morally charged, such as
when I walk into the kitchen for a glass of water. In fact, probably much
of our ordinary action and behavior of getting through the day falls into
this class of action.

Ten Good and Ten Bad Deeds

We can leave Path and kiriya intentions and actions here and return to the
ethical plane of distinctions of kusala and akusala actions. One place that
the texts try to sort out the role of intention and other mental factors in
action in a much more concrete fashion than we have seen so far is in their
treatment of what are called the “courses of action” (kammapathā). There
are said to be 10 bad courses of action and 10 good courses of action, and
each list classifies these deeds according to whether they occur through
body, speech, or mind. The 10 bad courses of action are, first, three bodily
actions:  taking life, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct; then
four verbal actions: lying, malicious speech, harsh speech, and frivolous
speech; and finally three mental actions: covetousness, ill will, and false
views. The good courses of actions are the opposites of these, generally
stated negatively as refraining from the 10 bad courses of action.100 These
are considered complete courses of action because they are carried out

99. Mp-ṭ.ii.346 on the Intention Sutta, A.ii.156, Mp.iii.135.

100. There are several places where the 10 good and/or the 10 bad courses of action are listed
and discussed:  D.iii.74, 269, 292; M.i.46–47, 286–87; M.iii.46–53, 209–10; S.ii.166–68;
S.iv.321–22, 343–44, 350–51; A.v.292–94, 258, 264–68; As 95–104; and Vin.v.138. The 10 good
deeds are sometimes called the “dāsa sīla.” The Sādhu Chapter in the Aṅguttara is given over
the 10 good and bad deeds (A.v.273–303), where the bad deeds are referred to as asādhu, not
in keeping with the Ariyan Dhamma, bad, disadvantageous, non-Dhammic, connected to
the taints, blameworthy, mortifying, tending toward accumulation, yielding suffering, and
having suffering as their fruit; and the good deeds are the opposite of these. It describes the
results in this and the afterlife for these deeds and their importance for men and women.
66 the forerunner of all th ings

fully, and the criteria for establishing the completeness of each of these
actions are discussed case by case, as we will see.
The courses of action and the discussions around them suggest that
one thread of Theravāda moral thinking is concerned with an action-based
ethics, rather than an ethics solely based on intention or character. There
are some actions, 10 in fact, that are just bad to do, and the wrongness of
them in some sense lies in the action primarily rather than in some vice
in the agent. To be sure, we will see that since action (by definition) always
has internal components that shape what it is, action, in theory at least, can
never be interpreted entirely apart from the inner experience of the agent
who performs it (and the analysis of these courses of action will bear this
out). For his part, Buddhaghosa tries in a consistent fashion to interpret
action in terms of its internal dimensions. Despite this, there is a small
but steady suggestion in some of the discussions that follow of a moral
order in which some actions are simply bad in ways that can be talked
about independently of agents’ particular inner experience while perform-
ing them. Such considerations might well be in tension with the more
psychologically oriented approach to action dominant in the sources, but
they evince a kind of moral naturalism also prevalent in Buddhist thought,
where the world is just structured in such a way that bad things will fol-
low from bad actions. These tensions help us to see the internally diverse
threads apparent even in Buddhaghosa’s own systematic thought.
The 20 actions are listed in various contexts. They are sometimes listed
in teachings to householders as actions that are either in keeping or not
with the Dhamma. In the Sāleyyaka Sutta, for example, when teaching
householders how one’s conduct may lead to fruits in the next life, the
Buddha describes the courses of action.101 The 10 bad courses of action
lead to bad future destinations in hell or lower realms of life, and the good
ones lead to fortunate human births or lives in the heavens. The Sutta on
Right View describes the 20 actions in the context of Venerable Sāriputta
teaching about right view.102 Other suttas describe actions that are to be
practiced and those that should not, on the basis of how these actions
cause good or bad factors to arise, and they chart how killing and thieving,
for example, bring nothing but further bad experiences.103 These actions
are evaluated on the basis of their results.

101. M.i.286–89.
102. M.i.46–47.
103. M.iii.47–53, for example.
 Constructing Experience 67

A particularly fascinating context in which the 10 good deeds occur is

the Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta, which describes the catastrophic destruc-
tion of the human moral order in the future when all religious and moral
knowledge will be destroyed, human life spans will be reduced to a 10-year
period, and nearly all people will have killed one another off in a great
cosmic cataclysm of violence. Only a small remnant of people will remain
who are able to hide away from the violence and then emerge to redis-
cover and reestablish a moral order that will make it possible for them to
survive. They figure out, for themselves on the basis of what has occurred,
that killing, the first of the 10 bad deeds, is bad as it has nearly destroyed
them. By refraining from killing, their life spans increase, and they grad-
ually expand their body of moral knowledge to include refraining from
taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, and the other bad courses
of action.104 This context suggests that these good actions can come to
be known through experience about what humans need to do to survive
and flourish. Knowledge of them is not dependent on scripture, but is
something that humans, even those in the most adverse circumstances
possible, can come to know empirically. Moreover, these actions are not
the result of any apparent prior goodness on the part of those who commit
them: they just happen to commit actions that lead to beneficial results.
We can look more closely at these good and bad deeds to see what they
are more specifically and how they are defined in relation to intention.
Since the bad actions are usually described first, and the good actions are
then simply their opposites, we may begin with the bad actions. What are
the bad actions? And what does it mean to abstain from them?
The 10 bad deeds are described by a Majjhima passage with some
detail beginning with murder.105 One who kills living beings is “murder-
ous, bloody-handed, bent on killing and striking, without pity for living
beings.” One who takes what is not given is a thief who seizes the wealth
and property of others. One (a male agent is assumed) who engages in
sexual misconduct has sex with women who are “protected” by their par-
ents, brother, sister, or relatives; have a husband; are protected by law; or
are engaged to be married.
As for the four bad verbal deeds, speaking lies is interpreted primar-
ily as bearing false witness, either in court or in an important meeting,

104. D.iii.74.
105. M.iii.47–50; cf. A.v.264–65.
68 the forerunner of all th ings

“in full awareness one tells a lie for one’s own ends, or another’s, or for
some small gain.”106 Malicious speech is a matter of repeating things one
has heard in order to divide people and to create discord. Harsh speech
is “uttering words which are sharp, hard, harsh, painful and offensive to
others, bordering on anger, and not conducive to concentration.” And friv-
olous speech is gossip: “speaking at the wrong time, speaking untruths,
speaking what is not helpful, speaking against the Dhamma or the Vinaya,
and saying worthless things.”
Bad mental deeds are three:  covetousness is the desire for someone
else’s property; malice is not merely disliking someone, but wishing for their
destruction; and wrong view involves championing doctrines that deny the
value of giving and sacrifice, the workings of karma and rebirth, that par-
ents are important, and that good recluses and Brahmans are present in the
world. These are amplifications of the three toxic roots or motivations (mūla,
hetu) at the heart of our suffering in saṃsāra: greed, hatred, and delusion.
They involve more fully developing into thoughts these basic motivations.
A much more extensive treatment of the 10 bad deeds is given in a sec-
tion of commentary that was used in a number of places, including in the
Abhidhamma commentary.107 This commentarial passage gets into some
technicalities concerning the factors that contribute to the culpability of
each of these actions.108 Taking life, for example, “is the intention to kill
(vadhakacetanā) applied at either the doorways of body or speech, for one
who is aware that life is present in a living being, and who generates an
attack which cuts off the faculty of life.” It says that there are five constitu-
ent parts of it: life, awareness that life is present, the thought to kill, the
attack, and death of the victim:

106. For more on lying, see Derrett (“Musāvāda-virati and ‘Privileged Lies’ ”), particularly his
argument that Buddhism does not allow for a category of lies he calls “privileged lies,” lies
that are excusable and commonly overlooked.
107. Sv.iii.1048–50 (on D.iii.269); Ps.i.196–206 (on M.i.47–50); Spk.ii.143–51 (on S.ii.166–
68); As 97–104; Paṭis-a.i.219–25. Bhikkhu Bodhi has a very helpful translation of both the
sutta and aṭṭhakathā of the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta, which includes this commentarial passage
(The Discourse on Right View).
108. This and the following passages from the commentaries are all taken from Ps.i.196–
203, but this passage is more or less identical with the commentarial citations in n.  107.
Harvey discusses some of these factors, as well as factors present in other texts (e.g.,
Milindapañho and the Vinaya) that were used to assess culpability (“Criteria for Judging
the Unwholesomeness of Actions,” 143–44, and An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, 46–49).
Vibh-a 382–83 offers a precise ranking of creatures according to size and virtue.
 Constructing Experience 69

Moreover, the fault can be greater or lesser depending upon the size
or status of the victim.
In the case of inferior life, such as among animals, etc. who
lack virtues (guṇa), the fault is small, but in the case of large
bodies, the fault is great. Why? Because of the greatness of the
effort (payoga), or because of the greatness of the object (vatthu)
when the effort is the same. In the case of humans who pos-
sess virtues, the fault is small when the virtues are small, and
great when the virtues are great. When the virtues of the body
are equal, it should be understood that the fault is small for those
whose attacks on the defilements (kilesa) are weak and great for
those who are stronger.

These considerations indicate that intention should not be confused with

the idea of moral responsibility. All of these deeds depend on intention
being present and evident in clear terms, but intention is not the only
morally relevant factor in the morality of action. Fault can be greater or
lesser depending on the nature of the victim and other criteria. The lan-
guage of “effort” is interesting; presumably, it takes greater effort to strike
down an elephant than an ant, or a more virtuous person than a less vir-
tuous one, and attributions of fault take this into consideration. Effort
refers to the means of the action and is said in the case of killing to be
sixfold: effort can occur through one’s own hand, by giving an order, by
weapons that are thrown, by weapons that are held, by the arts [of battle],
and by magical power.
Theft and sexual misconduct are treated in similarly technical terms
that indicate interest in not only intention and awareness of what one is
doing but also the nature and status of the object or victim of the deed
and the effort in performing it. We might look at sexual misconduct more
closely for its assumptions about gender, in particular the text’s ready
assumption of a male subject and the meticulous classification and objec-
tification of women. Sexual misconduct is “the intention of transgressing
ground where one should not go, occurring at the doorway of the body.”
And there is just one type of effort: “with one’s own hand.” There, “ground
where one should not go” refers to 20 types of women: married women
(of which there are 10: a wife bought for money, a wife married according
to her will, a wife living in wealth, a wife who possesses [ just] her clothes,
a water pot wife, a wife relieved of carrying water vessels, a slave wife,
70 the forerunner of all th ings

a servant wife, a wife captured as booty, and a temporary wife),109 those

protected by others (mother, father, both parents, brother, sister, relatives,
or her clan), a woman protected by the Dhamma (that is, her monastic
companions), a woman who is engaged, or one promised to a man and
whose engagement is enforced by law. This fastidiousness presumably
leaves some women out with whom sexual relations are not considered
misconduct, such as widows. “But,” the text goes on to say, “the miscon-
duct is a small fault in regard to forbidden ground that is lacking in quali-
ties such as morality, and a great fault in regard to those endowed with
qualities such as morality.” The culpability of sexual misconduct for men
depends, to a substantial degree, on how the woman’s virtue is judged.110
In addition, the care with which the object of the sexual transgression is
scrutinized deflects attention from the perpetrator of it, which promotes, at
least in this instance, an action-based or results-based ethical logic rather
than an agent-based one.
We need not go through the close parsing of all four varieties of bad
speech acts, except to note generally that these four actions demonstrate a
close ear for what speech can do and the variety and nuances of its dam-
aging effects and also to note several intriguing comments about them.
“Malicious speech” is a very particular kind of speech that is said to “empty
someone else’s or one’s own heartfelt love for another.” One says it delib-
erately to cause a breach in relationships. It can occur because one wishes
to endear or ingratiate oneself to someone by tearing someone else apart.
Buddhaghosa uses his exposition of “frivolous speech” to mention not only
silly gossip but also telling meaningless stories such as the Mahābhārata
and the Rāmāyana. He adds as well that the full course of action is not

109. Dhammapāla helps explain some of these distinctions (Ṭīkā 1.301), as does Collins,
“Remarks on the Third Precept.” The classification occurs also in the Vinaya (Vin.iii.139;
Sp.iii.554–55). Several of these marriages regard the social and economic status or advance-
ment of the woman, such as the wife living in wealth, the wife possessed of clothes, and the
wife relieved of carrying water vessels. The temporary wife is a prostitute (Collins, 265). The
water pot wife is a woman who has been married according to a ceremony of touching water
(Bodhi, Discourse on Right View, 29).
110. Curiously, as Collins (“Remarks on the Third Precept”) has shown, while all 10 women
and all 10 kinds of wives are “forbidden zones,” for men who violate the precept in having
sex with them, the first eight women protected by their families do not violate the precepts
in having sex with men (only the last two, those engaged, violate the precept). Collins sug-
gests that the reason that having sex with women who are engaged is wrong is because it is
a transgression not against her but against the husband or prospective husband who “owns”
her sexuality. By this logic as well, prostitutes do not violate the precept.
 Constructing Experience 71

complete if such talk is rejected by the listeners: only when people accept

and believe frivolous or meaningless talk is there the full deed.
“Harsh speech” is worth lingering over, because Buddhaghosa treats it
with an intriguing story. The story offers up a small detail that shifts analy-
sis of action back to the agent and intention, but also shows something
about Buddhaghosa’s own voice. Harsh speech is described as “bodily or
verbal effort to stab a soft spot in another,” and the text says, “A story will
make this clear.” He goes on to describe a young disobedient boy, who
against his mother’s instructions runs off into the forest. Fed up with him
and not able to catch him, she shouts after him, “May a fierce buffalo
chase you!”—an apparent example of harsh speech. And in fact, a buffalo
does appear and chases him. But the boy makes a vow of truth, saying,
“Let not what my mother said with her mouth come to pass, but what she
thought with her mind.” The buffalo stops in its tracks, and the boy is safe.
Buddhaghosa says this:

Thus even though there was a stabbing of a soft spot in effort, there
was no harsh speech because of its being suppressed by the mind.
For parents sometimes say to children, “may thieves cut you to
bits,” but in fact they do not want so much as a lotus petal to fall
on them. And teachers and preceptors sometimes say to their stu-
dents, “what can be done with these shameless, fearless [students]!
Throw them out!” but they do want them to attain knowledge of the
scripture.111

The passage indicates that here, regardless of the apparent action, the
actual thought underlying it is the essential criterion of the moral qual-
ity and results of the action. The anecdote illustrates an awareness that
people say things they do not mean and that we can expect them to be
divided in this way.
The voice of the commentator is equally interesting. Buddhaghosa
notices an everyday sort of situation between a mother and her son, knows
that mothers do not want any harm to come to their children, and knows
that sons know that, too. She says something, she’s fed up, but at the very
bottom of it is something else altogether (the truth act shows what is really
real). Parents may say harsh things, but we know, of course, that they do

111. As 100.
72 the forerunner of all th ings

not want so much as a lotus petal to fall on their babies. We should also
note Buddhaghosa’s fascination here with the “innermost interiority” or
psychological reality of ordinary human experience, reflecting in his own
distinctive way the usual Buddhist refusal to stop with a description of
mere action and his insistence on attending to the way that moral experi-
ence is actually being constructed underneath action.
The three mental actions are covetousness, ill will, and false views (we
have already met with mental actions in an earlier section when we distin-
guished them from cetanā). Buddhaghosa echoes the Majjhima passage
in asserting that these are not just equivalent to the three motivational
roots—greed, hatred, and delusion—that lie at the heart of so much of
what we do. Rather, they are fully worked-out mental actions, motivations
realized or activated in the mind: not merely desiring someone’s property
but having the thought, “would that it be mine”; not merely harboring
anger or hatred toward another but having the thought “this one should be
destroyed”; and not merely being mistaken but advancing the view “there
is nothing given,” which denies the value of giving, causality, and action.
Buddhaghosa concludes his treatment of the 10 bad actions with an
additional parsing of five aspects:  each can be understood as factors,
groups, objects, feelings, and roots.112 These dimensions of action get at
many of the (sometimes competing) criteria by which it may be evaluated.
As factors (dhamma), the first seven are cetanās, actual intentions, and the
last three, the mental actions of covetousness, malice, and wrong view, are
cetasikas. We may defer discussion of the significance of this point to the
next chapter since the issues in this designation are quite technical and
Abhidhammic. As groups, the first seven and false views are considered as
belonging only to the group “courses of action”; covetousness and malice
are considered both courses of action and roots (i.e., greed and hatred).
Object (ārammaṇa) refers here to the object of the action since all action
has an object, whether (in the most reductive sense) that object is a capac-
ity (saṅkhāra) or (in a more customary sense) a being or person affected by
the action. Taking life, for example, has as its object the faculty of life (that
is, a saṅkhāra), which is the chief property of the victim that is aimed at;
harsh speech has as its object the person or being affected.113

112. The Khuddakapāṭha and its commentary are also interested in these five factors and sev-
eral others besides in assessing the culpability of actions, in this case the 10 training precepts
(see Ñānamoli’s translation in The Minor Readings, 17–36).
113. See Ñānamoli, The Minor Readings, 29, n. 16, on “objects.”
 Constructing Experience 73

The designation of feelings (vedanā) attached to these deeds is impor-

tant for the larger point in the texts that feelings are a useful agent-based
guide to action. There are three feelings—pleasure, pain, and neutral
feeling—that attend actions. Taking life, for example, can have only pain
associated with it. Even if kings may laugh when a thief is caught and they
command that he be killed, Buddhaghosa asserts, “The intention in the deci-
sion is associated only with pain for them.” Actions can have mixed feelings,
such as in stealing one may first be excited and pleased at taking the property
of another, but then pain follows as one considers with fear the fruits, out-
comes, and consequences of the deed. There may even be a neutral feeling of
indifference at the moment of committing the theft. Lying can also be mixed
in this way, but harsh speech will be only painful. Covetousness involves
pleasure toward the idea of the object desired but indifference or neutrality
toward the person who owns it, and so, too, with false views. Malice is only
painful.
Frivolous talk can be complicated: when telling the Hindu epics (a para-
digmatic example of frivolous talk), one is initially excited and pleased when
people shout “well done” and toss their garments. But then after the bard’s fee
has been paid and someone comes along and asks that the story be repeated,
one thinks, “Should I tell a random and disconnected story or not?” and then
at the time of telling the story for one so distressed, there is a feeling of pain.
The idea that feelings invariably accompany action in these specified
ways points to a moral anthropology in which humans are connected emo-
tionally to their actions in certain identifiable and necessary ways through
feeling. This dimension emphasizes once again the subjective nature of
the experience of karma and its fruits. We act and experience the results
of our action subjectively in terms of pleasure or pain.
Finally, each of the 10 bad deeds is motivated by one or more of the three
roots:  greed, hatred, and delusion.114 These vary according to the action
and circumstances. For example, lying can be a matter of either greed and
delusion or hatred and delusion, depending on the nature of the lie. It is
difficult to overstate the importance of the motivational roots as the basis
of actions, and a brief word on the motivational system operative here is
in order (it will be covered more extensively in the next chapter). Other
passages emphasize that these three toxic roots are the cause of the 10 bad
deeds and lie at the bottom of all our wrongdoing. They are the seeds that

114. See also A.v.261, which also states that the 10 bad deeds are due to greed, hatred, and
delusion.
74 the forerunner of all th ings

bring forth fruits,115 and like actions, can be classified as good or bad.116
Roots are causes, and Buddhaghosa brings out much of the considerable
arsenal of terms for causality to describe the way they cause karma and
thus rebirth: greed, hatred, and delusion are roots (mūla), causes (hetu),
sources (nidāna), origins (samudaya), and reasons (kāraṇa) for continuing
in the cycle of rebirth.117
But what about the 10 good deeds? Buddhaghosa’s treatment of these
is considerably shorter than his discussion of the bad deeds, for reasons
that are instructive on numerous levels.118 Chiefly, they are described as
merely “abstaining” (virati) from the 10 bad deeds that have already been
described. But he goes on to describe the varieties of abstaining. There are
three types of abstaining: abstinence despite opportunity, abstinence one
acquires from resolution, and abstinence of giving up.
The first is abstaining when an opportunity for transgression occurs by
people who have not taken any formal moral precepts and who just think
“to do such a wicked thing is unsuitable for me,” when they consider their
birth, age, learning, and so on. Buddhaghosa gives a story to illustrate
this kind of resistance to temptation. When his mother became ill and
close to death, Layman Cakkana of Lanka was instructed by the physician
and his brother to fetch hare’s meat for her, and so he went to the fields
to catch a hare. As he snared one, Cakkana first thought, “I will make
medicine for my mother,” but then he reconsidered, “It is not right that
I deprive another of life for the sake of my mother’s life.” And so he freed
the hare and urged him to join the other hares in the forest enjoying grass
and water. When he returned empty-handed, his brother scolded him, but
Cakkana went to his mother and took a vow of truth to the effect that he
had never, since he was born, knowingly deprived a creature of life. And
his mother recovered on the spot. (We may note in passing the fortuitous
recourse to vows of truth, evident also in the harsh speech story, that saves
the situation and keeps people from what might otherwise be unhappy
consequences of their decisions.)
The second kind of abstinence is when one has made a resolution,
such as the precepts. What appears to be important here is that a person

115. A.v.261–62.
116. D.iii.214; A.i.201.
117. Mp.ii.209.
118. Ps.i.203–6.
 Constructing Experience 75

makes a formal precept in a face-to-face ritual with a senior monk that

keeps him from acting on his impulses; this is an intention that is a
kind of promise. Buddhaghosa describes a certain layman living on
Mount Uttaravaḍḍhamāna who took the five precepts with the elder
Piṅgalabuddharakkhita and went out to plow his fields. Searching for a
lost ox, he was menaced by a snake. His first thought was to cut off the
snake’s head, but he then recalled, “Since I have taken the precepts in the
presence of a respected teacher, it is not right for me to break them,” and
so he preferred to give up his life rather than strike the snake. Of course,
the snake conveniently obliges the moral of the tale, releasing him and
slithering away.
Finally, the “abstinence of giving up” should be understood as the
abstaining of someone following the Noble Path. For them, the thought “I
will kill a creature” does not even arise. Thus the highest kind of abstinence
is not resisting temptation or following precepts, but being so advanced
that the thought to commit a bad action never even enters one’s head. This
idea is in keeping with the earlier discussion of dark and bright deeds; as
action that is neither dark nor bright, following the Noble Path does not
involve the construction of either kusala or akusala intentions, but rather
the abandoning or absence of them. This kind of abstinence, unlike the
first two varieties, has no thought or restraint associated with it. Cakkana’s
refraining from killing the hare comes from an act of self-awareness that
to do a wicked act is “unsuitable for me.” In the second example, the elder
invokes a precept and his fidelity to it. This third “good deed,” however, is
quite different: it involves no awareness of even the possibility of commit-
ting a wrong act. It is a pure absence of intention and action altogether.
As with the 10 bad deeds, the 10 good deeds can be classified by five
aspects—as factors, groups, objects, feelings, and roots—and these are
classified much the same way as the bad deeds. But feelings will be a mat-
ter of either pleasure or indifference since “there is no feeling of pain in
following the good.” And the relevant motivational roots of moral actions
are the opposites of the bad roots: nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion.
Although the 10 good deeds are given relatively abbreviated treatment
here, the brevity should not divert us from the significance of what is being
said. Chiefly, it is important to note that these full courses of action are all
abstentions, that is, nonactions. Buddhaghosa describes them entirely in
the negative, what one could do or think but does not do or think. They
are not given positive description here or, for the most part, elsewhere in
the canonical texts.
76 the forerunner of all th ings

An exception to this choice to define the good deeds as simply refrain-

ing from the bad ones is the passage from the Majjhima with which we
began our discussion of the 10 good and bad deeds.119 It defines the 10
good deeds largely negatively, describing in detail, for example, a person
refraining from all of the bad things involved in taking life or in harsh
speech, but also adding a few more positive descriptions as well:  one
“lives with rod and weapon set aside, conscientious and kind, compas-
sionate toward all living beings,” and not speaking harshly, one “utters
such words as are pleasing to the ear, affectionate, heartfelt, polite, beloved
and delightful to many.” Here we have a sense that these acts are not just
refraining from the bad deeds, but involve specific actions that display
the opposite values. Other texts discuss what is possible when one has
abstained from the three mental bad deeds; for example, when one is free
of them one experiences lovingkindness and the other brahmāvihāras,
expanding in all directions.120
Whether these positive descriptions are always implied in the absten-
tions as given in the commentary or elsewhere where the 10 good deeds are
described is hard to say—certainly the texts do not say so. They are content
to describe a large part of moral action as abstaining from breaking pre-
cepts121 and from committing the 10 bad deeds. This indicates that much
of morality lies in refraining from bad actions, and where morality lies,
so, too, the flourishing of human life, at least as much as may be possible
in the saṃsāric existence of good and bad experience. As the people in the
Cakkavatti Sutta learn through hard experience as they piece together their
world after its near-total destruction, it is by refraining from evil actions,
from killing, stealing, lying, and the rest, that the moral order is restored.

The Presence of Absences

As we have begun to see, a curious feature of moral thought and action,
particularly in a system that emphasizes so strongly an ethic of intention,
is that many of these Buddhist descriptions of moral experience involve

119. M.iii.47–49; cf. A.v.266–89.

120. S.iv.322.
121. Pj I. 24–37 describes the five precepts as abstentions (veramaṇi), for example, and offers
a long discussion of what it means to “undertake” an abstention and what the “object” of
an abstention could be said to be. It also mentions the Vibhaṅga’s treatment of undertaking
abstentions, which we consider in the next chapter (Vibh 285).
 Constructing Experience 77

abstaining, refraining, abandoning, and relinquishing immoral thought

and action. Sīla, or the five precepts, is largely defined as not violating
certain actions,122 and the 10 morally good deeds are not performing the
immoral actions and thoughts listed in the 10 immoral deeds. At the psy-
chological level, much moral (and, of course, meditation) work is a matter
of clearing away and abandoning problematic states of mind. The texts are
interested in what is possible morally and psychologically when certain
things are absent or refrained from, and substantial energy and effort are
trained on generating absences and desisting from certain behaviors. For
example, the “right effort” factor of the Eightfold Path is described in part
as “generating zeal for nonarisings”—a phrase well worth mulling over—
which entails resolving and exerting the mind to not permit bad mental
factors to emerge.123
In fact, all of the Noble Path’s eight factors—right view, thought,
speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration—are
distinguished by their abandoning and abstaining from ordinary perspec-
tives and actions. We have noted that Path cetanā are “intentions for
abandoning.” For example, right thought (sammāsaṅkappa) means three
thoughts: renunciation, nonmalice, and noncruelty, which means stopping
our usual thoughts of desire, malice, and cruelty.124 Right speech, action,
and livelihood, the three factors that are normally taken “to pertain to eth-
ics or morality (sīla),” as Payutto puts it, were seen as, principally, absten-
tions (virati).125 Right action (sammākammanta) means abstaining from
killing, taking what is not given, and sexual misconduct; it is a kind of

122. Vism 10 says that, among other distinctions, sīla is of two kinds:  (actual) practice
(cāritta), which refers to what one should do, and avoiding, not doing, what is prohibited,
a distinction that would seem to give sīla both positive and negative senses. But even this
positive definition of sīla of practicing good conduct is then defined as following the pre-
cepts, which involves refraining from wrong actions. Buddhaghosa defines sīla as a matter
of (1)  intentions (of one who abstains from killing, etc.), as (2)  the three mental factors
of noncovetousness, nonmalice, and right view (which involves rejecting wrong view), as
(3) restraint, and as (4) nontransgression, which are again all defined as what one does not
do or think or feel (Vism 6–7). He says, too, that the function of sīla is its work (kicca) of
stopping misconduct, and its achievement (sampatti) is blamelessness one enjoys when one
accomplishes this (Vism 8).
123. M.iii.252.
124. Sammāsaṅkappa is sometimes translated as “right intention,” which is in some sense
appropriate, but as we can see, it is conceptually very different from cetanā, and I have pre-
ferred to keep the two ideas distinct by translating it as “right thought.”
125. Payutto, Buddhadhamma, 239. The Abhidhammasaṅgaha, for example, classifies these
three as abstinences; see Nārada and Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual, 79, 88–89.
78 the forerunner of all th ings

action (kamma) that is really a matter of ceasing from other actions. The
Noble Path as a matter of abandoning (pahāna), leaving off (ārati), absten-
tion (virati), refraining (paṭivirati), and abstaining (veramaṇī)—these
terms for abandoning and ridding oneself of problematic thoughts, inten-
tions, and activity are characteristically pervasive in the textual treatments
of the Noble Path.126 And Buddhaghosa gets even more elaborate in gloss-
ing the myriad ways one can pull back and desist: leaving off means keep-
ing back, abstaining is without taking pleasure, abstinence is not taking
pleasure having turned away, and refraining is crushing and destroying
hostile action.127
Noting that descriptions of the Path as pulling back and desisting
pervade the texts need not lead us to characterize the soteriological path
or goal as essentially pessimistic, passive, or quiescent.128 Nor does pull-
ing back and desisting exhaust the experience of advanced practitioners
and arhats; rather, it may be that abandoning problematic thought and
action makes space for good states to arise and permeate their experience.
But the importance of restraint, abstinence, and the configuring of good
actions as the sheer absence of bad action should be recognized.
While I cannot treat or even fully outline here the philosophical and
interpretative challenges of what I will call the “presence of an absence”
(and it will appear in various forms in subsequent chapters), we can begin
to see some of the questions it raises by a close look at a curious sutta
in the Aṅguttara called the No Need for an Intention Sutta.129 The sutta
describes how, in the presence of one thing (which is, in fact, itself often
an absence), there is no need for an intention (cetanā) for the arising of
something else. For example, the sutta begins with the Buddha instructing
that when one possesses virtue (sīla, the nonviolation of the five precepts),
there is no need for the intention “may non-remorse arise for me,” because
in someone who is virtuous, nonremorse will naturally (dhammatā) arise.
And for one who has nonremorse, there is no need for the intention “may
joy arise for me,” because it will naturally happen that those who have
nonremorse experience joy. Joy then leads to delight, delight to calm, calm
to happiness, happiness to samādhi, samādhi to seeing the way things

126. As, for example, in M.iii.72–78.

127. Ps.iv.133.
128. See Phra Payutto’s critique of such misinterpretations (Buddhadhamma, 234–35).
129. Cetanākaraṇīyasutta, A.v.2.
 Constructing Experience 79

truly are, then to disenchantment, to dispassion, to release, and finally to

nibbāna. This formula gives the entire soteriological path in a nutshell, as
it were, and it begins with sīla, the not doing of five bad things.
Now, while it may make for a smoother English translation to say
something like “freedom from remorse occurs for those who practice sīla,”
I have deliberately kept the translation as literal as possible here to show
how these absences are things that arise: nonremorse arises for people not
violating the precepts. Nonremorse is an absence of remorse that arises—
is present, as it were—coming about as the result of certain processes
(specifically, not committing immoral acts), and in turn making possible
other things (joyful experiences). I believe that the language of absences is
not just a quirk of the Pāli, but rather an important feature of this moral
psychology that identifies experiences of absence as the conditions for
other experiences that cannot otherwise occur. Pāli is fully equipped with
a rich vocabulary for positive states and factors of mind that could easily
be deployed to offer positive content, and yet in so many places in the texts
the language of absence is preferred. I believe then that we should take
seriously the idea that nonremorse is an experience.
In addition to introducing the idea that absences are importantly pres-
ent in some way (an idea by no means restricted to this one example but
pervades the moral psychology of much of this literature), this particular
sutta also, and quite pointedly, indicates that these processes occur “with-
out the need for an intention,” as Buddhaghosa puts it.130 This suggests
that much occurs morally and soteriologically (in meditation perhaps in
particular) when intentional processes are laid aside. Nalini Devdas has
also noticed this “remarkable” passage and the way it sets aside the purpo-
sive impulse of cetanā in favor of a natural development based on depen-
dent origination; the withdrawal of cetanā allows “the mind’s development
(bhavanā) to proceed according to its own inner impulse.”131
As far as I  know, the experience of absences has not been much
explored in Buddhist ethics, at least as a philosophical problem of learning
how to take the presence of absences and abstinences seriously or even
learning how to talk about them in adequate philosophical language.132

130. Mp.v.2.
131. Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 219–21.
132.But note Collett Cox’s “Attainment through Abandonment,” which offers a careful study
on how the Sarvāstivādin Abhidhamma tradition interpreted the abandonment of the defile-
ments and fluxes as part of the path structure of practice.
80 the forerunner of all th ings

We need to know more about the various types of absences, the ways of
making them possible (through restraint, abandoning, nonarising, etc.),
and how they may be identified, or not, with positive states or factors of
mind and action. But most pertinent from the standpoint of this project,
where intention is said to figure so centrally in morality, is to come to see
the places and processes in which morally significant activity and experi-
ence occur outside of intention.

Conclusions
The Suttanta treatment of cetanā has introduced some important theo-
ries about intention and action, which are subtle, technical, and complex
and worth briefly recapping here. Cetanā is usually linked to saṅkhāra,
our constructive activity in the world through which our minds gener-
ate our experience. As such, cetanā works with and arranges our psycho-
logical factors, motivations, and feelings to create all of our experience in
saṃsāra. This can be a process that occurs without deliberation, and it can
occur as the result of the influence others have on us. The texts see these
processes as good (kusala), bad (akusala), or neutral (abyākata), and they
explore our karmic activity both abstractly and concretely in these terms.
Since action is what it is constructed to be, we now have a clearer
account of what the Kālāma passage with which we began was getting at.
It asserts, we will recall, that if one does not intend evil when acting, then
one is free of the sorrow that may attend evil effects of one’s activity. Since,
in theory, there is no gap between intention and action, between cetanā
and karma, then, to state the obvious, the experience one constructs in
intended action is in fact what one experiences. Because there is no gap
between intention and action, there can be no misfiring of intentions so
that what we intend results in a quite different action or result. We are the
makers of our experience, and karma, cetanā, and saṅkhāra name that very
process of world making. Moreover, these processes in a fundamental way
are tied into good and bad (kusala or akusala) experience. They describe
what is important to us in leading our lives: will our actions create healthy,
skillful, blameless, distress-free, and pleasing experiences, or not?
At the same time, probably because of karma’s connections to the
operations of saṅkhāra—which are intrinsically saṃsāric activities—both
canon and commentary made moves to define a very distinctive type
of cetanā and karma that does not participate in these constructive pro-
cesses but instead entails abandoning them (maggacetanā as one type of
 Constructing Experience 81

kiriyacetanā). This is the intentional action of the Noble Path and arhat-
ship. This way we can still say that arhats act with intended action—they
have agency in this sense—without seeing them as tied up in the con-
structed and constructive activity of saṅkhāra.
Early on in the project, we dispensed with the notion of free will as
an analytical category useful for framing these Buddhist sources; as we
have seen, attributing freedom abstractly to cetanā or, indeed, to any of the
other intentional or motivational processes described so far does not come
naturally to these sources. I argue instead that the language of agency and
patiency can help us discern the dual nature of karma and cetanā, which
are at once agentive and passive. The enormous emphasis on intended
action as generating our present and future experience captures their
agentive aspect. Even so, as the Buddha repeatedly says, we are the heirs
of our karma, and our intentions are constructed by our own past psycho-
logical proclivities and conditioned by all of the factors of dependent origi-
nation. This language of agency and patiency can allow us to focus closely
on those places in which agency is possible, even while we are aware of the
constraints and conditions on the way it is realized.
Patiency, or our sense of being acted on and constrained by karmic
conditions (whether of our own making or otherwise), is featured promi-
nently in descriptions of a person in the doctrines of dependent origina-
tion and the five aggregates. To know these doctrines is to grasp fully our
human condition of suffering—the true horror of saṃsāra is just that very
fact of being conditioned and thus subject to constant loss. One purpose
of these doctrines is to show how we are conditioned and lack any perma-
nent dimension of self. As both doctrines describe persons as dynamic
processes and constantly changing events (rather than more substantial
entities), they emphasize our human experience as constructed and condi-
tioned. Cetanā, saṅkhāra, and karma are conditioned events that we do not
stand apart from and direct, even while they are also essential instruments
of our creative activity in making the present and the future. Mind may
make experience, but it is conditioned by previous karma.
But in related doctrines, such as the soteriological project of the Noble
Path, we discern a sense of agency, in fact, a quite strong one. It is here that
even as conditioned beings, we can effect a new trajectory for ourselves.
But curiously, that agency is often found in pulling back and desisting
from our ordinary thought and action. The term saṅkappa (often translated
as “intention” or “thought”) is one example where we see a robust sense of
agentive possibility. Right saṅkappa refers to thoughts of renunciation or
82 the forerunner of all th ings

that lack malice and cruelty. These thoughts have conditions, most promi-
nently right view as well as the other factors of the Path, but they also
demonstrate that our thinking can pull back from sensuality, hatred, and
violence. Similarly, the other factors of the Path all entail strong agency,
whether in changing or stopping one’s views, actions, or thoughts. Right
effort (sammāvāyama), for example, refers to a host of terms connected to
resolve (chanda), energy (viriya), power (bala), exertions (padhāna), and
other forces that help one guide the mind to relinquish bad mental factors
and cultivate good ones. Not only the Noble Path but also the other path
factors133 cultivated in meditation display an enormous optimism in the
human capacity to move toward the experience of complete freedom once
we learn to relinquish our ordinary constructions of experience.

133. I refer here to the 37 factors of awakening, which include the Eightfold Path, discussed
most exhaustively in Gethin, The Buddhist Path to Awakening.
 2

The Work of Intention

mental life in the abhidhamma

we often experience a strong sense of agency: we make decisions and

choices and do so with a least some measure of freedom. But when we
look more closely at what lies behind the choices we make, we see a more
complicated state of affairs: I may be free to choose what I will, but what
makes me will what I  will? When we consider the causes lying behind
our choices (rather than the reasons we offer for them), we get a more
complicated picture psychologically, one that points us inward to feelings,
motivations, and dispositions that in subtle but pervasive ways undergird
our agency.
We have already learned that the Theravāda sources see moral agency
lying not so much at the moment of choice or decision but at the moment
when our minds put together and arrange our mental factors to experi-
ence the world in the particular and distinctive ways that we do. It is this
process that defines intentional action. Strikingly, neither the Buddha nor
his commentators describe this process of constructive world making as
a matter of rational deliberation; rather, it lies prior to rational processes
as a fundamental mechanism of the mind that creates our conscious
awareness.
We turn in this chapter to a deeper and more systematic analysis of
the precise mental factors operative in this moral phenomenology to see
how cetanā works. What are the feelings and motivations that intention
arranges and animates as we construct our experience and act in the
world? What role does deliberative thinking play in intentional action?
The Abhidhamma probes these questions through a remarkably precise
and exacting psychology. It offers a model of mind that treats the factors
of mental experience and the intricacies of their interactions with a level
of detail that is distinctive in the history of human thought.
84 the forerunner of all th ings

The Abhidhamma
The mental and material constituents of experience that the Abhidhamma
charts are called dhammas, translated here as “factors.” Of course, there are
many different meanings of the word dhamma, and Buddhaghosa lists sev-
eral: scripture, root cause (hetu), virtue (guṇa), and something that lacks an
essence or life. He says that it is this last sense of a phenomenon lacking
essence or life that is used in the Abhidhamma.1
I suggest that factor begins to get at this phenomenon because it does not,
at least to my ear, seem to bear the same substantive or static sense conveyed
by the term state, which is often used to translate it. The Abhidhamma texts
claim that all experience is composed of these irreducible factors that are
conditioned by and that condition other factors. Though they are not reduc-
ible to other factors, they are also not sealed off or self-contained units; as
Nyanaponika puts it, they are “open” to the past and the future, and their
functions, direction of movement, intensities, and karmic qualities are “vari-
able in accordance with the relational system” to which they belong.2
In the Pāli Abhidhamma, there are 82 dhammas that comprise all our
experience: 28 are material (rūpa), 52 are mental (cetasika), 1 is conscious
awareness or mind (citta), and 1 is unconditioned and enduring (nibbāna).
All of them, except nibbāna (which exists outside space and time), are
momentary events rather than things or states. These events are known
through analyzing conceptual experience to its most irreducible parts
through meditative techniques and in grouping and classifying them in
various ways. As Bhikkhu Bodhi puts it, when meditative techniques are
applied:

the familiar world of everyday perception dissolves into a dynamic

stream of impersonal phenomena, flashes of actuality arising and
perishing with incredible rapidity. It is the thing-events discerned
in the stream of immediate experience, the constitutive mental and
physical phenomena, that are called dhammas, and it is with their
characteristics, modes of occurrence, classifications, and relation-
ships that the Abhidhamma is primarily concerned.3

1. As 38.
2. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 40–41.
3. Bhikkhu Bodhi in Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, xvii. On dhamma theory, see also
Karunadasa, The Dhamma Theory; Gethin, “He Who Sees Dhamma Sees Dhammas” and
“On the Nature of Dhammas”; and Ronkin, Early Buddhist Metaphysics.
 The Work of Intention 85

The first two books of the Abhidhamma, the Dhammasaṅgaṇī and the
Vibhaṅga, are largely devoted to enumerating the various factors of mind
that contribute to good, bad, and neutral thought and action. In these texts,
together with their commentaries, our questions concerning the nature of
the springs of action—what intentions are and what goes into forming
them—are treated more systematically and, according to Buddhaghosa,
more deeply than any other branch of the Pāli literature. They offer a
moral psychology that addresses in a very central way some of our most
nuanced questions about intentions.
The range of questions the Abhidhamma asks and the possibilities and
limitations of its capacities to answer them are closely tied up with its
methods and styles of analysis. The relationship between the Sutta piṭaka
and the Abhidhamma piṭaka is rather subtle and, in certain ways, overlap-
ping. The two genres are distinguished not so much for their content,
but for their method, although there is slippage on both sides of any clear
distinction of method since the Suttas often form matrices and treat phe-
nomena quite abstractly, and the Abhidhamma and certainly its commen-
taries often treat persons more conventionally than its own disclaimers
suggest.4 Nevertheless, the canonical Abhidhamma does have a distinctive
method that involves forming lists and groupings of the factors of experi-
ence in prolific and often repetitive fashion. The Dhammasaṅgaṇī and the
Vibhaṅga are primarily lists of items in different arrangements and tax-
onomies. These lists present the ever-changing dynamic factors that con-
stitute both the material and psychological experience of human beings.
Buddhaghosa sees the canonical Abhidhamma as a body of work
that “exceeds and is distinguished from the Dhamma” (“Dhamma”
here means the teaching of the Buddha, and he takes the prefix abhi to
add the sense of “exceed”). Here he does some careful footwork. The
Abhidhamma exceeds the Dhamma in that it offers fuller classifications
of things than are often provided by the Suttanta.5 It is an expansion of it
principally through a method of classification. At the same time, he insists
that Abhidhamma is the word of the Buddha: even if some of its texts were
expounded centuries after the Buddha’s lifetime, the Buddha forecasted
that they would emerge, and he knew what their contents would be, so

4. There is, in addition, very frequent overlap in both canonical and especially commentarial
passages between all three piṭakas.
5. As 2–3.
86 the forerunner of all th ings

in this sense they are his words.6 Moreover, the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, accord-
ing to Buddhaghosa, contains sections that classify, summarize, or pro-
vide commentaries (aṭṭhakathā) on the three piṭakas, and he classifies the
Abhidhamma as a kind of exposition (veyyākaraṇa).7 That Buddhaghosa
considers these elaborations of summary and commentary that consti-
tute the canonical Abhidhamma texts to be part of the Buddha’s words
suggests that the lines between canon and commentary were less sharply
drawn than modern scholars often treat them.8 Buddhaghosa also says
that though the Dhammasaṅgaṇī and the other Abhidhamma texts are
finite in how long it takes to recite them, they are, in fact, “endless and
immeasurable when expanded.”9
Buddhaghosa returns many times to this idea of the endlessness of
the Dhamma and the Buddha’s words. He says that to picture the depth
of the Abhidhamma method, one should consider the oceans. As vast and
seemingly endless is the sea for one out in a lonely boat drifting on it,
one knows that it is still bordered by land below and on all sides. But the
limits of the Abhidhamma (particularly the method of the Paṭṭhāna) can-
not be known. This is a cause of endless joy and happiness for those who
fathom it.10 (Intriguingly, those who can plumb its depths are not terri-
fied by its endlessness, but enraptured by it.) Buddhaghosa also says that
the Dhamma, in the sense of “the teaching as thought out in the mind,”
is endless and immeasurable. He plays also with ideas of its temporal
boundedness and infinitude. Even though the Abhidhamma was taught
straight through without stopping in three months’ time, which must have

6. As 3–6. Here the worry concerns the status of the Kathāvatthu, which is said to be
authored by the Elder Tissa, Moggali’s son, 218 years after the Buddha’s parinibbāna, and is
not accepted by the other schools. The idea that the Buddha, upon his awakening, knew the
entire set of the Abhidhamma books and their “endless methods of exposition” occurs also
in the Jātakanidāna (see Jayawickrama, The Story of Gotama Buddha, 104). On the matter of
buddhavacana, Buddha’s word and authority, and on the particular case of the Kathāvatthu,
see McDermott, “Scripture as the Word of the Buddha,” 26–31.
7. As 26.
8. The aṭṭhakathā section at end of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī is also called the atthuddhāra, syn-
opsis of the meaning. The Niddesa is another text that though treated as canonical in the
Suttanta, is really a commentary, and the Suttavibhaṅga is a “canonical commentary” on the
Pāṭimokkha. The processes of canon formation and how these commentaries got into the
canon is still not fully understood, but see Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Pali Canon.”
9. As 7.
10. As 10–12.
 The Work of Intention 87

seemed like a single moment, the Dhamma that was taught is endless and
immeasurable.11
The infinitude of the teachings suggests the idea of the “surplus of mean-
ing,” mentioned earlier. The canonical texts are infinitely expandable, even as
they report the Buddha’s words. The Buddha’s words are expansive by their
very nature: they do not end, and the canonical texts are never fully closed.
Commentaries, classifications, and summaries are very natural expansions
of meaning embedded in the root texts. For us, knowing that the ideas are
inherently expansive and open is crucial for how we learn to read these texts;
it is particularly helpful for how we come to think about lists, as well as the
expansive possibilities for human experience that the lists describe. This is
an anthropology that resists closure in depicting human nature and moral
possibility.
The Abhidhamma is engaged simultaneously in open-ended possibility
and reductive analysis. The Abhidhamma’s work with the Dhamma takes
us deeply into ultimate matters (paramattha) and into the irreducible factors
of our experience that cannot be analyzed further, even while the relations
between them can extend and vary almost infinitely. Buddhaghosa says that
the Abhidhamma is taught expressly for those who falsely hold onto a sense
of self in what is really just a collection of changing factors; it is a distinctive
training in wisdom12 or, we might say, a kind of therapy for those confused
about what really exists. It dismantles a static and enduring sense of selfhood
in favor of a dynamic system of constantly changing and interrelated events.
With the Abhidhamma then, in particular, we learn how to think about a
complex sense of agency without any notion of ultimate selfhood. This com-
plex agency is explored through lists and classifications of mental factors.
Abhidhamma’s analysis of a person involves breaking down conscious
awareness (citta) and material phenomena; we will be concerned primarily
with citta. Cittas are discrete momentary units of conscious awareness—we
can call them “thoughts”—that, when analyzed at the closest level possible,
are seen to be made up of any number of the 52 mental factors (cetasikas).13
This knowledge is not easy to come by. For one thing, the duration of a citta

11. As 15.
12. As 21.
13. Citta is also a cetasika that characterizes itself (all cittas are consciously aware), which is
in keeping with the idea that all dhammas are characterized by themselves. Citta can also be
translated as “mind” (it is a synonym of manas according to the Atthasālinī, As. 123). Mind
should never be thought of as an enduring or static thing, however. Instead, it consists of a
series of distinct moments of consciousness.
88 the forerunner of all th ings

(and the other dhammas, for that matter) is incredibly minute, traditionally
described as a billionth part of the duration of a flash of lightning.14 As eva-
nescent as these thought events are, they are comprised of many factors in
complex relationships with one another. Although our ordinary experience
of our mental processes involves a continuous stream of awarenesses, the
Abhidhamma breaks down the series into discrete and irreducible parts,
even while it acknowledges that these parts always show up in groups with
other parts. The Buddha’s analysis of mental processes into discrete com-
ponents, a direct knowledge he attained on the night of his awakening, was
said to be an even more difficult project than a person at sea scooping up a
handful of water and determining which drops in it came from which riv-
ers.15 Thus, the Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s analytical method to discern, list, and clas-
sify these fleeting mental phenomena is quite removed in this sense from
our ordinary conceptions of experience. That said, this is a type of moral
phenomenology in the sense that it names phenomena available, at least in
theory, in direct experience: it is based on the Buddha’s first-person account
of direct experience, and this account is, according to the tradition, available
directly through meditation practice.
Scholars are still learning how to appreciate the Buddhist affinity for
lists exemplified so assiduously in the Abhidhamma, and the apparent
endlessness of its classifications has not always evoked “endless joy and
happiness” in modern Western scholars. Erich Frauwallner found the Pāli
Abhidhamma “monotonously mechanical,” “tedious,” “overrun” with for-
malism, “pedantic,” and in many places silting up into a degenerate and
“rampant scholasticism.”16 Rupert Gethin offers a much more careful and
sympathetic treatment of the Abhidhamma use of lists. He shows how
summary lists allow the Dhamma to be expressed both in brief and exten-
sively, how they ingeniously articulate the structure of the Dhamma, and
how they stimulate further exposition. Lists give license for improvisation
and creative work: the term for list, mātikā, also means “mother,” and in
this sense, a list is “pregnant with the Dhamma and able to generate it in

14. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 100. Note, though, that the dhamma nibbāna is not
characterized in terms of duration.
15. As 142; Mil 87.
16. Frauwallner, Studies in Abhidhamma Literature, 57, 79, 89, 45. But see Collins’s criticism
of Frauwallner’s treatment of the Pāli Abhidhamma (“Remarks on the Visuddhimagga,” 6,
n. 22).
 The Work of Intention 89

all its fullness.”17 In this view, the Abhidhamma propensity for extensive
elaboration of lists and new arrangements of concepts is not a superficial
or senseless rehashing of the material, but an exercise in fashioning new
ways to interpret the relationality of existence.
Gethin also suggests that the Abhidhamma method must be under-
stood in the context of meditation and mindfulness exercises. Other schol-
ars as well have pointed to the inherent dynamic and living quality of the
Abhidhamma and the way its dynamic interpretative impact can be fully
appreciated only in the context of meditation and introspection.18 Gethin
advises that the Abhidhamma’s method is, in the end, practical. Its anal-
ysis or breaking up of wholes into parts undermines our constant and
fruitless tendency to grasp and fix the world of experience. The restless
reexamination of these arrangements through proliferating lists is itself
a method for destabilizing our yearning for a fixed and stable sense of
the world.

Of course, the danger is that when, in our attempts to undo our

reifying of the world, we break it up into parts, we might then take
the parts as real and begin to reify the world again, if in a different
way. . . . It seems to me that the early Abhidhamma authors sought
to avoid precisely this same danger through the elaboration of the
various mātikās. Try to grasp the world of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī, or
the Paṭṭhāna, and it runs through one’s fingers. In short, the indefi-
nite expansions based on the mātikās continually remind those
using them that it is of the nature of things that no single way of
breaking up and analyzing the world can ever be final.19

This is moral phenomenology of a unique sort. As much as it advances

a model of mind—and we do come to know what the elemental compo-
nents of mental life are and how they interact to produce action—its very
method destabilizes an overly fixed or final version of it.
Buddhaghosa explains that as useful as it is from the standpoint of
ultimate reality, the Abhidhamma method is simply not helpful when

17. Gethin, “The Mātikās,” 161. Gethin is here referring to a later commentator, Kassapa,
who says that lists (mātikas) are like mothers “because of begetting, looking after and bring-
ing up without end or limit.”
18. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, for example.
19. Gethin, “The Mātikās,” 165.
90 the forerunner of all th ings

considering conventional behavior, such as that described in the Vinaya

or in instruction on lay ethics and moral responsibility. In such contexts,
it is best to speak of minds or thoughts in a more conventional sense,
and we will see more conventional or everyday accounts of mind in the
next two chapters.20 Conventional use of language does some things that
ultimate language cannot; the two kinds of teachings have different pur-
poses and impacts on their audiences.21 Ultimate teachings refer to anal-
ysis that is reductive and deeper in the sense that it pushes on things
until they are dissolved into the smallest parts possible. Abhidhamma is
useful for a generic analysis of human nature and experience (referred
to as nippariyāya knowledge) but not for understanding the thick contex-
tual and particular circumstances in which people live their lives (pariyāya
knowledge).22 As both Charles Hallisey and Y. Karunadasa have argued, the
Theravādins do not see ultimate (paramattha) teachings as truer than con-
ventional (sammuti) teachings.23 They have different purposes but are equally
truthful ways of describing the world, and the Theravāda sources do not
place them in a hierarchy.
While the canonical Abhidhamma offers generic accounts of human
experience, at the commentarial level, Buddhaghosa deals with lists by
contextualizing them, elaborating on them, and explaining them, and thus
he develops the material in a more conventional or everyday direction. He
expands points by offering metaphors and similes of mental processes to

20. As 68–69.
21. See Hallisey, “In Defense of Rather Fragile and Local Achievement,” 130–33, in response
to Paul Griffiths’s view that Abhidhamma, as a type of “denaturalized discourse,” is an ideal
type of philosophical discourse (“Denaturalizing Discourse,” 69). For Griffiths, denatural-
ized discourse is an intellectual practice that renders its asserted truths “in a decontextual-
ized, abstract, fleshless discourse, a discourse that pretends to stand nowhere solid, to be
located nowhere specific, and to have its utterance by any thinking subject as an accidental
property rather than an essential one” (58). It is normative and universalizable in its claims,
austere in its ontology, and “aimed primarily at making available to its users what really
exists, a function that, from the viewpoint of a user of such discourse, cannot be performed
by ordinary, nondenaturalized discourse.” Hallisey argues that Buddhaghosa and the later
Theravāda thinker Gurulugomi did not see Abhidhamma as a superior type of philosophi-
cal discourse and were well aware of its limitations, particularly in the kind of impact it has
on people. Moreover, while there are some elements of Griffiths’s description that might be
usefully applied to the canonical Abhidhamma method, Buddhaghosa is at pains to provide
a context for when and why it was spoken, and it is very important to him that it be under-
stood as the Buddha’s words taught in a specific time and place; for him, not denaturalized
or decontextualized (As 27–35).
22. Hallisey, “In Defense of Rather Fragile and Local Achievement,” 131–32.
23. Ibid.; Karunadasa, The Dhamma Theory, 35–40.
 The Work of Intention 91

help us understand how mental factors work. And he sometimes intro-

duces stories that allow us to see how this moral psychology operates in the
actions of flesh-and-blood agents in particular contexts. In general, at the
commentarial level there are not the sharp distinctions between genres that
Buddhaghosa is at pains to assert for the canonical texts (and, in fact, many of
the same passages are used in both Sutta and Abhidhamma commentaries).

Moral Phenomenology
A central concern of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī is to determine the precise
factors (dhammas) that go into moments of conscious awareness or
thoughts (citta). These moments of conscious experience are known sub-
jectively and through introspection. The account of this phenomenology
is inflected by moral concerns as it classifies thoughts from the outset
as good (kusala), bad (akusala), and neutral (abyākata). The opening line
of the text’s first chapter asks this question: “Which factors are good?” It
goes on to claim that when a good thought arises in the sensory realm
and is directed to an object (either an object of the senses or another
mental object), and when it is accompanied by joy and associated with
knowledge, 56 mental factors (cetasikas) may occur.24 Morally good con-
sciousness can also be accompanied by disinterest rather than joy, and
dissociated from knowledge, and the Dhammasaṅgaṇī provides lists of
these variants. Thought, or conscious awareness, should be understood
as a momentary event that contains, at the very least, rudimentary per-
ceptual and cognitive processes; it can also contain varieties of affect and
quite refined moral sentiments. Since all consciousness is directed to
an object, it is intentional in the modern technical sense of being about
something.
Just as the Dhammasaṅgaṇī lists the factors that go into a morally good
thought, it also lists the factors that go into bad and neutral thoughts.
An immoral or bad (akusala) thought is not kusala and thus is unskillful,
blameworthy, and leading to bad and insalubrious results, misfortune, and

24. The 56 cetasikas in this kind of moral consciousness are drawn from the 52 cetasikas, with
some of them repeated. The text also states that this moral consciousness occurs in the “realm
of sense desire.” The realm of sense desire is that reality experienced by ordinary people who
have no advanced spiritual insight. Highly advanced humans and deities have experiences in
the other two realms: the realm of form and the realm of formlessness. While these distinctions
among possible realities are very important, my concern in this book is with ordinary human
experience, and thus, the higher realms will fall, for the most part, outside our purview.
92 the forerunner of all th ings

distress. It fortifies mental defilements and impurities. Neutral (abyākata)

thoughts are neither moral nor immoral, either because they are ordinary
experiences of everyday consciousness not productive of karma, such as
sense experiences toward that to which one is indifferent, or because they
are the experiences of arhats, awakened ones, whose actions are not char-
acterized in terms of kusala and akusala, as we saw in the last chapter.
Table 2.1 shows the Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s lists of the 56 moral mental fac-
tors, the 32 immoral factors, and the 10 neutral factors that can go into the
first variety of the three types of thoughts. These thoughts will comprise
combinations of such mental factors.
A few general remarks about the items on these lists are necessary,
since most of them can be seen to contribute, in one way or another, to
moral agency, before we go on to examine more closely those that are par-
ticularly relevant for conation.25 The first five in all three lists are tradition-
ally taken to be rudimentary perceptual and prerational functions present
in every conscious moment: the barest impacts of sensory contact, sense
impression or feeling, perceptual awareness (which also comprises an
element of judgment), intention (cetanā), and conscious awareness itself.
Nyanaponika suggests that these five omnipresent factors form the most
primitive functions of conscious awareness, perhaps even shared with the
higher animals.26 For our particular interest in cetanā, this is interesting
and seems to depart from many of the expectations we might have about
intentions, and we will explore the commentary’s exegesis on it at some
length. But at this juncture, we note only that some element of intention
is, necessarily, a part of every conscious moment and that it exists prior to
the processes of cognition (initial and sustained thinking).
The next five items on the lists of both good and bad factors are “fac-
tors of absorption” that intensify and differentiate awareness in ways that
are cognitive (initial and sustained thinking), affective (joy, that is, both

25. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, chs. 3–4, discusses the good factors in more breadth
than possible here.
26. Ibid., 55–57. This list of five was later expanded to seven in the Pāli tradition. Both the
Milindapañha and the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha list seven universal factors present in every
consciousness: contact, feeling, perception, intention, oneness of mind, the faculty of vital-
ity, and attention (Mil. 56; Bodhi and Nārada, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, 78).
Vasubandhu names 10 mental factors in every thought: feeling, intention, perception, the
desire for action (chanda), contact, discernment (prajñā), remembering (smṛti), attention
(manaskāra), resolve (adhimukti), and concentration (samādhi, glossed as oneness of mind
with the object) (de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol. 1, 189–90).
 The Work of Intention 93

Table 2.1 Good, Bad, and Neutral Mental Factors in the First Types of Good,
Bad, and Neutral Thoughts1
Good Mental Factors Bad Mental Factors Neutral Mental
Factors

Contact (phassa) Contact (phassa) Contact (phassa)

Feeling (vedanā) Feeling (vedanā) Feeling (vedanā)
Perception (saññā) Perception (saññā) Perception (saññā)
Intention (cetanā) Intention (cetanā) Intention (cetanā)
Conscious awareness Conscious awareness Conscious
(citta) (citta) awareness
(citta)
_____ _____ _____
Initial Thinking (vitakka) Initial Thinking (vitakka)
Sustained Thinking (vicāra) Sustained Thinking (vicāra)
Joy (pīti) Joy (pīti) Equanimity
(upekkhā)
Pleasure (sukha) Pleasure (sukha)
Oneness of mind Oneness of mind Oneness of mind
(cittassekaggatā) (cittassekaggatā) (cittassekaggatā)
_____ _____ _____
Faculty of faith (saddhindriya)
Faculty of energy (vīriyindriya) Faculty of energy
(vīriyindriya)
Faculty of mindfulness (satindriya)
Faculty of concentration Faculty of concentration
(samādhindriya) (samādhindriya)
Faculty of wisdom (paññindriya)
Mental faculty (manindriya) Mental faculty Mental faculty
(manindriya) (manindriya)
Faculty of happiness Faculty of happiness Faculty of
(somanassindriya) (somanassindriya) equanimity
(upekkhindriya)
Faculty of vitality (jīvitindriya) Faculty of vitality Faculty of vitality
(jīvitindriya) (jīvitindriya)
_____ _____ _____
Right view (sammādiṭṭhi) Wrong view (micchādiṭṭhi)
Right thought (sammāsaṅkappa) Wrong thought
(micchāsaṅkappa)
Right effort (sammāvāyāma) Wrong effort
(micchāvāyama)
continued
94 the forerunner of all th ings

Good Mental Factors Bad Mental Factors Neutral Mental

Factors

Right mindfulness (sammāsati)

Right concentration Wrong concentration
(sammāsamādhi) (micchāsamādhi)
_____ _____ _____
Power of faith (saddhābāla)
Power of energy (vīriyabāla) Power of energy (vīriyabāla)
Power of mindfulness (satibāla)
Power of concentration Power of concentration
(samādhibāla) (samādhibāla)
Power of wisdom (paññābāla)
Power of shame (hiribāla) Power of shamelessness
(ahiribāla)
Power of apprehension Power of fearlessness
(ottappabāla) (anottappabāla)
_____ _____ _____
Non-greed (alobha) Greed (lobha)
Non-hatred (adosa)
Non-delusion (amoha) Delusion (moha)
Non-covetousness (anabhijjhā) Covetousness (abhijjhā)
Non-malice (abyāpāda)
Right view (sammādiṭṭhi) Wrong view (micchādiṭṭhi)
_____ _____ _____

Shame (hiri) Shamelessness (ahirika)

Apprehension (ottappa) Fearlessness (anottappa)
_____ _____ _____

Tranquility of body (kāyapassadhi)

Tranquility of mind (cittapassadhi)
Lightness of body (kāyalahutā)
Lightness of mind (cittalahutā)
Softness of body (kāyamudutā)
Softness of mind (cittamudutā)
Workableness of body
(kāyakammaññatā)
Workableness of mind
(cittakammaññatā)
 The Work of Intention 95

Good Mental Factors Bad Mental Factors Neutral Mental

Factors

Proficiency of body (kāyapāguññatā)

Proficiency of mind (cittapāguññatā)
Uprightness of body (kāyujukatā)
Uprightness of mind (cittujukatā)
_____ _____ _____
Mindfulness (sati)
Meta-attention (sampajañña)
Calmness (samatha) Calmness (samatha)
Insight (vipassanā)
Exertion (paggāha) Exertion (paggāha)
Balance (avikkhepa) Balance (avikkhepa)
____________________________ _____________________ ______________
“and other factors”: “and other factors”: “and other factors”:
Attention (manasikāra) Attention (manasikāra) Attention
(manasikāra)
Initiative (chanda) Initiative (chanda)
Resolve (adhimokkha) Resolve (adhimokkha) Resolve
(adhimokkha)
Impartiality (tatramajjhattatā)
Compassion (karuṇā)
Sympathetic joy (muditā)
Abstention from bodily
misconduct
(kāyaduccaritavirati)
Abstention from
verbal misconduct
(vacīduccaritavirati)
Abstention from wrong livelihood
(micchājīvavirati)
Conceit (māna)
Envy (issā)
Avarice (macchariya)
Rigidity (thīna)
Sluggishness (middha)
Agitation (uddhacca)
Remorse (kukkucca)

1 Dhs 1; 75; 87; these are the potential contents of only the first types of thoughts (citta) in each
category. Buddhaghosa adds additional factors to these canonical lists as “other factors” in As
131, 250, and 264. See also Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 31–35.
96 the forerunner of all th ings

rapture and interest, and pleasure, that is, a pleasant feeling as opposed to a
painful one), and focusing (oneness of mind with the object).27 These items
can be either good or bad, depending on which other factors are present in
the awareness. Similarly, other functions are shared by both lists: certain
varieties of energy (and effort and exertion) and concentration (and bal-
ance), stated in different ways, are part of both good and bad consciousness.
These good and bad thoughts alike require a certain energy toward their
object, as well as a certain focus on or conscientiousness toward it. These
factors are not good or bad in and of themselves; their moral valence is vari-
able or open and determined by other factors that occur in a given thought.
The affective resonances in good and bad thoughts are especially inter-
esting: both can be joyful and pleasurable, but only bad thoughts can be
distressing and painful. We might expect some morally good thoughts to
be painful, as when one does something that is disagreeable but morally
right, such as diving into a cesspit to save the life of a child who has fallen
in or lying to save a person’s life. But in this psychology, kusala thoughts—
skillful, felicitous, salutary—are simply never painful or distressing,
though they can be neutral. (They are felt as neutral when they are experi-
enced through equanimity and disinterest or are the thoughts of spiritually
advanced adepts.) We might also note that the Abhidhamma generally does
not set up its reflection about morality in terms of conflicts or dilemmas,
such as when one is confronted with a dilemma between two morally prob-
lematic options—lying or allowing someone to be killed—neither of which
is appealing. This may make it easier to see that moral thoughts and actions
are not presented here as particularly fraught with the conflict, ambiguity,
and pain that such dilemmas often engender. We will encounter a different
moral psychology when considering the Vinaya and narrative texts that do
consider moral dilemmas and the pain sometimes accompanying them.
The remaining items on the list of moral factors are parts of groups
of morally and soteriologically valuable mental activities or states familiar
from other contexts, such as the mental elements of the Eightfold Path,
certain faculties (three of which, faith, mindfulness, and wisdom, are par-
ticularly conducive to changes in character and conduct), and the seven
powers (which overlap with the first five faculties and add the important
capacities of shame and apprehension). Although faculties exert a cer-
tain controlling influence over other mental factors, powers provide an
additional firmness or steadfastness of the disposition.28 Some factors are

27. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 53–55.

28. Gethin, The Buddhist Path to Awakening, ch. 4, provides a helpful discussion of the facul-
ties and powers.
 The Work of Intention 97

listed twice, treated here under their different aspects as powers and facul-
ties, as, for example, mindfulness and concentration.
The several instances of repetition of items on the list may seem unsatis-
factory, given the precision with which the topic is approached: why should
concentration, for example, occur four times, as a faculty, a power, a Path
factor, and separately? Buddhaghosa takes up this problem and argues that
by repeating items in their membership in different groupings, attention
is drawn to their functions and aspects in those groupings; just as a king
hires an artisan who may be able to offer several kinds of crafts and belong
to several different guilds, so the same factor can perform different func-
tions according to its membership in groups. Since classification is a key
instrument of the development of meaning, seeing which groups each item
belongs to suggests important variations in its qualities and intensities.29
Shame and apprehension are two important powers and moral senti-
ments with particular value for conation. Shame (hiri) is a complex feeling
of embarrassment and mortification in the face of one’s wrongdoing, and
apprehension (ottappa) is a fear or horror of one’s own potential for evil
and attracting the blame of others. These are features of our mental lives
that, when cultivated, make us shrink from wickedness. They are called the
“guardians of the world” because they protect the world from our poten-
tially harmful incursions upon it.30 While shame may have a rather nega-
tive ring in modern ears, evoking either a corrosive assault on the self, a
primitive disgust at human vulnerability and animality, or a destructive
internalization of rigid social norms, in this system it is considered a mor-
ally valuable sense of bashfulness and self-awareness of one’s capacity for
wrongdoing. (Some uses of the English word shame hint at some positive
moral value in it, as when we disapprove of those who are shameless.)
As I have argued elsewhere, hiri is regarded as a sensitivity to how one is
perceived by others that generates a morally praiseworthy self scrutiny and
regard.31 Ottappa, or apprehension, is a sensitivity to blame and censure
from others and fear of the consequences of evil action. Their opposites,

29. As 135–36. Nyanaponika offers a very helpful and sympathetic amplification on

Buddhaghosa’s treatment of factors according to function or application or degree of intensity
among these factors (Abhidhamma Studies, 37–42, 88–92). Again, Nyanaponika’s point that
these factors are “open” means that they are really “potentialities” whose quality and intensity
will be determined by the other factors by which they are relationally constituted (90).
30. Vism 465.
31. Heim, “Shame and Apprehension,” 237–60.
98 the forerunner of all th ings

shamelessness and fearlessness, are present in all bad thoughts and allow
our wicked propensities to wreak harm on the world unchecked.
The motivational roots (mūla or hetu) are of particular importance to
conation, as we have seen in chapter  1. Among the morally good factors,
three motivational roots are listed—nongreed, nonhatred, nondelusion—
together with their intensified states, noncovetousness, nonmalice, and
right view. We should also notice that motivations comprise both affective
conditions (nongreed and nonhatred, for example) and cognitive clarity
(nondelusion and right view). In this psychology, the condition of possess-
ing clarity and truth has motivational force. The importance of these factors
of mind is hard to overstate. The first three are, according to Nyanaponika,
“the main criteria by which a state of consciousness is determined to be
wholesome,” that is, kusala.32 The latter three are considered to be “intensi-
fied states”33 of the first three and are also the three good mental actions on
our list of 10 kusala deeds. Except for right view, all are described in the nega-
tive; that is, they are the opposites of the bad roots (greed, delusion, mal-
ice) or the abstentions from the bad mental actions (covetousness, malice,
and wrong view). Their statement in the negative is significant; chiefly, they
are the absence of or abstinence from the bad motivations and bad mental
actions. While Phra Payutto argues that stating virtues in the negative with
the use of the “a” prefix covers more ground than a positive term would (“it
carries both a negative meaning and encompasses all opposites”),34 neither
the Abhidhammikas nor Buddhaghosa typically elaborate on them in a posi-
tive direction. The texts themselves treat these “nonaffirming negations” as
irreducible factors that need not imply positive content.
The bad motivations listed are greed, delusion, covetousness, and
wrong view, opposites of the good motivations. Notably absent in the table
are the motivational roots hatred and malice; this is because this particu-
lar listing is for bad thoughts that occur accompanied by joy (somanassa).
Hatred and malice are such unpleasant experiences that they never occur
in such a moment. The Dhammasaṅgaṇī gives another list of bad factors
that occur in the presence of distress (domanassa): many of the same items
are listed but instead of elements of joy, pleasure, happiness, greed, and
covetousness, we find suffering, distress, and the motivational roots hatred
and malice.35 Thus a bad thought can either be joyful, such as when one is

32. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 69.

33. Jaini, “The Sautrāntika Theory of Bīja,” 221.
34. Payutto, Buddhadhamma, 235.
35. Dhs 83.
 The Work of Intention 99

greedy and lustful, or it is distressing, as when it is comprised of hatred or

malice. In contrast, good thoughts are, as we have seen, always joyful or
disinterested: ordinary good thoughts are joyful, but as they become more
rarefied and attain to other realms achieved through meditation, they tran-
scend joy, and the experience is characterized instead by equanimity.
The list of good factors includes six pairs of qualities that can describe both
body and mind, for a total of 12 qualities that always arise together: tranquility
(being quiet and composed), lightness (agility and buoyancy), softness (being
pliable, resilient, and adaptable), workableness (the right balance of softness
and firmness “which makes the gold—that is, the mind—workable”), fitness
(health and competence), and uprightness (sincerity and straightforward-
ness).36 These dispositions are not treated with much detail, but they sug-
gest attributes that dispose one to moral action through mental and physical
composure, malleability, health, readiness, and rectitude. Following them,
we have several potentialities: mindfulness, mental clarity, and insight, which
refer to distinctive aptitudes in the development of mental culture. Last,
calmness, exertion, and balance (present in both good and bad thoughts)
are synonyms or amplifications of some of the earlier items and provide the
steadiness, energy, and concentration required for moral agency.37
In the last line of each passage listing the factors, the Dhammasaṅgaṇī
allows that other factors not listed may contribute to each type of con-
sciousness, making room for “whatever other factors” may also arise in
mutual dependence with the others.38 This asserts that these lists are not
meant to be exhaustive; they do not complete the process of elaboration or
classification, and, I would suggest, we cannot understand the nature of
Abhidhamma lists if we think that the lists, or the moral phenomenology
they depict, are always meant to be complete. Gethin is correct to describe
a good thought as having “at least” 56 factors: his inclusion of “at least”
shows the resistance to closure built into the structure here. He suggests

36. See Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 71–81; As 150–151.

37. Nyanaponika, Abhidhamma Studies, 82–83.
38. Dhs 8, 75, 87.
39. Gethin, “The Mātikās,” 165. Izmirlieva (All the Names of the Lord, 2008) offers a careful
and thoughtful treatment of lists of the names of God in early Christian contexts; some of
her insights about lists may be helpful here. She argues that a list is a “symbolic imposition
of a particular vision upon reality” (7), and when a list is open-ended, it makes possible a
view of the world that “is open to a ‘yonder,’ to the possibility of becoming something that
it is not.” Its order is temporary, and it “means living not with definitive answers but with
provisional assumptions” (153). To experience the canonical Abhidhamma lists as open is to
destabilize and make provisional even what the Buddha taught about mental experience.
100 the forerunner of all th ings

that the lists are given as invitations to others to discover through medita-
tion what else might be there in their experience.39
The door is thus left open for expanding the list, and Buddhaghosa
is quick to step in and add additional factors. He suggests an additional
factor of attention (manasikāra) is also present in all three types of con-
sciousness.40 Attention “makes the mind differently than it was before,”
and it leads the mind to its object.41 Like a coachman, it drives other men-
tal factors to an object, whether the object is a sense object, a cognitive
process, or an impulse to act. We should not underestimate the impor-
tance of attention in consciousness, a point increasingly recognized by
the tradition.42 And we may recall the mention of “careful attention” in the
Atthasālinī’s definition of kusala discussed in the previous chapter, which
also indicates its importance specifically to moral agency.
Besides attention, Buddhaghosa includes eight additional good fac-
tors: initiative, resolve, impartiality, compassion, sympathetic joy, and three
abstentions, that is, abstaining from physical and verbal misconduct and
wrong livelihood.43 Certain of these are particularly pertinent to our interest
in conation and merit further definition. Initiative (chanda) is a desire for
an object of an action, likened to the mind stretching out its hand toward
that desired object.44 Resolve (adhimokkha) is something like a firm deci-
sion, the “making up of the mind” in conviction and determination. The
Sammohavinodanī defines resolve thus:  “the mind is resolved in regard to
the object by means of it and arrives at a conviction through the absence of
doubt.”45 Impartiality balances the factors of energy and concentration and
adds an important element of equanimity where necessary in moral action: it

40. As 131–33, 250, 262.

41. As 133. Attention has for its characteristic remembering, its function is joining associ-
ated factors to their object, its manifestation is its nature of turning toward an object, and it
is included in the saṅkhāra aggregate.
42. Ānanda’s Abhidhammasaṅgaha treats attention (manasikāra), oneness of mind, and
vitality as universals, and unlike the Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s list, it omits citta, for a total of seven
universals (Nārada and Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, 79–81).
43. As 131.
44. The Sammohavinodanī offers an intriguing detail about chanda (Vibh-a 461). It says that the
people of Uttarakuru have entered into a place without chanda, this desire to act. Uttarakura
is, in traditional Buddhist cosmology, the land to the north where people live fantastically long,
beautiful, and pain-free lives; however, they are incapable of attaining awakening and seem to
have limited moral agency. This may be due, as suggested here, to their lack of chanda, initiative.
45. Vibh-a 210.
46. As 133.
 The Work of Intention 101

“checks deficiency and excess and cuts off partiality.”46 Compassion and sym-
pathetic joy are two of the four sublime attitudes (brahmavihāras), which are
essential to many forms of moral action.47 Finally, we have three abstentions
(that are also Path factors)—abstention from bodily misconduct, from verbal
misconduct, and from wrong livelihood—that indicate that abstaining from
immoral thought and action is itself a kind of positive mental factor, a “pres-
ence” of something in the mind that ceases from bad action.
The Atthasālinī’s additional bad factors are, besides attention: initiative,
resolve, conceit, envy, avarice, rigidity, sluggishness, agitation, and worry.48
These include what we might call emotions as well as traits or dispositions,
and certain of them, as with other items among the immoral factors, occur
in various groupings of defilements, depravities, and hindrances. All of
them offer much that is psychologically interesting. Despite the fact that
these, as dhammas, are irreducible events, they seem to involve complex
thoughts and emotions. Envy, for example, is grumbling at others’ good
fortune, involving a whole set of feelings of resentment.49 Conceit, too, is
complex. Traditionally, there are several varieties of conceit, all concerned
with measuring oneself in one’s own estimation vis-à-vis others and thus
displaying an undue preoccupation with oneself.50
As interesting as these additional factors are, we may also note what
is not included here. Fear, for example, is not listed here or anywhere
in the lists of immoral factors. This may be surprising, given its impor-
tance in other contexts as entangled with problematic states of mind and
immoral action.51 Indeed, the absence of fear as a motivation generally in
the Abhidhamma is something of a puzzle. While it appears in the list
of moral factors in the form of ottappa (a moral disposition to fear one’s

47. The other two sublime attitudes, mettā and upekkhā, are covered by nonhatred and par-
ticular equanimity.
48. As 250:  manasikāra, chanda, adhimokkha, māna, issā, macchariya, thina, middha,
uddhacca, kukkucca.
49. As 373.
50. Vibh-a 487–89. See Heim, “The Conceit of Self-Loathing,” for more on conceit.
51. Such as M.i.16; D.iii.181–82.
52. Rupert Gethin has suggested one way to see that fear may be present in a type of hate
(dosa), that is, the hate rooted in delusion (moha) associated with agitation (uddhacca), based
on Vism 454 (Gethin, “On the Nature of Dhammas,” 189–90). I think that fear might be pres-
ent in the feeling of pain (dukkhavedanā), as suggested in the Atthasālinī’s treatment of the 10
courses of bad action, in which theft, for example, can be accompanied by a feeling of pain
described as frightened and fearful (bhītatasita) (As 102). As Gethin also notes, such attempts
at getting fear into the picture are not unproblematic, however, for they build additional quali-
ties into dhammas that are themselves supposed to be discrete or indissoluble phenomena.
102 the forerunner of all th ings

own capacity for evil), there is no mention of more negative types of fear
(bhaya) as contributing to bad thoughts.52 We might also find the omission
of fear surprising in light of recent evolutionary psychological approaches
to the emotions that claim that fear is a universal emotion and an indis-
pensable motivational factor in our biological makeup.53

The Work of Intention

The foregoing census of the many factors of conscious awareness, though
all too briefly sketched here, provides a model of mind that depicts many
complex and interrelated elements at work in moral agency. This view of
the mind is very much in keeping with key Buddhist doctrines of depen-
dent arising. But how do these many factors relate to intentions? And why
is intention deemed to be the chief factor generating action when many
of these seem also to play an important role in it? Here we must turn to
a closer inspection of cetanā, examining what it is and how it constitutes
action.
That intention belongs to the first five prereflective factors of conscious-
ness, universally present in every conscious moment, means that inten-
tions are always present in conscious experience. Also, they themselves
are not morally valenced; they become good, bad, or neutral depending on
which other factors occur within a thought moment. We can also see that
the presence of so many factors of mental life relevant for thought and
action decenters cetanā from being an isolated or discrete mental state that
is solely responsible for the moral quality of karma.
In his commentary on the opening verse of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s list-
ing of all 56 factors that can arise in a good thought that we reviewed,
Buddhaghosa defines and elaborates on all the factors.54 This section
of commentary is particularly concerned with issues of how conscious
awareness arises in relation to its object. Along with his discussion of all

53. Ekman (Emotions Revealed) argues that there is a set of universal human emotions
deeply embedded in the species and essential to human response and agency: fear, anger,
sadness, surprise, disgust, contempt, and happiness. It is striking how few of these appear
as such in the Abhidhamma treatment of experience.
54. Dhs 1; As 106–7.
55. A technical definition usually includes naming four things: lakkhaṇa (the “characteristic”
or its particular or generic nature), rasa (the “function,” that is, its work or the accomplish-
ment of it), paccupaṭṭhāna (the “manifestation,” that is, its manner of service or the result),
and padaṭṭhāṇa (its “proximate cause,” its near condition) (As 63). Here Buddhaghosa does
not mention cetanā’s proximate cause.
 The Work of Intention 103

of the 56 cetasikas, he provides a technical definition55 of cetanā that sug-

gests a good starting place for our inquiries:

Cetanā is what intends (cetayati), which means that it puts together

(abhisandahati) with itself its accompanying factors as objects. Its
characteristic is what is intended (cetayita), which means that its
characteristic is its nature of intention (cetanābhāva).56 Its func-
tion is accumulating (āyūhana).57 Intentions in the four realms58
are never without the characteristic of being intended. All have as
their characteristic what is intended. But its function of accumulat-
ing occurs only with reference to good or bad [karma]. [When its
function] obtains in accumulating good or bad karma, then there
is only a partial role for the remaining associated factors. Intention
is exceedingly energetic, exceedingly striving, it does double effort,
double striving.59

There are many things going on in this brief passage. The insistence
that cetanā be characterized either by its nature of intending or by what
is intended indicates the different ways the word is used that has paral-
lels with English intention: roughly, intention can be the result and the
activity of intending. To say that intentions in all four realms will have
the sense of being intended is to say that even arhats have intentions in
this sense: every kind of cetanā (even kiriyacetanā) involves putting itself
together with other mental factors as an object of thought and action. But
the particular function of cetanā to accumulate is restricted only to intended

56. This says that cetanā can be what is intended and what intends (since cetanā is what
intends, as the first sentence in the passage states). Cetanā, like all dhammas, bears its
own characteristic, sallakkhaṇa, which defines it according to itself or its particular nature,
sabhāva (Karunadasa, The Dhamma Theory, 17, referring to Vibh-a 45). The Mūlaṭīkā says the
cetanābhāva is “work” (byāpāra) (Dhammasaṅgaṇī-mūlaṭīkā 87 [Myanmar edition]).
57. Recall from the last chapter (notes 18 and 44) that accumulating is a specialized sense of
āyūhana, discussed by Bodhi in his translation of the Samyuttanikāya, 342, and supported
by the textual evidence I have already described.
58. The four realms are the three worlds—that is, the sensory world, the world of form,
and the world of formlessness—and the supramundane reality (stream-entry, once-return,
nonreturn, and arhatship). Intentions occur in all of them.
59. As 111 (cf. Vism 463; Mil 61). The Mūlaṭīkā adds: “Puts together means connects and sends
forth. The nature of intention is the nature of working. Double effort is not said to indicate the
joining of two kinds of effort, but rather the extensive state of its duty of working” (Dhamma-
saṅgaṇī-mūlaṭīkā 87 [Myanmar edition]).
104 the forerunner of all th ings

action that involves amassing karma (and thus excludes kiriyacetanā and
maggacetanā).
The language of accumulating as cetanā’s chief function is by now
familiar. Cetanā puts itself together with the other factors of conscious
awareness (the universals and whatever other factors or cetasikas are oper-
ative) and makes them objects of thought and action. The definition also
emphasizes cetanā’s energetic effort that is the mind’s work in good and
bad action. When it is present in a neutral thought moment, it coordinates
the other factors, but it does not strive toward any action. Buddhaghosa
goes on to offer a simile that anthropomorphizes cetanā in a way that
makes it more accessible. He likens cetanā to a landowner who takes 55
strong men (i.e., the other 55 moral mental factors possible in a good
thought moment) and with “exceeding energy, exceeding striving, double
effort, double striving” puts the workers to their work and toils alongside
them.60 The double effort and striving indicate its own work and its way of
making the other factors do their work.
Buddhaghosa also defines cetanā according to its manifestation. Again,
similes help tremendously, not only for elaborating or ornamenting the
concept but also for providing its basic content.

[Cetanā’s] manifestation is arranging (saṃvidahana). Arranging, it

occurs accomplishing its own and others’ work, like the head stu-
dent, the head carpenter, etc. For it is just like the head student who,
seeing the teacher approach from afar, learns the lesson himself
and makes the other students learn it themselves, and they resolve
to learn and do so by following him. And it is just like the head
carpenter who himself works and makes the other woodworkers do
the woodwork, and they resolve to work and do so by following him.
And it is just like the army general who himself fights and leads
others in the line of battle, and they, in their resolve to fight, fight
without turning back by following him. So too [cetanā], produces
its object by its own work, and makes the other associated factors
produce it with their own actions. By its undertaking its own work,
those [ factors] associated with it undertake [theirs]. Because of this,

60. As 111.
 The Work of Intention 105

it is said that “it occurs accomplishing its own and others’ work, like
the head student, the head carpenter, etc.” Moreover, it should be
understood that it is manifest as making associated [ factors] ener-
getic in such things as remembering urgent action.61

Considerations of a phenomenon’s manifestation concern how it appears

or is manifest in experience. From these illustrations, cetanā is a factor of
the mind that coordinates, rallies, and marshals other factors to produce
the objects of conscious awareness and thus generate action in the world.
It is operative whenever there is energetic activity of putting the factors
of mind to work on their objects. It is a dynamic activity of collecting and
animating rather than a state, decision, choice, or inclination.
The similes here suggest that the mind is a complicated and manifold
set of operations, in which intentions, as, say, head tutors, are assigned
multiple responsibilities for their own and others’ mental work; they can
see what is needed and the urgency of it (the teacher is approaching), and
they are driven to stimulate themselves and the others to action. Cetanās
seem to be able to remember—they “recall important work”—which
begins to show how they connect present thought and action with the
past. We may note in passing that these similes are doing essential philo-
sophical work, invoking ideas that cannot be otherwise easily communi-
cated. In keeping with the Theravāda’s affirmative stance on figurative
uses of language, we can appreciate the substantive work that simile does
in developing the ideas, not just in illustrating them.62
Perhaps most intriguingly, cetanā “produces its object by its own work,”
which means that through its activity, this property of the mind makes the
objects of our experience. The term object (ārammaṇa) refers to the objects
of the six senses (the five sensory faculties and the mental sense). Cetanā
is like a carpenter who makes a house by working and getting his subcon-
tractors to do their specialized tasks. Or just as an army general creates the
reality of battle for himself and others, cetanā creates its object through its

61. As 111–12; cf. Vism 463. The Mūlaṭīkā adds: “The state of instigating is the state of respect
(or carefulness, ādara). For it is like respect in that it respects the accompanying factors like
its own self” (Dhammasaṅgaṇī-mūlaṭīkā 87 [Myanmar edition]).
62. Iris Murdoch argues that it is “impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts without
resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be
analysed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance” (Murdoch, The
Sovereignty of Good, 75).
106 the forerunner of all th ings

activity. This is not idealism, but it is constructivist. Our cognition does

not simply mirror or represent the world out there. Rather, our experience
of the world and of our own mental life is constructed and shaped by the
work of our mental processes. This idea links cetanā with the construc-
tive aspects of saṅkhāra that we explored in the previous chapter. Cetanā
is constructing the objects of our conscious awareness, which it does by
its own work and by putting other mental factors to their particular tasks.
Thus, intentional action—karma—is the active rallying of mental factors
as one constructs the world of experience. To put it another way, action is
this very construction of experience.
To sum up, we can say that this phenomenology depicts intention as a
matter of coordinating a quite large number of other mental factors, each
of them an irreducible process, component, or quality of the mind. These
numerous factors contribute to morally relevant thought and agency in
complex ways not limited to either rational deliberation or various appeti-
tive forces, but invoking other sensibilities, motivational roots, faculties,
aptitudes, capacities, energies, and functions. Such a depiction stretches
considerably beyond modern conceptions of intention construed as a com-
bination of belief and desire and some kind of relation between them.63 In
this model, belief and desire are presented as rather self-evident discrete
thoughts and wants appearing in the mind, rather than forces or factors
driving it: I believe that the 7 p.m. plane leaves for New York, and I desire to
go to New York, and so I intend to catch the plane. While this seems a plau-
sible account of the matter at one level, it tells us little about the promptings
and causes behind our beliefs and desires that the Abhidhamma consid-
ers crucial in accounting for our intentional actions. The Abhidhamma
theory of action may seem to be rather cluttered compared to modern,

63. Anscombe, Intention; Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. Even though Bratman
(Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason) attempts to go beyond this basic model in impor-
tant ways, he still barely touches on the web of psychological causes underlying intentional
action. But see Baier, Death and Character, in her reading of Hume’s ideas of “character” in
a way that presses substantially beyond desire and belief as explanatory of action.
64. Many contemporary philosophical notions of desire do little to account for intentional
action, except to state what precedes it. Desire is treated as a necessary component of inten-
tional action but is given little psychological substance. Resting on a sketch of desire drawn
largely from Hume and rather circular from the perspective of accounting for intentions,
contemporary philosophy “characterizes desire by the job desire does in collaborating with
belief and thereby generating action” (Pettit, “Desire”). Susan James charts how 17th-century
philosophy increasingly moved toward a generic conception of desire and notes that “taken
generically, desires lack the inflections that would make them explanatory” (James, Passion
and Action, 291–92).
 The Work of Intention 107

sparer theories of action. Yet what it lacks in economy, it makes up for in

psychological richness.64

A Theory of Action
We now have before us the conscious mental factors and the operations of
intention occurring in action. But how is karma understood in this branch
of Pāli thought? Although the Abhidhamma texts do not take up karma
as a central category of analysis, Buddhaghosa does think it deserves spe-
cial attention, and he examines it closely in part III of the Atthasālinī. In
his treatment of karma, he begins by mentioning the Aṅguttara passage
identifying karma with cetanā.65 He also quotes from the Intention Sutta,
to state that feelings subjectively experienced are caused by bodily, verbal,
and mental intention,66 and he cites a Majjhima sutta in which the Buddha
explains that one doing an intentional action with body, speech, or mind
feels pleasure, pain, or neither and goes on to describe the 20 courses
of action.67 He also mentions an Aṅguttara passage that refers to the 20
good and bad courses of action and how they are divided by body, speech,
and mind.68 Finally, he quotes the sutta on bright and dark actions to sug-
gest that karma can be classified into four groups (bright, dark, both, and
neither). From his references to these passages, with which we are also
familiar, we learn which texts Buddhaghosa thought were essential for
defining intentional action. We also see him underscore the idea that
karma is intention.
His own definition, however, differs slightly but importantly from the
equivalence of karma and cetanā cited in the Aṅguttara. He asks, “What
is karma?” and replies, “It is just intention as well as some factors associ-
ated with intention.”69 Karma is not just intention, but additional dhammas

65. As 88; he mentions quotations found at A.iii.415 and Kv 393.

66. As 88; S.ii.39; A.ii.157. See McDermott, “The Kathāvatthu Kamma Debates,” on the dis-
tinctiveness of the Theravādin insistence that the result of karma is a matter of subjective
experience as debates about this unfolded in the Kathāvatthu.
67. As 88; M.iii.209.
68. As 88; A.v.264; Kv 393.
69. Kim panetaṃ kammaṃ nāmāti? Cetanaṃ ceva, ekacce ca cetanāsampayuttakā dhammā
(As 88).
70. As 89. Jaini says that covetousness, malice, wrong view, noncovetousness, nonmalice,
and right view are not, strictly speaking, roots (mūlas) but are “intensive states” of the six
108 the forerunner of all th ings

as well. He goes on to describe 21 factors that are associated with inten-

tion:  the seven factors of awakening, the eight factors of the Path, and
six other factors:  covetousness, malice, wrong view, noncovetousness,
nonmalice, and right view.70 These factors are not identified with cetanā,
but are to be understood as “factors associated with cetanā” that consti-
tute karma; the theory is that there are some actions that are not defined
entirely by intention. The first 15 are soteriologically important factors in
that they contribute to the destruction of karma and thus to freedom from
the woes of saṃsāra. Though these factors when present in intentional
action are still called karma, they in fact do not produce further karma but
rather lead to the destruction of it. Soteriological actions are not defined
solely by cetanā, but also by these Path factors that have a different logic
than accumulating good and bad karma. This is very much in keeping
with Buddhaghosa’s views on kiriyacetanā, and in fact here he mentions
these soteriological factors in the context of his reference to the sutta on
bright and dark actions.
The additional factors that together with cetanā can constitute karma
are the six good and bad mental deeds: covetousness, malice, and wrong
view and noncovetousness, nonmalice, and right view.71 These, too, are
considered “factors associated with cetanā” rather than just cetanās. These
six kinds of actions are intensified motivational roots (greed, hatred, delu-
sion, and their opposites). We may recall that our earlier discussion of the
10 bad deeds defined the first seven bodily and verbal actions as cetanās
and the last three mental actions as cetasikas.72 And likewise for the 10
good deeds. These mental actions are, for Buddhaghosa, not just matters
of intention but also, and perhaps principally, these mental factors. When
one commits a mental action of malice, it is principally the pervasive and
intensified motivation of hatred that is operative, not just the activity of
accumulating and animating that cetanā does. Of course, intentions them-
selves are the assembling and energizing of other mental factors, including
motivations, so we might think they can cover this specific set of things.

actual roots (lobha, dosa, moha, alobha, adosa, amoha). They are the grosser forms of the
basic, underlying roots, which may be overcome by those advanced in moral and religious
progress, while the deeper motivational roots remain (Jaini, “The Sautrāntika Theory of
Bīja,” 221).
71. As 89.
72. This distinction was already made evident in our discussion of the 20 deeds; the first
seven of each set are cetanās, and the last three are factors associated with cetanā, that is,
other cetasikas. Buddhaghosa makes this point at As 101, 104, and Vism 7.
 The Work of Intention 109

Intentions have motivational roots, and indeed to a large degree, motiva-

tions are at the bottom of all of our constructive activity. But Buddhaghosa
wanted to emphasize that these particular actions are best understood as
amplifications or full manifestations of the motivational roots rather than
solely intentions; some actions of our minds are principally the actions of
fully realized motivations. This was an issue of some contention among
the mainstream Buddhist schools, and the Sautrāntikas disagreed, prefer-
ring instead to see this type of action simply as cetanā.73
We shall return later to this matter of seeing certain karmas as cetasikas
rather than cetanās, but for the moment several other issues about defin-
ing karma must occupy us. The interpretation of the Buddha’s equivalence
of cetanā with karma gave rise to different views among the mainstream
Buddhist schools concerning the exact relationship of cetanā with karma.
The Theravāda position is clear:  there is no gap between intention and
action. In addition, action is not material (rūpa) but mental (citta, nāma),
even when it is bodily or verbal karma. The Theravādins reject language
that suggests that there is a mental process of intending that results in
a bodily or verbal action that can then be characterized as good or bad;
instead, the intending and the acting are the same, and they are citta, not
rūpa. These positions were, as we shall see in the next section, contested
by the Sarvāstivāda. The Kathāvatthu insists that what is morally relevant
in an action are mental doings—“the apprehending, the idea, the con-
sidering, the attention, the intention, the aiming, the aspiration.”74 It is this
activity, not the gross physical properties of the body or the vocal activity of
speech, that is deemed good or bad.
Yet as we know, there are three types of karma: mental, physical, and
verbal. For Buddhaghosa, all are, first and foremost, intentions. The

73. For discussion of this controversy, see Jaini, “The Sautrāntika Theory of Bīja,” 220; and
Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 390–99.
74. āvaṭṭanā ābhogo samannāhāro manasikāro cetanā patthanā paṇidhi (Kv 380; Kv-a 111–12).
Some of these may be little more than synonyms (the commentary equates intention,
aiming, and aspiration [Kv-a  111]), but collectively they describe related elements of atten-
tion, interest, thinking, intending, and wanting. See McDermott for the debate between
Theravādins and other Buddhists on this point about karma (“The Kathāvatthu Kamma
Debates,” 428–29). McDermott also argues that “the Theravādin has set himself to defend
the definition of kamma as intentional impulse (cetanā) against all inroads” (430).
75. The term doorway means the “intimation” (viññatti) generated by conscious awareness.
Intimation is what communicates to the body or voice or mind to act; the intimation “dis-
plays” the intention. There follow material changes, though these material (rūpa) properties
are not, strictly speaking, karma or morally valenced (As 82–83; Cf. Vism 447–48).
110 the forerunner of all th ings

language of doorways is important for Buddhaghosa in describing how

intentional action works in these three locations. The mental processes
of intending are located in the body, mind, or voice.75 Buddhaghosa says
that intentions are “accomplished in” the physical, verbal, or mental door-
ways.76 Though sometimes I  have spoken of these processes as happen-
ing “in” the mind (and they are mental rather than material), in fact, it is
more appropriate to visualize them as occurring in the body and voice in
the case of bodily and verbal actions. If intending is doing, then this must
be so: it is not as though one thing (an intention) happens in the mind and
then something else (the action) occurs in the body, but that intention is its
very occurrence in the bodily (or verbal or mental) action. (The analogy of
perceptual processes may be helpful here:  perception or sensory contact,
though mental, is something that happens in the bodily organs, according
to this system. While there is a strong division between mental and physical
phenomena, there is not such a strong division between mind and body—
mental phenomena can occur in the body.) Intentions occur in the doorway,
for example, of the physical body, resulting in movement in which a person
“with a good, bad, or neutral thought moves forward, steps back, beholds,
looks closely, bends or stretches the body.”77 When a person kills, it is said
that a cetanā to kill occurs in the bodily doorway; when one speaks harsh
speech, a cetanā occurs in the verbal doorway.78 An intentional action of the
mind is described the way we have already seen, as that which “accumu-
lates, constructs, heaps up, cognizes, creates, and arranges”79 accompanying
factors. In the case of the six mental courses of action of covetousness, mal-
ice, wrong view, and their opposites, the cetanā occurs in the mind doorway.
Buddhaghosa gives an illustration that shows that actions can be parsed
according to these different varieties.80 A hunter decides to go and hunt
deer but is unsuccessful at catching one. Does he perform an action? Yes,
he performs a mental action—malice or the thought to kill—for which he
is karmically accountable. But he does not fully complete a bodily action
since he did not manage to kill any creature, and so he is not culpable of a
physical act of killing. In this way, what we may see as a single action may
actually be a matter of several actions—mental actions of malice, intended

76. As 85–87.
77. As 82.
78. As 84, 86.
79. āyūhati abhisaṅkharoti piṇḍaṃ karoti ceteti kappeti pakappetīti (As 87).
80. As 90.
 The Work of Intention 111

verbal actions of declaring one’s intentions, and intended bodily actions of

physically performing the act. They are all intentional, but the full “course
of action” (kammapatha) of the bodily action has not occurred.
The idea that what we might see as a single deed is in fact a series of
intentional actions occurs elsewhere in Buddhaghosa’s work. In a brief
distinction between three types of intention, the Sammohavinodanī states
that cetanās occur prior to, during, and after giving a gift or taking the pre-
cepts. When giving a gift, the agent has an intention to give, an intention
while giving, and an intention after the gift is given.81 Buddhaghosa says
that the intention afterward is an “understanding made by giving,” sug-
gesting that one’s thinking about a gift or other moral action after it is com-
plete is a deepening of understanding about it made possible only upon
completing it.82 Other commentaries suggest that in the example of giving
a gift, the gift should not be followed by a change of heart or regret, and so
the ongoing intentionality surrounding what one is doing is important.83
Giving a gift is really a matter of multiple intentional actions: planning to
give, actually giving the gift, and reflecting about it afterward. Again we
see a concern with time and the temporality of intention and action.
Here we notice that the definition of cetanā differs markedly from con-
temporary philosophers’ definitions of intention, which generally assume
that intention precedes the action or occurs simultaneously with it; mod-
ern philosophers would probably suggest that thoughts about an action
after committing it are, quite simply, different thoughts that have nothing
to do with intentions. We may come to regret an action or wish we had
different intentions when we performed it, but we cannot change or alter
the intention that led to it, and it would be odd to call subsequent feelings
and thoughts about the action “intentions.”
Yet in some sense Buddhaghosa is getting at something important
and suggested by intuition by proposing that since intentional action
is constructing activity, then how we construct our experience is some-
thing that unfolds over time. The intentions surrounding a gift can be

81. Vibh-a 412–13. He also mentions this distinction in As 159. In his translation of the
Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya, de La Vallée Poussin also noticed that cetanā can refer to a mental
state following an action with which it is associated; this made him uneasy about his transla-
tion of cetanā as volition (Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol. 2, 709, n. 3).
82. Vibh-a 412–13.
83. See Heim, Theories of the Gift in South Asia, 42–43, where I  discuss the
Upāsakajanālaṅkāra’s discussion of the three times of giving.
112 the forerunner of all th ings

parsed into many separate moments of assembling our thoughts, moti-

vations, and feelings about it. Since action is so deeply tied to intention,
then how we continue to construe and construct actions in our minds
remains essential to what they are. It does seem that often we become
aware of our intentions and attribute importance to them only after the
deed has been completed, when we go back and try to reconstruct its
meaning by naming what we intended to do in committing it (“I really
meant to give her something she would enjoy” or “I had no intention
of harming him when I ate the last piece of his favorite cake”). In such
cases, intentions become most relevant to us in how we consider them
or reconstruct them after the deed has taken place. And sometimes, per-
haps even often, it is this intention as it is constructed after the fact
that carries the day in terms of the meaning and significance we assign
to the act (“I believe her when she says she did not mean to hurt his
feelings”). In addition, we sometimes continue to intend things about
actions we have completed (“I hope she is still getting use out of that
sweater I knitted for her last year”). But also, intentions can change over
time and be reconstructed or altered in ways that change how we see the
moral value of the action. The text’s example of regretting one’s earlier
generosity does seem to take away from the value of the generosity itself
and the moral quality of the action. Perhaps it even changes what the
action was: now it is considered a mistake, and this shift entails that one
is no longer generous. Conversely, regret over doing wrong actions can
sometimes make up, at least to some extent, for a wrong action. Much
legal thinking seems to concur that this sort of regret—changing one’s
thinking and feeling about the action—is relevant, at least in assign-
ing punishment, and of course, many religious traditions celebrate such
changes of heart in relation to one’s sins in ways that redefine the nature
of the action itself.
But again, why call subsequent thoughts about an act “intentions”? In
the Buddhist view, action is what it is constructed to be, and cetanā, as we
saw in the many metaphors about it, is that very constructing process (it
“produces its object by its own work”). Strictly speaking, we have to sug-
gest that in what may appear to be a single action—giving a gift—there are
actually many intentional actions occurring over time. Constructing our
actions and what goes into them goes on even after a deed would seem to
be complete. These considerations open action up temporally—an act like
giving a gift is really multiple intentional actions not confined to a discrete
moment in time when the action is committed or an intention occurring
 The Work of Intention 113

shortly before. Buddhaghosa posits a theory of action that is open-ended;

the meaning and value of actions continue as we construct them, literally,
in our minds and conversations, a process and activity that happens over
time. (Chapter 4 on narrative treats the dialogic and temporal aspects of
intention as central themes.) While Buddhaghosa does not elaborate on
all of the puzzles associated with the temporal aspects of moral action as
it is experienced in the mind, he goes further than many contemporary
treatments of action that treat it and its moral dimensions as a discrete
and finite event.

Action as Abstinence
We turn now to how it is that actions that are really abstentions or restraints
are to be understood. The Abhidhamma, no less than the Suttanta, has
many instances of describing good actions as refraining from bad actions.
The Dhammasaṅgaṇī, for example, says that right speech and right action
are “leaving off, abstention, refraining, abstaining, not doing, not acting,
not committing, not transgressing, and destroying any bridge to” the four
bad speech actions and the three bad physical actions.84 Buddhaghosa
elaborates each of these synonyms with great nuance; “leaving off” is
delighting in being apart from something, and “abstaining” is destroying
the bad action, for example. Some of these seem to be part of an inhibitory
system, others simply the presence of an absence. Above all, these good
actions comprise a mental factor (cetasika) that prevents the committing
of bad action or speech.85
But abstaining—that is, not engaging in wrong action—raises intrigu-
ing challenges for the tight focus on intentional action that is otherwise
pervasive throughout the texts. Are abstentions intentions? When refrain-
ing from committing a bad action, whether out of resisting temptation or
because I have taken a precept or because it does not even occur to me
to do it, what is the nature of my intention? In what sense is abstaining
an action? We turn first briefly to a passage in the Vibhaṅga that is the
chief place where precept taking (and thus issues about proper action) is

84. Dhs 299–300.

85. As 218–19. Another interesting place where speech is considered to be an abstinence
is in Buddhaghosa’s discussion of karma where he says that speech is threefold: intention,
abstinence, and sound (As 86). Sometimes not saying something is a speech act.
114 the forerunner of all th ings

discussed in the canonical Abhidhamma. The Vibhaṅga devotes a chap-

ter to the training precepts (sikkhāpada), which it lists as five abstainings
(veramaṇī): from killing, from taking what is not given, from sexual mis-
conduct, from false speech, and from taking intoxicating drink.86 (These
are the same as what is often understood as the five sīla precepts, though
Buddhaghosa tends to define sīla as the 10 good deeds.)87 We will also
turn to the Paṭisambhidāmagga88 and to Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga for
a closer look at this variety of precept.
The Vibhaṅga discusses the five training precepts as matters of
cetanā, abstaining (veramaṇī), and factors associated with both of
these, though it does not offer any actual distinctions between these.89
Buddhaghosa thought that this could be potentially confusing—is keep-
ing a precept, say, not killing someone, a matter of abstaining or inten-
tion? He suggests that keeping precepts can be understood as cetanās
only in a figurative sense (pariyāya) and that the canonical text says they
are abstainings (veramaṇī), not cetanās. He argues then that since the
Buddha generally “taught by referring to cetanās,” we can say figura-
tively or conventionally that keeping precepts is a matter of intention.
But in fact, a precept is literally (nippariyāya) an abstention (virati). So
we can say that in the case of misconduct, at the moment of transgres-
sion there is a hostile intention, but in the case of good conduct, there
is a moment of abstention. In addition, there are the associating factors
accompanying each of these that also comprise the precepts (that is,
the other relevant factors of the 52 cetasikas that work with a cetanā or
a veramaṇī).90

86. Elsewhere, 10 sikkhāpada are listed, including the additional abstaining from eating at
the wrong time, worldly amusements, using scents and ornaments, sleeping on high beds,
and accepting gold or silver; these latter five are factors less of moral practice than monastic
renunciation. For a discussion of the 10 sikkhāpadas, see Pj I.22–37; while these are not the
same as the dasasīla (that is, the 10 kusala actions), there are similarities and overlaps in how
Buddhaghosa treats the 10 sikkhapādas in this text and how he discusses the 10 good and 10
bad actions that we considered in chapter 1.
87. Vism 7: Buddhaghosa describes sīla not as the five precepts or sikkhāpadas, but as the
10 kusala kammas—abstaining from killing, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct,
false speech, malicious speech, harsh speech, frivolous speech, covetousness, malice, and
wrong view.
88. The Paṭisambhidhāmagga is really an Abhidhamma text, though it is part of the
Khuddhaka Nikāya of the Suttanta. Buddhaghosa relies on it heavily in the Visuddhimagga.
89. Vibh 285–90.
90. Vibh-a 381–82.
 The Work of Intention 115

We thus see a preference, at least for Buddhaghosa, for talking about

the morally good activity of abstaining as a distinctive kind of action
that is not identical with intention. He turns with even more detail to
such questions and tangles in the treatment of sīla, which he describes
as the 10 good deeds in the Visuddhimagga and his commentary on the
Paṭisambhidāmagga. The Paṭisambhidāmagga offers a number of ways
of classifying or dividing sīla. One of them is that sīla is fourfold:  it is
(1) intention (cetanā), (2) mental factor (cetasika), (3) restraint (saṃvara),
and (4)  nontransgression (avītikkama).91 One and the same precept
can involve combinations of these; they are not mutually exclusive. Let
us take the latter two first. Sīla as “restraint” can be fivefold:  restraint
by the Vinaya rules, by mindfulness, by knowledge, by patience, and
by energy.92 Sīla as “nontrangression” is simply not breaking the precepts
by bodily or verbal action.93 But what is sīla as cetanā and as cetasika? We
may recall that Buddhaghosa defines the first seven abstentions of bodily
and verbal misconduct as, properly speaking, intentions, and the last
three good mental actions of abstaining from covetousness, malice, and
wrong view are cetasikas.94 We have seen this idea before, and it seems
to suggest that the mental actions are, chiefly, intensified motivations
rather than intentions. But we might also posit that since they are really
abstentions, they are not a matter of the accumulative work of intentions.
Their logic is abandoning, not accumulating, and this makes them, above
all, a kind of cetasika, rather than a cetanā.95 (Cetasika is, of course, a very

91. Paṭis i.44; Vism 7.

92. Vism 7; Paṭis-a i.218; but see also Vism 11, where sīla is restraint in four senses: Vinaya
rules, restraint of the sense faculties, of the purification of livelihood, and concerning the
monastic use of requisites. In fact, it is this latter list of four that Buddhaghosa goes on to
discuss at great length (Vism 15–46 and thus the bulk of his treatment of sīla here). The
treatment of restraint in largely a monastic register suggests that restraints are best treated
in our Vinaya chapter.
93. Vism 7.
94. See chapter 1, p. 103.
95. This is one place where I find my interpretation to be in substantial disagreement with
that of Nalini Devdas. She suggests that mental karma is classified as cetasika kamma to
avoid a redundancy problem. That is, since manokamma accomplishes much the same work
as cetanā, there is the danger that it might appear that two intention-like processes are at
work in one karmic event (Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 399). This is plausible, but
I think that, at least in the case of good mental actions, they are chiefly cetasikas because their
main action is abandoning and abstaining, not accumulating (but they cannot be consid-
ered kiriyakammas because they are kusala). And intending and abstaining are consistently
regarded by Buddhaghosa as conceptually distinct because they entail quite opposite logics.
116 the forerunner of all th ings

broad category of factors that can include absences and various kinds of
abandonings.)
In another listing of the varieties of sīla, both texts add a fifth type: aban-
doning (pahāna).96 Buddhaghosa says that abandoning is not actually a
factor (dhamma), so it should just be understood as the nonarising of kill-
ing and so on. And it is also the upholding of good factors in the sense of
establishing them, and it is a resolution in the sense of preventing waver-
ing.97 The texts then go on to describe these five operations of abandoning,
abstaining, intention, restraint, and nontransgression, not only with refer-
ence to the 10 bad deeds but also in higher forms of mental and spiritual
development: sīla is abandoning, abstaining, intention, restraint, and non-
transgression of the hindrances in experiencing the first jhāna, for exam-
ple, and of applied and sustained thought in the second jhāna. And right
up to arhatship, sīla is these processes of abandoning, and so forth. Sīla
thus leads to nonremorse, joy, delight, calm, happiness, and so on, right
up to nibbāna itself (a formula we saw in the last chapter and will see again
in the next). Again we see a logic of abandoning and abstaining—that is,
absences—that make possible the presence of other felicitous things. If
we want to understand morality and religious development in this system,
we must learn to see the precise ways that the presence of absences makes
possible other processes.
A final discussion may be helpful for discerning the precise nature
of precept taking and abstaining. The mainstream schools had different
views on how it is that intentions might work. The issue concerns the tem-
poral aspects of intentional action. Is the intention to refrain from violating
a precept (such as killing) something one has at the moment of making
a vow or precept, or does it occur when one does not in fact kill? How do
we locate that particular moment of “not killing”? The Sarvāstivādins had
a theory of karma and cetanā that posited a certain underlying intention

96. Paṭis i.46; Vism 11, 49–51. Dhammapāla’s commentary to the Visuddhimagga deems it
necessary to try to clarify this passage by mentioning that cetanās are present in all of the
three actions—physical, verbal, and mental—but when one wants to offer a more specific
treatment of the abstaining from the bad mental deeds, one says that the sīla is a cetasika to
be understood separately from sīla as intention (even though intention is also present). He
goes on to argue that either cetanā or the cetasika of abstention will be primary depending
on the case, though both are present. Restraints for him are when “bad factors do not occur
as though they were being concealed.” Nontransgression is when mental factors occur that
are opposed to the transgression (Vism-mhṭ I.24). Some of these seem to indicate functions
of an inhibitory system; others are pointing simply to absences.
97. Vism 50–51.
 The Work of Intention 117

that occurs at the moment of taking a precept and that persists over time
and ensures that one does not violate it. To see how this works, it is help-
ful to observe that there are serious differences between the Theravādins
and the Sarvāstivādins on how to interpret the Buddha’s identification of
intention and action. Dipping into these debates can sharpen our grasp of
the Pāli position.
The Theravāda adherence to the close identification of karma and cetanā
was rejected by the Sarvāstivādins. As we have seen, the Theravādins argue
that the Buddha’s statement “having intended, one acts by body, speech,
and mind” means that there is only one event: the intending is the acting.
This is against the Sarvāstivāda view that the Buddha’s statement refers
to two events, the intention and the action produced by the intention.
Vasubandhu says: “There are two karmas: the karma of intending and the
karma after having intended.”98 In this view, there is a mental action, the
intention, which is the cause of bodily or verbal actions. Vasubandhu thus
posits a sui generis intention, a pure intention that intends the intentional
action.99
This move leads the Sarvāstivādins to develop a distinction that we do
not see in the Pāli literature. For them, vijñapti, referring to the action that
makes itself known to others, is introduced to name the bodily or vocal
manifestation of the intention in the action.100 Then they introduce the
term avijñapti to refer to the intentional act in the mind (the sui generis
intention) that is not known either by bodily or verbal movement. Avijñapti
karma is a latent potential that can carry beyond a bodily action. Thus
when one takes the precepts or the Prātimokṣa rules and then refrains
from harming beings, there remains, beyond the formal action of taking

98. Abhidhammakośa iv. 1b–d (de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol. 2, 551–
52). See also Gombrich, “Merit Detached from Volition,” 429, n.  2. The Mahāyāna texts
tend to follow the Sarvāstivāda position; for example, the Prajnāptiśāstra interprets karma
as two events:  volitional action and action following the intention (de La Vallée Poussin,
Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol. 1, 24), as does Asaṅga’s Abhidharmasammuccaya (Rahula and
Boin-Webb, Abhidharmasamuccaya, 112).
99. de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol. 2, 559. This move introduces the
possibility of regress, as Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind) would suggest, though Theravāda
and Sautrāntika arguments against it do not go this route.
100. There are some similarities with this term and Pāli viññatti, intimation, or what com-
municates to the body to act (see note 76). Note also that although Vasubhandu represented
and himself subscribed to much of the Vaibhāṣika view, in places he disagreed with certain
aspects of it, and he argued against what follows concerning avijñāptirūpa (see Hayes, “The
Analysis of Karma in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya”).
118 the forerunner of all th ings

the precepts, an intention that is not manifest in bodily or verbal action in

the form of a lasting, inner restraint known only to the agent, or perhaps
even the agent is not always consciously aware of it.101 This moral intention
persists even if the mind is, at moments, bad or neutral. Intriguingly, it is
considered to be material (rūpa) in nature.102 The avijñapti is the absention
(virati) of a wrong action when one is committed to the restraint of the
precepts, which is considered a “real dhamma.”103
This theory of avijñaptirūpa karma relies on the Sarvāstivāda view of
time, in which past and future are said to exist in some sense; it allows
the Sarvāstivādins to posit the notion of an enduring latent intention that
persists even when other actions are being carried out or other thoughts
are in the mind. Dharmaśrī, an early Sarvāstivādin author, says, “If, for
example, a person undertakes the precepts, his mind can then be bad or
neutral: nevertheless the precepts continue.”104 The theory offers an expla-
nation for the presence of intentions that seem to outlive the finite action
with which they are associated. It also allows an explanation of moral
actions of restraint that involve the absence of immoral conduct: the inter-
pretation given here is that when one refrains from breaking the precepts
(which involves no overt bodily or verbal action), an inner, uncommuni-
cated, but nonetheless real moral intention is at work over time.
The Theravādins rejected this doctrine of avijñapti; it is a bit clumsy
and compromises the insistence that karma is no more than intention.
For them, as we have just seen, when one refrains from killing or lying,
for example, discrete intentions or abstainings are at work. There is no
single intention that occurred at an earlier moment of taking a precept
that remains lurking underneath other mental experiences, culminating
in later actions or nonaction. Rather, when one is not killing or lying, it is
because any number of mental experiences we have been discussing are
at work, whether they are abandoning, abstaining, intention, restraint, or

101. For thorough accounts of the meaning of these terms and the implications of these
views, see McDermott, Development in the Early Buddhist Concept of Kamma/Karma, 132–140;
Gombrich, “Merit Detached from Volition” and How Buddhism Began, 55; and Hayes, “The
Analysis of Karma in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya.”
102. Gombrich argues that this move to see it as material may have been the result of influ-
ence from the Jains (“Merit Detached from Volition,” 429). Hayes charts how and why the
Vaibhāṣikas argued for a form of “non-phenomenal matter” (“The Analysis of Karma in
Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya,” 28–29).
103. de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol, 2, 562.
104. Ibid., vol. 1, 47.
 The Work of Intention 119

nontransgression. These are situation-specific absences that are present at

that moment. For them, this is a sufficient explanation of precept taking
and keeping vows.

A Theory of the Unconscious?

Up until this point, we have been concerned with the irreducible factors of
conscious experience (citta). But there are further dispositions of human
psychology in addition to the irreducible factors that make up moments
of thought. The Dhammasaṅgaṇī treats a variety of groups of disposi-
tions that contain some of the cetasikas with which we are familiar, as
well as additional forces we have not considered. These are understood
variously in how they pervade and influence experience. For example, the
āsavas, or “depravities”—there are four:  desire, becoming, wrong view,
and ignorance—“attend” good and bad factors that are themselves results
of previous karma.105 They flow or ooze and ferment our experience in
saṃsāra, attending even good and neutral factors of mind in all three
realms: sense-desire, form, and formless.106 Arhats, also called “those rid
of the depravities” (khīṇāsava), are the only people free of them entirely.
The depravities are inherent in a beginningless way to our experience in
saṃsāra. While all of the depravities are important, Buddhaghosa empha-
sizes ignorance and its pervasiveness in our condition. He quotes the
Buddha:  “There was no earlier point at which ignorance was not pres-
ent whereby we could say that once there was no ignorance.”107 In our
unawakened state, we never stand outside our condition of ignorance. In
terms of our interest in intentional action, we can recall that in the doc-
trine of dependent origination, ignorance is a direct condition of our con-
structions (saṅkhāra), and thus intentions.
In the Abhidhamma, to classify is to define. As different dispositions
and factors are grouped in diverse classifications, we learn more about
their nature. A group of 10 inclinations—sensual desire, repulsion, con-
ceit, wrong view, doubt, the rigid adherence to rule and observance, the
passion for becoming, envy, avarice, and ignorance—are considered

105. Dhs 1096–1112; As 42; The āsavas are kāma, bhava, diṭṭhi, and avijjā.
106. As 48.
107. As 48 quoting A.v.113.
108. Dhs 1113, 1151. The fetters (saṃyojana), floods (ogha), and yokes (yoga) are kāmarāga,
paṭigha, māna, diṭṭhi, vicikiccha, sīlabbataparāmāsa, bhavarāga, issā, macchariya, and avijjā.
120 the forerunner of all th ings

variously as fetters, floods, and yokes.108 Buddhaghosa says that fetters

and yokes tie one to the round of rebirth, and floods sink and submerge
one in rebirth.109 There are four bonds that knot us to saṃsāra: covetous-
ness, malice, rigid adherence to rule and observance, and an inclination to
dogmatize.110 Hindrances or blockages are six: sensual initiative, malice,
stubbornness and lassitude, worry and anxiety, doubt, and ignorance.111
And the defilements are 10: greed, hatred, delusion, conceit, wrong view,
doubt, stubbornness, worry, shamelessness, and the lack of moral appre-
hension.112 Most of the items on these lists are various cetasikas, but some
are more complex tendencies of behavior, habit, and disposition, such as the
inclination to dogmatize or the rigid adherence to rule and observance.
Groupings define these terms through a distinctive kind of exposition.
When particular terms appear under different classifications, we can get
a sense of their varied nature and influences. These different groupings
of negative forces, dispositions, and inclinations, and the evocative nature
of their names and descriptions, depict a corrupted and depraved anthro-
pology. We human beings come to our experience heavily freighted with
dispositions that distort our perceptions and incline us to immorality. In
the context of our interest in intentional action, we can see that these vari-
ous forces operate in a pervasive way on our constructions of the world
as we act within it. When we reflect on these dispositions, we become
aware of a sense of patiency, of being acted upon by our own inherited and
entrenched dispositions and inclinations.
Although it is not easy to say how much we notice the presence of
these many dispositions (since one of the chief things we are ignorant
about is the nature of our own mental lives, and since it was only with
extraordinary insight that the Buddha discovered and parsed all of them),
the factors among them are, by definition, matters of conscious awareness
(citta). It is noteworthy that the Abhidhamma mapping of mind does not
attribute much weight to unconscious drives or motives as such. But the
idea of anusayas, that is, biases or latent tendencies, was taken by some

109. As 48–49.
110. Dhs 1135. The gantha are abhijjhā, vyāpāda, sīlabbataparāmāsa, and saccābhinesa.
111. Dhs 1152. The nīvaraṇa are kāmacchanda, vyāpāda, thinamiddha, uddhaccakukkucca,
vicikicchā, and avijjā.
112. Dhs 1229. The kilesa are lobha, dosa, moha, māna, diṭṭhi, vicikicchā, thīna, uddhacca,
ahirika, and anottappa.
 The Work of Intention 121

Buddhist thinkers to indicate forces that lie below the level of conscious
thought. The list of seven biases consists of items we have just seen: sen-
sual desire, repulsion, conceit, wrong view, doubt, desire for existence, and
ignorance.113 The word anusaya is not mentioned in the Dhammasaṅgaṇī
and appears just once in the Vibhaṅga. It is not a category that was central
to the Abhidhammikas. This may be noticed in contrast to the Sarvāstivāda
Abhidharma traditions that foreground the anuśayas’ (in Sanskrit) role in
action much more directly than the Pāli Abhidhamma.114 Vasubandhu fea-
tures the anuśayas prominently as underlying prompts of action:

We said that the world, in all its variety, arises from action. Now it is
by reason of the anuśayas, or latent defilements, that actions accu-
mulate: in the absence of anuśayas actions are not capable of pro-
ducing a new existence. Consequently the roots of existence, that is,
of rebirth or action, are the anuśayas.115

Vasubandhu makes a very clear link between action and the latent or
inherent biases or defilements that drive it. This direct framing of action
in terms of the anusayas is not evident in the Abhidhamma sources; where
anusaya is mentioned, it is usually in reference to abandoning them in
the quest for arhatship and to make the point that arhats are free of them.
For the Pāli Abhidhammikas, the trouble with the biases is that they
suggest a latent presence or quality in the mind that does not arise in
a moment of consciousness; since Abhidhamma is concerned with con-
scious experience (citta), it does not offer a theory of an unconscious mind.
There is also the problem of momentariness, as Nalini Devdas points out.
If all experience is momentary, how can there be enduring tendencies
lying inactive in the mind?116 The Kathāvatthu rejects the idea that other
Buddhist schools propose, namely, that there could be a nonmanifest
motive in the mind, or that a person could have a moral or neutral thought
under which lurks an immoral latent defilement.117 Thus, the latent

113. Vibh 383. These are kāmarāga, paṭighā, māna diṭṭhi, vicikiccha, bhavarāga, and avijjā.
114. In addition to Vasubandhu’s treatment of the anuśayas, Dharmaśrī’s Abhidharmasāra
has an extended and quite innovative discussion of them (Frauwallner, Studies in Abhidharma
Literature, 153f.).
115. de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam, vol. 3, 767.
116. Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 146–49.
117. Kv xiv.5–6.
122 the forerunner of all th ings

defilement is no different from the manifestation of it (pariyuṭṭhāna), a

position that appears to reject a notion of dormant or unconscious moti-
vations altogether.118 This would seem to have important implications for
agency: we are not, in fact, driven by unconscious tendencies to which we
cannot have access.
Yet this stance is moderated to some degree in other Abhidhamma
texts, and the texts are not conclusive on this matter. The Vibhaṅga men-
tions the biases and emphasizes their tenacity. Buddhaghosa suggests that,
like robbers on the road who beset travelers, the manifested latent ten-
dency for ignorance besets moral consciousness, seizes and plunders it.119
Another passage connects them with habit.120 He also notes, interestingly,
that there are no equivalent good latent tendencies (kalyāṇānusaya).121
The Yamaka, which discusses the anusayas more than any other book of
the Abhidhamma, does not address the question of their relationship to
action directly, but it does consider where the anusayas are said to adhere
(anuseti). Sensual desire, repulsion, and conceit adhere to feelings, and
wrong view, doubt, and ignorance adhere to all the factors associated with
persons; that is, they are intrinsic to the unawakened human condition.
Finally, the desire for existence adheres to experience in both the realms of
form and formlessness, gripping beings even beyond the realm of sense
desire.122 Here, the latent tendencies are posited not so much as a matter
of conscious or unconscious mental factors but as proclivities inherent
to our experience in saṃsāra in fundamental ways, much like the other
groupings of dispositions.

118. A readiness to see anusayas as truly latent or unmanifested tendencies may be more
apparent in the Suttas than the Abhidhamma, which is concerned with conscious experi-
ence. For example, the Mahā-Māluṅkāya Sutta suggests that even a young and tender infant
possesses the five lower fetters, such as greed and malice, which are described as underly-
ing tendencies (anusaya) (M.i.433). See Jaini, “The Sautrāntika Theory of Bīja,” 223–26; and
Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 146–49 and 455–56, for good treatments of the
Theravāda inconsistencies on this doctrine.
119. Vibh-a 141.
120. Vibh-a 40.
121. Vibh-a 461.
122. Yam vii.
 The Work of Intention 123

Promptings and Spontaneous Actions

When the Dhammasaṅgaṇī asks, at the very start of its treatise, “Which
factors are good?” it is referring to a particular type of thought—one that
arises in the realm of sense desire that is “accompanied by joy,” “associated
with knowledge,” and directed to an object of the six senses.123 The text goes
on to list good thoughts that arise in the realm of sense desire that are not
accompanied by joy or associated with knowledge, as well as the various
kinds of possibilities of different combinations of these. It later mentions
good thoughts that occur “with prompting,” introducing a new variety of
thought.124 It then treats bad and neutral thoughts, and then the kinds of
thoughts that occur in the realm of form and the realm of formlessness.
We need not work through all of these variants, and in particular we
may set aside the consciousness that those experiencing the form and
formless realms enjoy. But we do need to turn to Buddhaghosa’s treat-
ment of the Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s distinctions concerning thoughts that arise
with or without knowledge, with or without joy, and what is meant by
“prompting.” Buddhaghosa thought these were very important distinc-
tions, and he dilated on them at some length. Although we cannot treat
all of the intricacies of this fascinating commentary, discussion of the dif-
ferent ways that morally good thoughts come about demonstrates a very
nuanced appreciation of internal and external conditions for our thoughts
and actions that has not yet surfaced.
Buddhaghosa, in his treatment of these different kinds of distinctions,
discusses the fact that thoughts are always connected to objects. The color
that the eye falls upon or the sound that greets the ear stimulates the sen-
sory contact that makes possible conscious awareness. He is particularly
interested in what is experienced by the sixth sense, that is, the mind,
because this is the mind’s way of representing to itself objects that need not
be present to the five sensory organs. What the mind calls up and attends
to is shaped by previous sensory and mental experience. It is here that,
in the case of a good thought, we can see important factors of moral and
religious development shape and influence thoughts. Buddhaghosa—and
here he mentions that this particular view is not mentioned by the earlier
commentators—says that at least four things can influence the emergence

123. Dhs 1.
124. Dhs 146.
125. As 74.
124 the forerunner of all th ings

of a thought that occurs at the doorway of the mind (i.e., a thought that
arises with a mental action). These are faith, preference, thoughtful reflec-
tion, and patience with wrong views.125 So what one represents to oneself
in a thought will be in part determined by these other processes of faith,
reflection, and so on.
He goes on to suggest that even what occurs to the other five senses
is experienced in a good thought in a way that is inflected by what we
might refer to as virtues or habits. That is to say, when one experiences a
beautiful color, one may be moved to a good thought (kusalacitta) if one’s
consciousness has been “trained, inclined, practiced, and turned toward”
the good. Otherwise, the sight of a beautiful thing could lead to greed.126
He elaborates:

For one who says “I should do something good,” the mind is trained
on good actions, turned away from the bad, inclined towards only
good actions, and practiced only with good practices through
repeated action; thus, an appropriate idea occurs through relying
upon living in a suitable place, associating with good people, lis-
tening to the Good Dhamma, having done good deeds before, and
so on. For such a [person] that which is called good arises through
being trained, inclined, practiced, and turned in these ways.127

Buddhaghosa is highly sensitive to the larger conditions for moral devel-

opment, quite external to the constituents of good thought, that make pos-
sible the ways we attend to our senses and thus the very nature of the
thoughts that occur to us.
When he considers the kind of good thought that is “accompanied by
joy,” Buddhaghosa sees additional influences at work. When one sees the
Buddha, unless one has faith and is free of wrong views, joy will not arise.
But for those with faith and right view and who can see the advantage of
merit, immense joy will spring up in seeing the Buddha.128 Similarly, for
a good thought to be “associated with knowledge” is also a matter of how
our present experience is shaped by the past: we get knowledge from the
nature of our previous karma, our past births, the maturity of our faculties,

126. As 75.
127. As 75. Jayasuriya refers to living in a suitable place and so on as “predisposing causes”
of moral action (Jayasuriya, The Psychology and Philosophy of Buddhism, 55).
128. As 75.
 The Work of Intention 125

and our distance from the defilements. These will influence the nature of
our current thoughts. On this topic, Buddhaghosa sees fit to mention the
seven awakening factors associated with inquiry into the Dhamma:  fre-
quent questioning, making clear fundamental things, bringing the facul-
ties into equilibrium, avoiding foolish people, frequenting wise people,
reflecting on deep matters, and inclining the mind toward this.129 If one
wants to have thoughts that are endowed with knowledge, one can adopt
these intellectual practices.
Then Buddhaghosa makes a distinction that he argues is present even
if unmentioned by the Dhammasaṅgaṇī passage he is working on. He says
that the text will later offer a class of good thoughts that are, among all of
these other variants, said to be “prompted” (sasaṅkhārena). This implies,
he argues, that though these first kinds of good thought do not explicitly
say so, they are spontaneous (asaṅkhārena). Of course, we are familiar
with the language of saṅkhāra, but this is a specialized and technical sense
appearing in the Abhidhamma that was developed in the commentaries
into a distinction between prompted (sasaṅkhārena, sasaṅkhārika) and
unprompted (asaṅkhārena, asaṅkhārika) thought.130 Buddhaghosa men-
tions this distinction in his commentary on a Sutta passage in which he
says that there can be intentions that are “not instigated by others which
one does with an unprompted mind, and there are those which are gen-
erated by others which one does with a prompted mind,” such as when
one is inspired to act when told that karma has results.131 This distinction
returns us to intersubjectivity and the ways that our intentions can be
influenced by others.
Prompted good thoughts are those that take some prodding to come
into being, either by one’s own moral thinking or by the impact others’
words can have on us. Buddhaghosa defines prompted as occurring “by a
means, by an expedient, by a collection of causes” and provides this help-
ful illustration:

When the time came to sweep in front of the stūpa, attend to an

129. As 76.
130. For example, Dhs 146, 402.
131. Spk.ii.57. Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 749, n. 78, suggests that “this
text may be the original basis for the Abhidhamma distinction between sasaṅkhārikacitta
and asaṅkhārikacitta.” For more on this distinction, see Nārada and Bodhi (A Comprehensive
Manual of Abhidhamma, 36)  and Rhys Davids (A Buddhist Manual of Psychological Ethics,
34–35, n. 1).
126 the forerunner of all th ings

elder, or listen to the Dhamma, a certain monk living in a neigh-

boring monastery would think, “it will be too far for me to go and
return, so I will not go.” But then he would consider, “it is not fit-
ting for a monk not to go to the stūpa, to attend an elder, or to listen
to the Dhamma, so I  will go after all.” Whether it is through his
own means, or whether others have admonished him showing him
the benefits of doing his duty and the dangers of not doing it, or
whether they have rebuked him saying “come and do it,” his moral
consciousness arises by being prompted, that is, it arises by a col-
lection of causes.132

These promptings are not mental factors (dhammas or cetasikas), but rather
internal or external instigators of action. They can be either thoughts that
occur to oneself or the suggestions or rebukes of others. Buddhaghosa
additionally describes prompted good thoughts of those who lack knowl-
edge as the experiences of young boys whose parents grab them by the
head and make them pay homage to a shrine. The children then worship
excitedly and happily, even if it was not their own aim.133 Such proddings
show yet another way that our actions do not spring solely from the combi-
nations of mental factors discussed previously, but that they are subject to
either outside influences and admonishments or to our own inner voices
that tell us what we should and should not do.
But what about unprompted thoughts? Where do these come from?
Buddhaghosa says that we can have good thoughts that are unprompted
or spontaneous in the sense that they arise without any such means.
These are good thoughts that occur to people that consist of either gener-
osity (dāna), habit (sīla), or mental cultivation (bhāvanā). When one sees
something beautiful and then spontaneously (because one is generous)
wants to give it to the Saṅgha, then we have an instance of the first kind.
Spontaneous gifts that are given out of habit (sīla) are done when one acts
according to one’s family customs and traditions. The things we regularly
do out of habit do not take much additional prodding to make us continue
them. And thoughts that occur due to mental cultivation arise when, for

132. As 156. But in fact, as is apparent in the lists of these kinds of thoughts, prompted
thoughts do not differ in content from unprompted thoughts.
133. As 156.
134. As 77–79.
 The Work of Intention 127

example, one is moved to give a gift by reflecting on the impermanence

of things (which, presumably, dislodges greed and attachment to the
gift object).134 A deep awareness of the fundamental transience of reality
can make us act reflexively in certain ways. The category of unprompted
thought shows the many ways Buddhaghosa sees whereby we can be
spontaneously inspired to act either out of a sense of beauty and generos-
ity or because of a deeper awareness through meditation of the fleeting-
ness of things.
This carving out of the spontaneous from prompted intentional action
suggests how certain domains of action are assigned to the realms of dis-
position, habit, custom, or religious awareness. Spontaneous action is not
unintentional, but it does not require the full repertoire of moral psycho-
logical factors to interpret. Roy Wagner has argued that “what we call ‘cul-
ture’ thus has much to do with how different peoples in different parts of
the world figure spontaneity within an intentional field—how they may
deny it, claim it, impute it.”135 Buddhaghosa is recognizing, among other
things here, the role of what we would call culture—the habits, traditions,
and customs that produce so much of what we do. Much good thought
and action are simply the results of habit, of doing what one’s family or
community has always done, and no further explanation of it need be
sought. The category of the spontaneous also functions as shorthand for
accounting for why people do what they do due to disposition or character,
which is thought to produce action in something like an automatic fash-
ion: “Why did she give that gift? Oh, because she is a generous person.”
No further account of the deed is required. Finally, we see a particular
emphasis on how religious awareness works on people to make them act
reflexively or automatically.

Conclusions
We have spent the preceding pages in an intricate dissection of conscious
experience, both the discrete factors that comprise thoughts and the vari-
ous dispositions and influences that shape them. As complex and manifold
as this psychology is and his probing into the nuances of it, Buddhaghosa
still marvels at how the mind produces the great range of effects that it
does. He suggests that the mind is like a painter who paints a great work

135. Wagner, “Hazarding Intent,” 164.

128 the forerunner of all th ings

of art that is the product of many artistic skills and designs. He says that
the Buddha once mentioned a particularly beautiful masterpiece that was
the result of diverse artistic mastery and said that the mind is even more
diverse in its arts than that painting.136 The mind is even greater than
the greatest artist in its creativity and design of the world of experience
through action. The mind creates our good and bad actions and through
them our current experience and our future destinies. We are reminded,
too, that the Abhidhammikas and Buddhaghosa described human experi-
ence in a manner resistant to closure, as an artist somehow not bound by
the borders of the canvas.
Intention is the primary agent of constructing reality in present and
future existence through marshaling and constructing the mental and
material experiences we will have. Its creativity is likened here to that of an
artist, elsewhere to that of a carpenter, a tutor, a landowner, and an army
general, all of whom, in their own distinctive and complex ways, fashion
their objects.
One of the striking things about this entire account is that as funda-
mental as intention is in action and world construction, the texts never tell
us how to change our intentions, as such. Although the Buddha pointed
to cetanā as the key element in moral agency (karma), he never directly
or explicitly instructed how one might go about correctly ordering or
developing one’s cetanās. How then does one do moral work? Intentions
themselves are not directly managed; rather, programs of meditation and
moral development work at the level of uprooting immoral motivations
and enhancing and developing the many moral motivations, sentiments,
and capacities that are operative in moral consciousness. A close look at
cetanā reveals a complex network of conditioned and changing causal fac-
tors that are assembled and galvanized into action through cetanā’s activ-
ity. The Buddha’s emphasis on intention did not lead to any programs
aimed directly at cetanā as we might expect if cetanā was a matter of will or
choice, which could, presumably, lend themselves to programs of will for-
mation or to instructions on how to make the right choices. Rather, cetanā
is, at least in the Abhidhamma treatment of it, a rather elementary, though

136. As 64–65. Buddhaghosa quotes here from S.iii.151. There are numerous puns in this
passage and in Buddhaghosa’s development of it, based mostly on the word citta, which can
be either “picture” or “thought” (i.e., mind), that we cannot hope to render adequately in
English. Bhikkhu Bodhi is also drawn to this passage and how it expresses the fundamental
artistry and creativity of “the will” (Bodhi, Nourishing the Roots, 20–21).
 The Work of Intention 129

crucial, operation of the mind in garnering and propelling the many other
mental factors that come together in action.
From a modern Western perspective, perhaps the most conspicuous
feature of the model of mind advanced in the Abhidhamma is that it does
not turn to “reasons” for its explanations of moral or immoral action. By
reasons, I refer to those “representational mental states (desires, beliefs,
valuings) that the agent combines in a (sometimes rudimentary) process
of reasoning that leads to an intention.”137 This domain for explaining
actions is perhaps the dominant mode of describing intention in mod-
ern Western thought, whether in folk, philosophical, or psychological dis-
course. In this view, the concept of intentional action is seen to involve
two minimal reasons for an action to be considered intentional:  “that
an agent have a desire for an outcome and that the agent have a belief
that the intended action leads to that outcome.” On the “causal history of
these reasons,” however, modern accounts usually remain silent.138 The
Abhidhamma and, for the most part, the Pāli literature as a whole do not
treat intention in these terms. Intentional action is not boiled down to
discrete desires and beliefs that may be said to precede and generate it in
a process of practical reasoning, but rather is located in a complex web of
causal factors that come together in ever-changing moments in almost
infinitely diverse combinations. Given how entrenched the desire-belief
model is in contemporary thinking about intentions, this style of inter-
preting intentional action represents a significant departure from our
modern expectations of what intentional action is about.
We might also underscore that neither the Abhidhamma treatment
of mind nor Buddhaghosa’s work emphasizes rationality or deliberative
choice in their depiction of intentional action. Elements of cognition and
thinking are present, to be sure, in initial and sustained thought. However,
these are never described as rational processes of means-ends calculations
or other kinds of rational decision making.139 Nor is the act of intending
a matter of balancing and negotiating competing claims by the affective

137. Malle, “Folk Explanations of Intentional Action,” 267–68.

138. Ibid., 267.
139. Certain discourses in the Sutta literature stress reflection on action through processes
of reasoning about ends as important for moral agency; see, for example, M.i.415–16, where
the Buddha instructs his son Rahula to think about what actions lead to before committing
them. So while reflection and reasoning are important to some Pāli thinking on action, they
are not central to the tradition’s thinking about cetanā.
130 the forerunner of all th ings

and rational components of the mind. What is clear is that the presence
of cetanā in every conscious moment places intentional processes at the
heart of conscious experience; it directs one’s mind and action in a con-
stant intentional engagement with the world. The constancy of intention’s
work in conscious experience suggests that intention does not get fea-
tured primarily in a kind of problems and arguments approach, where it
gets wheeled out to make choices in moral dilemmas.140 In fact, there is no
term in the Abhidhamma texts that does the work of this modern concep-
tion of choice.
Perhaps because the Theravāda’s formal thinking on morality is more
interested in causes, that is, in moral psychology or phenomenology, we
do not get branches of systematic ethical thinking, such as we have in the
West, that are focused on the rationalities of ethical decision making.141
Although many modern scholars have been keen to determine which of
the three families of Western ethics—consequentialism, virtue ethics, or
deontology—best fit Buddhist ways of thinking, they are met with some
resistance to the project by the Buddhist sources themselves, at least in
the case of the Theravāda. This is because Theravādin thinkers trained
their energies on phenomena that for the most part fly below the radar of
these Western systems, that is, on the deep, complicated, and nitty-gritty
psychological factors and their interrelationships that lie beneath choice
and virtue.142
Other genres—most notably Vinaya, to which we turn next—make
more of decision, choice, or consent in their interpretations of karma and
cast different light on the notion of intention than the moral psychology
sketched here. This examination of the Abhidhamma account of karma
shows that intention is the fundamental mechanism by means of which

140. See Kapstein’s Introduction to his Reason’s Traces, on the limits of a problems and argu-
ments approach to understanding Buddhist philosophy. On the pervasiveness of “choice”
as the trademark of modernity, see Rosenthal, The Era of Choice. It could be argued that the
modern emphasis on choice heavily influences our styles of thinking about how to do philo-
sophical ethics.
141. See also Garfield, “What Is It Like to Be a Bodhisattva? Moral Phenomenology in
Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra,” where he argues against assimilating Buddhist ethics to con-
sequentialism or to virtue ethics and characterizes it as a moral phenomenology.
142. In this regard, as I have suggested elsewhere, I think these Buddhist thinkers might be
more usefully brought into conversation with Western moral psychological theories, such
as the British moral sense theorists and those influenced by them, or with the traditions of
Christian moral anthropology, such as Jonathan Edwards. See Heim, “Toward a ‘Wider and
Juster Initiative.’ ”
 The Work of Intention 131

the mind organizes mental factors and engages with the world through
action. We have seen just how many and how complex those factors are
and the dynamic and shifting ways they may come together in construct-
ing action and, through action, our experience of the world. This is an
essential truth about karma, in their view, and locates our intentional
activity at a very fundamental level indeed.
A final feature of the moral psychology we have explored here con-
cerns the role of abstentions in the moral and religious life. Buddhaghosa
sees abstentions as distinctive actions that do not follow the same logic of
accumulation that ordinary cetanā involves. Many of the most important
moral and religious actions advanced by this system—the five precepts,
the 10 good deeds, the Eightfold Path—are described, in large measure,
as abstentions and restraints. Much of the moral life consists chiefly of
ceasing habitual and problematic actions. With this in mind, we turn to
the Vinaya, a body of practical guidance on the technologies of restraint.
 3

Culpability and Disciplinary Culture

in the Vinaya

as he introduces the Vinaya, Buddhaghosa tells a story that mentions

the Aṅguttara linking of karma and intention and affirms the importance
of intention in action.1 He tells of an incident regarding the Indian emperor
Ashoka, who offered royal support and prestige to the Buddhist Saṅgha.
Under Ashoka’s reign, the Saṅgha, due to its wealth and status, swells with
the ranks of pretender monks and heretics who refuse to participate in the
Uposatha ceremonies that monks are obliged to perform. The Saṅgha does
not seem able to handle this “tumor, stain, and thorn” in the community
and appeals to King Ashoka for help. He sends a minister to force them to
settle the problem and revive the Uposatha. The minister interprets these
instructions to mean that he should kill the wayward monks and beheads
many. When King Ashoka hears that this is what the minister is doing, he
is filled with anguish and remorse, and he immediately worries that the
evil (pāpa) from this slaughter is his. Some of his advisors say that since the
minister acted at his command, the evil is Ashoka’s, while others say that
since his aim was good (kusalādhippaya)—that is, since he merely com-
manded that the Uposatha be restored—he bears no fault.
Wracked by doubt, he consults the great elder Moggaliputta Tissa about
his remorse. Elder Tissa insists on the importance of Ashoka’s thoughts, what
Ashoka thought the minister would do. Since he had not thought the minis-
ter would kill anyone, he bears no evil. And here Buddhaghosa quotes from
the Aṅguttara Nikāya: “Monks, I say that karma is intention; intending, one
acts in body, speech, and mind.” For additional support, the elder mentions a
jātaka story that describes a similar case where “it is the thought that counts.”2

1. The story is in Sp i.53–61.

2. This is Jātaka No. 319, Ja.iii.64ff. (Tittira Jātaka). In this story, a decoy pigeon is forced to
call out and attract other birds, whereupon they are killed. Since the pigeon is coerced, he
bears no evil for his action.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 133

We thus have in Buddhaghosa’s introductory presentation and contex-

tualization of the Vinaya a move similar to that in the Kālāma Sutta we
observed in our study of the Suttanta. Evil may follow from an action we
perform, but if it was not intended, we may be assured that we are not
touched by that evil. We find once again that part of the work that the close
identity of intention and karma does in the tradition is to determine matters
of culpability. In assessing culpability in moral transgression, intention is
central. That Buddhaghosa frames the Vinaya with this story and with this
assurance helps us to see that the element of intention will be crucial to
much of the Vinaya literature’s reflection on culpability and transgression.
But questions about culpability are not our only entry point into inten-
tion in this literature, and the Ashoka story presents several other themes
helpful for understanding intentions and agency. The story introduces
remorse and shows how it prompts inquiry into actions; we will need to
attend to remorse and the work that it does. The story also indicates the
importance of the Uposatha, the ritual recitation of the rules and confes-
sion of transgressions required of monastics every fortnight. The Uposatha
is just one of the disciplinary practices—here it is helpful to invoke Michel
Foucault’s language of the “technologies of the self”—that the Vinaya
advances for the constitution and formation of a certain type of moral per-
son. This moral person is shaped by the rituals, norms, and ideals of the
monastic community in a manner that makes possible self-examination
and restraint. Charting these processes will allow us to see how intentions
are often constituted and constructed prior to intentional action.

A Shift in Terminology
We recall that while Buddhaghosa suggests that the Suttanta and the
Abhidhamma concern questions of meaning, he claims that the Vinaya
is about actions, training, and matters of restraint. Vinaya is a teaching
brought about by transgression and is centered on the Buddha’s com-
mands about physical and verbal actions.3 Moreover, in several places,
Buddhaghosa asserts that Vinaya governs acts of body and speech but not
acts of mind.4 Up until now, the texts have been interested in all three types

3. Sp.i.17–23; As 19–24; Sv.i.17–22.

4. Sp.i.19, 103; As 19, 93. A possible exception to this is the pācittiya offense of holding fast to
a heretical doctrine (which might appear to be a mental event). But it comes to be classed as
a verbal offense since it requires verbally espousing the doctrine (Vin.iv.135; see Dhirasekera,
Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 108–9).
134 the forerunner of all th ings

of action—bodily, verbal, and mental. But he recognizes that the rules of

the community do not legislate mental actions; they govern only visible
acts of body and speech. We shift here to thinking about how action, as
experienced by others, may be represented, controlled, and mastered.
Although the Vinaya legislates only bodily and verbal actions, it is still
very concerned with the intentionality of these actions, and intention is a
primarily factor in discerning culpability. But we will notice an important
shift in the language used to talk about intention. Buddhaghosa states
that where the Abhidhamma parses the discrete psychological factors that
go into experience—perception, feeling, intention, and the like—in the
Vinaya it is enough to talk simply and more vaguely of thought or mind
(citta)5 without assuming one has to analyze the intricacies of the interior
conditions of action.

When the Buddha arrived at an explanation according to the

Vinaya, he did not ask [an offending monk] “what is your sensory
contact, what is your feeling, what is your perception, what is your
intention?” Rather, he primarily asked simply about his thought
(citta): “monk, what was your thought?” And when the reply is “I
had the thought to steal, Bhagavan,” the Buddha does not say “the
offence of stealing is of sensory contact, etc.,” but rather that “the
offence, monk, is in the thought to steal.” And not only is this so
of Vinaya teaching, but in other worldly teachings also he teaches
primarily simply about thoughts.6

While Abhidhamma takes mind and thought to its deepest level of analy-
sis, much of the time when we try to understand our intentional actions,
we do not need to engage in such technical and reductive moral phenom-
enology. This has important bearings for cetanā, which has been until now
our central category. Cetanā, like many of the other philosophical and psy-
chological terms that have been with us throughout our discussions of
Suttanta and Abhidhamma discourse, can be a very technical term. Like
English “intention,” cetanā is used differently in different contexts, from

5. As we have seen, mind and thought are identical:  yaṃ cittaṃ taṃ mano, yaṃ mano
taṃ cittaṃ (Vin.iii.74; Sp.ii.442). On the other hand, Devdas shows the subtle differences
between them (and the concept of viññāṇa as well) as the terms are used in the Suttas and
Abhidhamma (Devdas, Cetanā and the Dynamics of Volition, 104–10).
6. As 68.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 135

legal and philosophical discourse to everyday folk conversation about

actions. Despite occurring in many contexts, however, cetanā is not a term
ordinary people (as we find them in the story literature, for example) use
often, and even the rules of the monastic code, while highly attuned to
issues concerning intentions, do not usually invoke intention with this
level of precision. Instead, we will see the language of thought or mind
(citta) throughout Vinaya discussions, just as Elder Tissa queried King
Ashoka about his thoughts, rather than his cetanā.
This variance in terminology is very much in keeping with
Buddhaghosa’s sensitivity to how language is used and to the distinctive
qualities of the different genres of the Buddha’s teaching. As we have seen,
the Buddha made use of conventional or absolute language depending
on the circumstances, context, and capacities of those hearing the teach-
ing. Technical or absolute language, such as talking about the aggregates,
invoked to dismantle the self (appropriate to Abhidhamma discourse) is
not going to be helpful to those who need to hear about everyday moral
actions such as those that cause us shame and embarrassment, that
embody different kinds of love for others, or that involve knowing appro-
priate gifts to give. For these purposes, the Buddha teaches in a conven-
tional fashion.7 Since cetanā is a foremost factor in the aggregate saṅkhāra,
it bears the hallmarks of the absolute or ultimate language that befuddles
people in everyday conversation.
In most instances in the Vinaya where intention comes up, the word
used is thought (citta) or some variant of it rather than intention (cetanā).
To provide just a few representative examples of this usage, when discuss-
ing the element of intention in the offense of stealing, the question con-
cerns whether the offender had the “thought to steal” (theyyacitta).8 When
determining whether an action might have been committed accidentally
or unknowingly, the Buddha asks an offender, “Monk, what was your
thought?” or, more colloquially, “Monk, what were you thinking?”9 The
answer that often works to clear the monk or nun of wrongdoing is “Sir,
I didn’t know” what I was doing. In related terms, monks and nuns are
said to commit faults deliberately (sañcicca), purposefully (cittasaṅkappa),

7. Ps.i.137–39; Mp.i.95–96. See Hallisey, “In Defense of Rather Fragile and Local
Achievement,” 125–28, on conventional and absolute teachings.
8. For example, Vin.iii.48; Vin.iii.59.
9. kiṃ citto tvaṃ, bhikkhu? (Vin.iii.60).
136 the forerunner of all th ings

purposely (cittamana), and knowingly (jānanta, sañjānanta).10 The texts are

also interested in whether an action was done willingly (adhiṭṭhāya) and
what can be said about one’s aim or wish (adhippāya) in performing it.11
The language of “aim” can, though rarely, also cover motivation, as in the
case of a monk who released a pig from a hunter’s trap: since his aim or
motivation was compassion, he is not at fault.12 Finally, the language of
consent (sādiyati) is invoked, particularly in matters of sexual infractions.
For the most part, the Vinaya’s language of intention is concerned with
whether an action was done knowingly, willingly, with consent, and, more
rarely, what may be said of its aim.
I think that this movement to a more general description of awareness
of one’s action is akin to a shift we would see in our own English usages of
intention. Intention is going to be treated as an identifiable mental state in
certain philosophical treatments of it, but in criminal jurisprudence, it is
enough to point to an intentional element in an action without having to
identify its psychological complexities. The intentional element in law can
be an omission of an action, or amount to recklessness; in other contexts,
it is framed as consent. To be sure, as Buddhaghosa puts it, in the worldly
or workaday morality (lokiyadhamma) of the Vinaya, mind or thought is
still chief, but one does not have to get into a reductionist description of
its workings, as one does in Abhidhamma.13

Buddhaghosa’s Vinaya
Before we press on to issues of intention and culpability, we need to look
more closely at what the Vinaya does, in keeping with the idea that mean-
ing is always closely connected to the nature of discourse. As we have
just seen, Vinaya discourse is quite different than Abhidhamma or Sutta
material, with quite different purposes. Modern scholars have read the

10. Vin.iii.73, 79–80. In an example of the pārājika offense of killing, Vin.iii.74 glosses
cittasaṅkappa as being aware of killing, having the intention to kill, having the aim to
kill (maraṇasaññī maraṇacetano maraṇādhippāyo). We will consider in more depth how
Buddhaghosa understands all of the terms mentioned in this paragraph, but here he sees
that elements of awareness, intention, and aim are being brought together (saṃvidahana) in
the term cittasaṅkappa (Sp.ii.442).
11. Vin.iii.74, 79.
12. Anāpatti, bhikkhu, kāruññādhippāyassa (Vin.iii.62).
13. As 68.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 137

Pāli Vinaya in various different ways—as legal literature, as ethics, for

its institutional concerns, and how it depicts an ideal religious life and
contributes to Buddhist soteriology.14 All of these are quite appropriate,
and often these concerns overlap. But how did Buddhaghosa understand
Vinaya? What did he think the purpose of this piṭaka is?
In the introductory chapter (literally the “external context” [bāhiranidāna]
of the Samantapāsādikā), Buddhaghosa does several things to locate and
contextualize the Vinaya. In addition to providing several narrative con-
texts in which the text is to be located—providing an account of the three
councils and of Buddhism’s arrival and presence in Sri Lanka, a history
of kings and teachers, and the account of Ashoka’s angst with which we
began—he mentions the benefits of studying and learning the Vinaya.
This part of the introduction emphasizes, as Buddhaghosa often does,
the pragmatic context of the root text, that is, the ideal context in which
the text is to be received. The Vinaya, he suggests, should be an object of
study. Those who study it accrue several benefits: they come to be looked
on as mother and father by those with faith in the Buddha’s dispensation,
and people will come to rely on them for their ordinations, for their prac-
tice of duties, and for ensuring the goodness of their conduct (ācāra) and
alms gathering. Quoting a passage from the Parivāra, he says that those
who study the Vinaya, whom he calls “vinaya experts,” enjoy five bene-
fits: their body of moral precepts (sīlakkhandha) is well guarded and well
protected, they become a refuge for monks who are by nature scrupulous,
they live confidently in the midst of the Saṅgha, they firmly restrain their
adversaries with the Dhamma, and they practice in a way that prolongs
the Dhamma.15 This suggests that for Buddhaghosa studying the Vinaya
served to advance a moral education. This education results not simply in

14. Von Hinüber (“Buddhist Law According to the Theravāda Vinaya) and Huxley
(“Buddhism and Law” and “Buddhist Case Law on Theft”) are good treatments of the legal-
istic nature of Vinaya; Dhirasekera (Buddhist Monastic Discipline) is probably the best text
on the ethical dimensions and their role in the religious life the Vinaya promotes; Gregory
Schopen’s voluminous work focuses primarily on the social, economic, and institutional
aspects of the Vinaya literatures; and Thanissaro (The Buddhist Monastic Code), Wijayaratna
(Buddhist Monastic Life), and Holt (Discipline) are very helpful accounts of the religious life
and values articulated in Vinaya texts.
15. The next several paragraphs are drawing from Sp.i.104–5. The “Bāhiranidāna” is the only
part of the Pāli Samantapāsādikā that is translated into English (Jayawickrama, The Inception
of Discipline; see pp.  92–93 for this passage). We also have an English translation of a
Chinese version of the Samantapāsādikā, the Shan-Chien-P’i-P’o-Sha (Bapat and Hirakawa),
which is a very helpful guide to the text. All translations from the Samantapāsādikā are my
own and are drawn from the Pāli edition.
138 the forerunner of all th ings

expertise in judging ethical and legal cases but also, ideally, transforms a
person into a moral exemplar. This offers a useful clue for us in learning
how to read Vinaya: we will attend closely to how Buddhaghosa shapes his
own reading of the vinayapāli (that is, the canonical material) into a certain
type of moral instruction.
Using the language of good factors (kusaladhammas) already familiar
to us, Buddhaghosa says, “The vinaya expert becomes heir to the good fac-
tors described by the Buddha as having their roots in restraint.” In other
words, one who studies the Vinaya makes himself the beneficiary of the
good factors, as we know them from the Abhidhamma, that are caused by
restraint. And then we see a formula with which we are already familiar
from chapter 1, with an important emendation. Buddhaghosa says (again
quoting the Parivāra) that “vinaya (here the concept of discipline rather
than the piṭaka) leads to restraint, restraint leads to nonremorse, non-
remorse leads to joy, joy leads to delight, delight leads to calm, calm to
happiness,” and so on all the way to nibbāna.16 But in the Aṅguttara pas-
sage that we considered earlier, the foundation of these processes is sīla,
the precepts. Here the foundation is vinaya, which leads to restraint, and
from restraint nonremorse kicks in, making possible the other links of
the chain.
In our first reading of the Aṅguttara formulation, when we considered
it in the “No Need for an Intention Sutta,” we were interested in how
these processes are said to flow one from the other naturally without the
need for intention, and we were also interested in nonremorse as a state
of mind. Our interest here is the way that Buddhaghosa sees vinaya and
restraint, which replace sīla in this version, at the foundation of the sote-
riological process this passage elucidates. This move locates vinaya in the
larger system: it lies at the foundation of the soteriological path.
The connections and overlaps of vinaya and sīla are many, and
Buddhaghosa’s commentary on the Parivāra passage says that vinaya is
the foundation (upanissaya), the condition (paccaya), of sīla that has as its
end the purification of livelihood.17 At the heart of both is restraint from
wrongdoing, in other words, nonactions. Jotiya Dhirasekera has shown
the many ways that the Pāṭimokkha rules (the formal strictures for monks

16. Vin.v.164; the Aṅguttara passage we looked at in chapter 1 is A.v.2.

17. Sp.vii.1365. As we have seen in these last few paragraphs and will continue to see,
Buddhaghosa relies heavily on the Parivāra, a text that modern scholars often neglect.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 139

and nuns) are identified with or considered sīla par excellence, and he
argues that “Buddhaghosa is conscious of the paramount importance of
the Pāṭimokkha as a body of sīla.”18 In this conception, then, Buddhaghosa
is telling us what vinaya is—it is the ethical foundation of restraint that lies
at the foundation of the whole soteriological project that leads to highest
freedom. It does not instruct on meditation or reflect on the highest ech-
elons of religious awareness, but it is the entry point to a path that can go
to them. The Mahāvagga says this of the Pāṭimokkha, the rule code: “The
Pāṭimokkha is the entrance, the beginning of the good factors.”19
As he works through the Vinaya texts, Buddhaghosa is ever conscious
of the larger whole of which the Vinaya is a part, a whole that he both
sees and helps create through his systematization of the material. As he
begins to work through the beginning of the Suttavibhaṅga, Buddhaghosa
spends a huge amount of time on the context that the Vinaya itself opens
with, which is a conversation that the Buddha has with a brahman. There
is much that he sees going on here that would take us too far from our
present concerns to begin to explore, but one thing we can say is that he
uses the opening passages of his Samantapāsādikā to discuss many topics,
including Buddhist cosmology, the nature and knowledge of the Buddha,
dependent origination, the intricacies of the jhānas, and the extraordinary
pliability of the mind when disciplined. At one point in this discussion,
he tries to rein himself in, saying that “the sense of mental cultivation
should be understood by looking at the Visuddhimagga. While mentioning
it here, the Vinaya context is also quite serious and so I need to stick just to
illuminating the meaning of the root text of the Vinaya.”20 Indeed, he often
presumes and refers to the Visuddhimagga throughout his commentarial
work. Here, as elsewhere, he assumes the reader will have access to the
Visuddhimagga and the systematic whole—that is, morality (sīla), concen-
tration (samādhi), and wisdom (paññā)—it espouses and represents. The
Vinaya is to be understood in the context of its role in this larger path, that
is, as the foundation that is sīla from which one can develop the mind.
One way to talk about this whole is suggested by Dhirasekera’s dis-
cussion of sikkhā, the “culture, training, discipline, and also study” of the
monastic life. This training is said to be threefold: training in higher sīla

18. Dhirasekera, Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 3.

19. Vin.i.103; see also Sp.iv.787; it is also echoed at the beginning of the Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī.
20. Sp.i.146.
140 the forerunner of all th ings

(adhisīlasikkhā), training in higher conscious awareness (adhicittasikkhā),

and training in higher wisdom (adhipaññāsikkhā), with Vinaya as the first.21
These are successive stages of practice that culminate in the elimination
of the deep motivational roots of lust, hatred, and delusion.22 They also
describe the three piṭakas: Vinaya is training in higher morality, Suttanta
is training in higher conscious awareness, and Abhidhamma is training
in higher wisdom.23 Buddhaghosa also says that ordinary sīla can be estab-
lished by people without a Buddha present in the world, but higher sīla,
that is, the restraint of the Pāṭimokkha, can be known only when a Buddha
teaches it.
Dhirasekera also shows how sīla, sikkhā, and sikkhāpada (the Vinaya
precepts) are the foundations of this holy life. They are “perfectly coor-
dinated but at times almost identified with one another.”24 They are dif-
ferent aspects of restraint, which in turn allows the elimination of the
hindrances that block religious development. The basic logic is that it is
only through restraint of the senses and of bodily and verbal action that
the religious life can be lived and joy can be found.
We can also understand something of Buddhaghosa’s treatment of
Vinaya discourse by looking at the contexts in which the first rules were
given and the reasons the Buddha gave for the rules. The Suttavibhaṅga
mentions that at one time Sāriputta requested that the Buddha give the
community rules by which to live. But the Buddha refused, saying that
the rules are not to be given until conditions causing the depravities
appear in the community, and these unfold only over time. The Buddha
does not assign the community rules just for the sake of having rules,
but only when prompted by problems that come up.25 At least initially,
rules are pragmatic matters provoked by the actual circumstances that call
them forth.
Buddhaghosa adds several interesting points here. He says that the
Buddha did not prescribe rules while the community was still pure, that
is, free of bad actions, because he was concerned about what people would
say. How would it look to people for the Buddha to pester men from good

21. Vin.iii.24; A.i.235; Ps.ii.313.

22. Dhirasekera, Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 43; A.i.230.
23. Sp.i.22; 243.
24. Dhirasekera, Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 53.
25. Vin.iii.8–9.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 141

families who renounce great wealth for this life of austerity? Would not
laying down rules that appear unnecessary look like he underestimated
them, that he failed to discern the quality of these men? It would be like
a bad doctor who pops a patient’s boil, though it had only begun to swell,
and makes it bleed painfully, leaving the patient worse off.26 The imagery
is appropriate: only when the depravities ooze to the surface to make them-
selves known can they be treated with the medicine of rules. The skillful
physician knows how to treat skin diseases appropriately and only when
they present symptoms. The Buddha knows that depravities lie beneath
the surface, but monastic rules can treat them only when they erupt into
actions. Here again, we see that the rules treat actions that are present and
visible, not underlying dispositions or mental actions.
Eventually the presence of impurity does emerge, however, 20  years
into the Buddha’s teaching career, in the actions of the monk Sudinna.
We will look more closely in the pages ahead at his violation of what then
becomes the rule against monks engaging in sexual intercourse, as it
raises several fascinating issues about intention, but here we can say that it
is on this occasion that the Buddha realized that laying down the first rule
is now necessary, and he offers up 10 reasons for the Vinaya rules. These
reasons, and Buddhaghosa’s treatment of them, suggest the many pur-
poses that the rules serve. The 10 reasons for the rules and Buddhaghosa’s
interpretations of them are:

1. “For the excellence of the Saṅgha.” Buddhaghosa says this means that
the rules support the community’s joy and happiness for a long time.
The monastic life is meant to be joyful.
2. “For the comfort of the Saṅgha.” The rules make it possible for the
monks and nuns to live together in happiness.
3. “For subduing bad people.” The rules subdue people with bad moral
habits (dussīla), who are shameless, or who commit transgressions.
4. “For the comfort of well-behaved monks.” Buddhaghosa says that
well-behaved monks who care about good practice whether or not they
know all the boundaries of what should be done or not done and what
is blameworthy or not, should not be wearied or exhausted as they
strive to purify their practice. Additionally, there is the very practical
matter that the monastic rituals, the Uposatha, the Pavāranā, and so

26. Sp. i.191.
142 the forerunner of all th ings

on, cannot be held in the presence of impure monks, so for these rea-
sons the rules allow good monks to meet their monastic obligations
and thereby live comfortably.
5. “For restraint of depravities in this visible life.” Buddhaghosa elaborates
to say that the rules fend off various forms of suffering one might experi-
ence in this life as the result of immoral action, such as blows by the fist
or rod, cutting off of hands and feet, dishonor, defamation, and regret.
6. “For warding off depravities that lead to results in future lives.” The
rules keep one from committing bad actions that lead to the hells.
7. “For gladdening those lacking faith.” Buddhaghosa elaborates to say
that the rules attract the notice of learned people who will see the
monks living in austerity and who will also be impressed that they have
a book by which they live just like the heretic, three-Veda brahmans.
8. “For increasing faith.” This means that people of good families will see
the monks and they will increase their faith.27
9. “For supporting the Good Dhamma.” Buddhaghosa divides the Good
Dhamma into three parts:  study of the scriptures, practice, and the
attainment of the goal, all of which the rules help to preserve for a
long time.
10. “For the sake of aiding vinaya.” Buddhaghosa says vinaya (discipline)
is fourfold: the discipline of restraint, the discipline of abandoning, the
discipline of calming meditation, and the discipline of the established
rules.28

We can see multiple concerns at once in the reasons themselves and in

the ways that Buddhaghosa is interpreting them. Right on the surface, we
see both the Buddha and Buddhaghosa thinking institutionally in terms of
how to hold together an organization with very different kinds of people, to
provide for the harmonious workings of its community and their rituals,
and to make it go into the future. These reasons show how the rules keep
monks out of trouble with the public and with secular authorities who
wield the rod, attract people of good families, and put Buddhist monks
on par with or above the social status of brahmans. But beyond practical
and institutional concerns, they show ethical and religious commitments,

27. Pasanna and pasīdati are more complex than “faith,” of course, and also indicate bright-
ness, gladness, and calmness.
28. Vin.iii.21; Sp.i.223–24.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 143

creating the conditions for a good life lived with others in happiness and
joy, helping people restrain their depravities that will bear consequences
in this and their next lives, and supporting the Dhamma and its goals. In
fact, the texts do not separate the institutional from the ethical (these are
our distinctions); instead, what benefits the community practically is of a
piece with its ethical and religious ideals.
Buddhaghosa goes on to quote the Parivāra to develop the idea that
these reasons (atthavasa) can be considered conditions (paṭicca) that build
on one another, a logic of conditionality with which we are by now quite
familiar. That is, when the first condition is present, then the following
one also can occur, and when that one is present, it leads to the next. So
when there is the excellence of the Saṅgha, then people can live comfort-
ably; and when the community is living comfortably, bad monks can be
subdued, and so on.29 The various concerns that these conditions reflect
are mutually supportive: securing the institutional health of the commu-
nity makes possible the ethical and religious goals, and vice versa.
Because Buddhaghosa’s treatment of the purpose of the Vinaya
rules interprets the concept of vinaya (discipline), the 10th reason bears
additional consideration.30 Vinaya can be used in the sense of absence,
restraint, calming, and the established rules themselves. Since absence
and restraint, along with intention (cetanā), figure prominently in Sutta
and Abhidhamma thinking as forms of sīla, we are particularly sensitive
to their appearance here as forms of vinaya. Vinaya can be the absence of
wrong conduct and the restraint of the depravities and other problematic
urges. If we stay within this logic, we see that much of what is true of
sīla—that only some forms of it are, strictly speaking, matters of intention,
and much of it is the presence of absences and restraints—is also true of
vinaya. But how are these four kinds of disciplines related? Buddhaghosa
does not say, but a later subcommentator says that the discipline of the
established rules is for the sake of the discipline of calming meditation,
calming meditation is for the sake of restraint, and restraint is for aban-
doning.31 The rules allow a calm mind, which helps people restrain them-
selves so that they can enjoy the absence of bad factors.

29. Sp.224; Vin.v.143.

30. Since “Vinaya” can mean the piṭaka or the concept, I clarify the first as “Vinaya-piṭaka”
and leave the concept in lower case. Additionally, I later refer to vinayapāli when I want to
make a clear distinction between the canonical material and the aṭṭhakathā.
31. Vajirabuddhiṭīkā 72.
144 the forerunner of all th ings

Finally, in our brief exploration of how Buddhaghosa understood

Vinaya, we turn to a short passage that opens the Parivāra. (The Parivāra,
though canonical, is an Abhidhamma-like expository handbook on the
Vinaya that proceeds through a kind of commentary through classifica-
tion and listing that is familiar to us from the Abhidhamma. Because it
is working on a second-order level, it is quite helpful for us to see how
vinaya-piṭaka and vinaya discipline more generally are being theorized,
and this is why Buddhaghosa, who is also attempting this kind of theoriza-
tion, relies so heavily on it.) In its opening passage, it raises and answers
questions concerning the meanings of key terms we have already begun
to consider, including:

What is vinaya? What is adhivinaya? Vinaya is the established rules

(paññatti), and adhivinaya is analysis. What is pāṭimokkha? What is
adhipāṭimokkha? Pāṭimokkha is the established rules, and adhipā-
ṭimokkha is analysis. What is falling away? Falling away is non-
restraint. What is success? Success is restraint. What is practice?
Practice is [saying] “I won’t do such and such anymore,” as one
trains in the training precepts, having undertaken them for as long
as one lives until one’s last breath.32

Here we get distinction between the rules laid down and the analysis
or division of them (vibhatti, which Buddhaghosa takes as “analysis,”
vibhaṅga), a second-order expository treatment through classification.
In his comments, Buddhaghosa defines nonrestraint as transgression
and restraint as nontransgression; restraint is simply not breaking the
rules. Most interesting for our purposes is how the Parivāra treats prac-
tice with an insertion of the very thought a person would have who has
undertaken these rules: “I won’t do such and such anymore.” The text
makes explicit that practice is having certain intentions or thoughts: “I
won’t do this anymore.” The practice of vinaya creates certain identifi-
able thoughts in a person’s head, creating, as it were, a distinct inten-
tion. Our task then, throughout this chapter, is to look at the processes
whereby a person comes to have the restraint to say, “I won’t do this
anymore.”

32. Vin.v.2; Sp.vii.1303.

 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 145

Kinds of Rules
Buddhaghosa draws several distinctions that can guide us to how intention
figures in the different classes of rules in the Pāṭimokkha. Well known, of
course, is that there are 227 rules for monks and 311 for nuns33 and that there
are seven different classes of rules divided according to penalty:  pārājika,
violations entailing “defeat,” that is, disrobing; saṅghadisesa, violations that
involve formal acts of the Saṅgha; aniyata, rules with undetermined pen-
alties; nissaggiya pācittiya, rules that involve confessing and forfeiting a
wrongly acquired article; pācittiya, rules requiring confession; pātidesaniya,
rules entailing acknowledgment; and sekhiya, training in decorum. These
violations are also classified into grave offenses (thullaccaya) and mere
wrongdoings (dukkata); violations of pārājikas and saṅghadisesas are usually
grave unless they do not reach full completion or there is some mitigating
factor making them only wrongdoings, and violations of the remaining
classes of rules are almost all considered wrongdoings.
Buddhaghosa draws a distinction among these classes of rules, distin-
guishing between the first two, which are matters of sīla, and the latter
five, which are matters of ācāra.34 Both these terms can mean moral con-
duct and habit, but sīla means not violating at the very least the five pre-
cepts. Ᾱcāra, on the other hand, is a more general term for good conduct
that can also mean etiquette, good manners, and customary practice, and
it may be considered in some sense as the external representation of an
idealized inner morality.35 Since the first two classes of rules entail forbid-
ding sex, theft, killing, and lying, they are very much matters of sīla, four
of the five precepts. The remaining rules are either lesser infractions or
matters of decorum and etiquette. Thanissaro Bhikkhu says they concern
social relationships, and “social relationships are defined by seemingly
minor points.”36 Buddhaghosa also says that the first two are heavy and
wicked and the other five are light and not wicked.37

33. Technically, there are 220 rules for monks and 304 rules for nuns according to
Buddhaghosa in Sv.i.13, because the seven adhikaraṇasamatha (rules for settling cases) are
not disciplinary rules (sikkhāpadas) (Dhirasekera, Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 155–56).
34. Sp.vii.1303, 1414.
35. Collins shows how ācāra is concerned with demonstrating empirically the virtue lying
within, citing Visuddhimagga 19 on what a monk’s bodily decorum looks like (“The Body in
Theravāda Buddhist Monasticism,” 198–99).
36. Thanissaro, The Buddhist Monastic Code, 26.
37. Sp.vi.1279, vii.1319. Buddhaghosa is using classificatory terms in the Parivāra (Vin.v.115).
146 the forerunner of all th ings

Another important distinction suggested by the Parivāra and developed

by Buddhaghosa is the difference among classes of offenses that are pre-
scribed as blameworthy and those that are blameless. Buddhaghosa inter-
prets blameworthy offenses to be “blamable for the world” (lokavajja),
while blameless offenses are “blamable because of the rules” (paṇṇatti-
vajja).38 The first are actions that are universally condemned, such as kill-
ing and so on, that are blameworthy no matter who commits them, and
the second are actions proscribed only for monastics. Interestingly, the
Milindapañho picks up this distinction and says that the 10 bad actions
(akusalakammapatha) are blameworthy universally, but actions like eating
at the wrong time or playing in water are blameworthy only for monas-
tics.39 Buddhaghosa elsewhere goes further with the distinction to say
that actions that are universally blameworthy are matters of a bad thought
(akusalacitta) involving conscious awareness (sacittaka).40 That is, one can-
not commit them unintentionally or unknowingly, and given the context
in which this distinction first occurs, in which a monk has had sex with a
monkey, it is easy to see that the perpetrator is conscious and full of bad
thoughts at the time of the action (how could it be otherwise?). Certain
minor violations that are blameworthy only for monks and nuns, on the
other hand, can be done unwittingly or even unknowingly and still war-
rant a penalty, and the Milindapañho argues that even arhats, who cannot
know everything, may commit them.
We thus gain a distinction that is helpful to us and quite in keeping
with what we know about intentional actions so far. A person may com-
mit certain relatively minor monastic infractions unintentionally, but it is

38. Vin.v.115; Sp vii.1319.

39. Mil 266. See von Hinüber on the presence of this distinction in the Milindapañho and
how it differs from the interpretation in both the Parivāra and the Samantapāsādikā (“The
Arising of an Offense: āpattisamuṭṭhāna,” 66–68).
40. Sp. i.227–28; i.270. Here he is using a distinction between sacittaka and acittaka, which
occurs only in the Parivāra (Vin.v.125, 206–7; see Horner, The Book of the Discipline, vol. 1,
xv). Buddhaghosa glosses acittaka as “one commits [an action that is] blamable because of
the rules not deliberately (asañcicca), as in the case of [a violation of ] lying down together,”
which refers to a monk inadvertently sleeping in the same building as a woman (Sp.vi.1379).
Again, the idea is that one can commit relatively minor breaches of monastic rule unknow-
ingly but not a universally condemned moral practice. Thanissaro Bhikkhu has a different
interpretation of this, however: “The concepts would seem to have been developed originally
to deal with the exceptional cases in which a bhikkhu would be led by mature consideration
to break a rule—e.g., where another person’s life was at stake. Under such circumstances,
the world at large would not criticize his actions, although the rules would impose a penalty”
(The Buddhist Monastic Code, 25).
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 147

not possible to commit a universally condemned immoral action without

awareness of what one is doing (since karmic action itself is the construct-
ing of it intentionally). Otherwise, the action has simply not been commit-
ted, or there is some mitigating factor that downgrades it to a wrongdoing.
But a lesser violation can be committed unwittingly and still warrant a pen-
alty, such as when a monk intending to sleep alone falls asleep and is later
joined by a woman sleeping elsewhere in the same building. Buddhaghosa
says that milder offenses can result from even good or neutral thoughts,
but universally condemnable offenses are always matters of bad thoughts.41
Thus, intention broadly construed is not always relevant, particularly when
the issue concerns relatively minor matters of institutional reputation
or appearance, where it does not really matter whether one deliberately
committed an embarrassment for it to still count as an offense. Breaching
minor rules or etiquette is not always a matter of bad intent but is still
important in various ways to monastic practice and must be regulated.

Intention and Other Factors of Culpability: The First

Four Rules
As Thanissaro Bhikkhu analyzes the Suttavibhaṅga, there are five factors
of action that can come into play to determine whether a violation has
occurred, what kind of violation it is, and what sort of penalty it incurs: the
object of the action, the perception, the intention (literally, the “thought”),
the effort, and the result. The object of an action concerns the person the
action affects, such as in a sexual violation or murder, or, say, in the case
of theft, the object stolen. The perception refers to a general awareness of
the facts of the case: when one steals, one is actually aware that the object
belongs to someone else. The thought means that one knows what one is
doing as one steals; that is, one acts deliberately rather than accidentally.
The arising of thoughts alone, without a concomitant action, are never
offenses in the Vinaya sense (though they might incur karmic results,
as we saw in the case of the hunter in the last chapter).42 This can be a

41. Sp. i.270. Here he is attempting to map different types of offenses onto the classification
of good, bad, and neutral thoughts that we are familiar with from the last chapter. He also
mentions a distinction, mentioned only rarely in the vinayapāli, of the “origin” of offenses,
whether they emerge from body, speech, or mind. See von Hinüber about this classificatory
scheme (“The Arising of an Offense”).
42. Vin.iii.56.
148 the forerunner of all th ings

somewhat elastic category and sometimes can slip into the area of motiva-
tion. The effort refers to the commission or omission of the act and the
lengths the monk or nun goes to in order to carry out the action. Finally,
the result of the action must come to completion for the act to rise to the
level of a full violation: an attempted murder in which the victim does not
die will not entail a full pārājika (though it incurs a lesser penalty).43
Generally speaking, the graver rules require all or most of the five fac-
tors to be present, but the more minor rules may involve only several of
them. As we have just seen, intention or thought usually has to be pres-
ent for the action to count as an offense, but not always, such as in minor
rules like lying down on the wrong sort of bed. Because the working out
of these criteria is done on a case-by-case basis in the canonical text (the
vinayapāli), to know how each of these factors may be weighed and inter-
preted in each of the many rules, one would need to go through each
of them to see how the texts treat them in their particulars. Thanissaro
Bhikkhu has done this work with admirable clarity and thoroughness, and
there is no need to duplicate his work here (even if space permitted such
an exhaustive analysis).44
My approach will not attempt to parse each rule for its various factors
of culpability but rather to spend time with just four rules, considering
closely the ways that intention is treated in the different layers of each
rule. The Suttavibhaṅga embeds each rule in several expository layers.
First is the story in which the first violation of the rule occurs, which is a
narration of the circumstances in which the first offender does something
that makes the Buddha lay down the rule. Then the rule is laid down,
and the vinayapāli supplies a word gloss on it, clarifying the most impor-
tant terms in the rule. Then the text provides various amendments and
extenuating circumstances whereby a monk or nun would be exempt
from the penalty or that would alter the judgment of the case up or down.
Finally, for the major rules, there is the vinītavatthu, related case law that
describes similar cases and how they are to be judged. Although many
monks and nuns memorize just the rules themselves and recite them in
the Pāṭimokkha, vinaya experts study the Suttavibhaṅga and the commen-
taries on it as part of a complex ethical and legal education. The expository

43. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Monastic Code.

44. Ibid. Also very helpful is Harvey (“Vinaya Principles for Assigning Degrees of
Culpability”), which attempts to provide an account of the general principles of culpability
in the Vinaya.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 149

matter surrounding the rules is considered canonical and essential to

know and study.
At the next level of textual material we have, of course, the commen-
tarial exposition of Buddhaghosa in his Samantapāsādikā, and again,
Buddhaghosa’s work with the canonical material is of central interest.
Buddhaghosa’s treatment of the rules is, as we must expect by now, expan-
sive. He picks up and adds to details in the many layers of the vinayapāli
and offers more word commentary, additional stories that add to the set-
tings of the rule, and, often, supplemental narrative details that make
the cases even more complex and nuanced. Part of our interest here, as
throughout the book, is learning to see how Buddhaghosa approaches this
material and how he guides us to a distinctive kind of interpretation.
The importance of the vinayapāli’s narrative particulars and extensive
use of case law has been studied by legal scholar Andrew Huxley. Huxley
has pushed back against Max Weber’s scorn of casuistic legal reasoning
and has suggested that while Vinaya case law is less succinct than, say,
modern English law, it communicates a rational legal education. Case law
makes use of far fewer abstract nouns to convey its legal principles, prefer-
ring instead to describe complex legal content in narratives of particular
cases.45 Huxley argues that casuistry is no less rational than nominalized
conceptual analysis. He also suggests that the vinayapāli’s style of using
case law was chiefly for purposes of education. By exploring particular
cases in detail, a vinaya expert could convey to his students complicated
legal instruction, which Huxley begins to demonstrate by taking up sev-
eral cases regarding the treatment of theft.
Gregory Schopen has also considered the role of narrative particulars
in vinaya texts. Discussing the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, he argues that
“vinaya cases are neither fables nor historical accounts but rather the forms
that vinaya-masters chose narratively to frame the issues that concerned
them.”46 He argues that vinaya cases are embedded in a much larger body
of accumulated cases that collectively provide general principles whereby
the particularities of each case may be examined and debated. Where
Huxley is interested primarily in the legal knowledge vinaya cases explore,

45. Huxley, “Buddhist Case Law on Theft,” 313–19. Jonson and Toulmin, in The Abuse of
Casuistry, offer a persuasive philosophical defense of casuistry as a case-based, bottom-up
method of moral reasoning.
46. Schopen, “Ritual Rites and Bones of Contention,” 311.
150 the forerunner of all th ings

Schopen is interested mostly in sociopolitical concerns, how “power,

access, and economics” are negotiated in these texts.47
I, too, am interested in how these narratives frame the issues that the
vinaya experts were concerned with. But while I  find both the legalistic
knowledge and the glimpses of the social, political, and economic negotia-
tions they afford us fascinating, my interest is chiefly in the ethical con-
cerns evident in the treatment of particular cases. I want to show how the
complex circumstances and narrative particulars convey a sophisticated
ethical education, even while they exemplify the Buddha’s pragmatic and
particularist approach to the rules. Buddhaghosa has already told us that
the vinayapāli is to be an object of study and that many benefits flow from
the education it provides. My interest in this section as I take up each of
the four defeats (pārājikas) in some detail is twofold. First, I am interested
in what the vinayapāli and Buddhaghosa teach us about matters of inten-
tion, motivation, and reasons for action and how they identify the factors
of culpability in action. Second, I suggest (as I have throughout the book)
that explorations of these matters cannot be analyzed separately from the
styles of discourse in which they occur. The fact that these discourses are
highly contextual and particularized should not be taken as a matter of
inconvenience for us, in which we must sift out the particulars to get to
the bare facts or general principles of the rule, but rather as constituting
the very subject of our inquiries. Our maxim that “no detail is unimport-
ant,” here as elsewhere, requires an openness to the possibilities for read-
ing and interpreting that can lead us into many varied directions. Instead
of reading in a way to close off certain of these directions (and thus the
moral education they provide), I  try to follow some of them, at least as
Buddhaghosa points the way.
But of course, as we have seen elsewhere, the idea that no detail is
unimportant, means that we must be selective in other ways, else we will
begin to write a book that can never be finished. I have chosen to focus on
just four rules, a tiny fraction of the overall Vinaya corpus, and even within
them, I have not tried to treat exhaustively all of the vinītivatthu or even all
of the matters pertaining to intention that the many extenuating circum-
stances suggest. Instead, I focus on the origin story and particularly the
narrative settings that introduce each rule which the tradition regarded as
important to understanding the rules themselves. Buddhaghosa, here as

47. Ibid., 310.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 151

throughout the book, is treated as both a model for learning how to read
the canonical texts and as a fascinating thinker in his own right.
In this way, I offer a style of reading the Vinaya texts as a kind of moral
instruction. This entails trying to determine how factors of culpability
work and how intentions are treated in this legal-ethical discourse. But it
also suggests that more is going on in these cases than merely determin-
ing a judgment in a legal case. I see, additionally, that an ethical sensitivity
is being cultivated, one that is attentive to an array of human concerns
in the context of people finding themselves in difficult and challenging
predicaments.

The Case of Sudinna

The rules begin, we have already seen, when Sudinna has sex with his
former wife. The vinayapāli goes to some length to describe the circum-
stances of Sudinna’s fall, beginning with his story prior to his ordination
when by renouncing he has to defy his parents’ wishes for him to main-
tain the family and its wealth. He is an only child, and his leaving the
household will be catastrophic for them. After pleading with his parents
three times to let him become a monk, he goes on a hunger strike to force
them to consent to his decision. Realizing they will lose their son either
way, they relent and he goes forth. After some time has passed (eight
years, according to Buddhaghosa) and Sudinna has become particularly
well established in the more austere practices of a forest-dwelling monk,
he returns to their home to seek alms. When he returns, his parents and
former wife beseech him to return to lay life. Even after much persistence
on their part, he refuses to return to the household, but he does agree to
have sex with his former wife so that the family will at least have an heir.
As it stands, the story in the vinayapāli presents Sudinna quite sympa-
thetically. This is not a depraved monk who has fallen due to uncontrol-
lable lust, but a committed and sincere monk who relents to his parents’
pressure. The dictum that a child has to secure his parents’ consent before
ordaining stems from the acknowledgment that a child’s decision to leave
the family in this manner is often devastating. This acknowledgment
came when the Buddha’s own son Rāhula renounces the world (an epi-
sode to which Buddhaghosa eludes in his treatment of Sudinna).48 When

48. Sp.i.204.
152 the forerunner of all th ings

Rāhula renounces the world, his grandfather, the Buddha’s own father,
tells the Buddha of the pain that it causes parents when their sons leave
them in this way (which is itself a quite arresting rebuke to the Buddha).
Since “affection for sons pierces the skin, cuts the flesh, pierces the sin-
ews, pierces the bone, and stays there pressing into the marrow,” the loss
of sons through renunciation causes “not a little sorrow” to parents.49 The
context for Sudinna’s lapse is thus complex and multivocal: Sudinna is a
sincere renunciant who is burdened by parents who have very genuine
and sympathetic claims on him. It is not easy to condemn him.
If the story in the canonical account contextualizes the events in ways
that are sympathetic to Sudinna’s predicament, Buddhaghosa’s treatment
of the matter goes even further. Buddhaghosa refuses to allow us to see
Sudinna’s commitment to the monastic life as anything but resolute.
Yet, the anguish of the parents, who view the loss of their only son to the
monastic life as akin to death, is palpable. No detail in the Suttavibhaṅga
is too small to garner additional emotional weight by Buddhaghosa. Why
do the parents mention to Sudinna that he is their “only son”? It is empha-
sized, Buddhaghosa tells us, because they sought to stimulate his compas-
sion.50 We see their grief also in their initial refusal to allow him to ordain,
relenting only after he forces them to: you will lose me either to the monk-
hood or to death through a hunger strike. Their reaction at this point is to
relent, and they do so quite graciously, helping him to restore his strength
with good food and drink; they bathe and massage his body and honor
him as tears stream down their faces.51
We may look closely at a small later encounter between Sudinna and
his father to see some of the emotional weight that Buddhaghosa sees
in the original story. Sudinna has arrived for alms and is lingering out-
side the house where the maidservant, not recognizing him at first, has
given him last night’s leftovers. Upon recognizing him, she reports to the
parents that Sudinna has come home. His father approaches him and is
horrified to see him out by the wall eating leftover gruel; he is so shaken
that all he can do is exclaim that his son is eating leftovers outside when
he should be in his own house. He is so overwhelmed by his grief that he
cannot say more, so he takes Sudinna by the arm and leads him into the

49. Vin.i.82–83.
50. Vin.iii.13; Sp. i.204.
51. Sp. i.206.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 153

house. Why, Buddhaghosa asks, does Sudinna allow himself to be led by

the arm into the house? Sudinna “becomes compliant by his father’s affec-
tion,” and out of compassion he agrees to take a meal there the following
day since otherwise his father’s sorrow will be extreme.52 Buddhaghosa
takes small, tangible details in the text and finds them fraught with the
claims of a parent’s love. And we can begin to see what Sudinna is up
against even as he tries to pursue monastic austerity.
Picking up on a small phrase in the text that says that Sudinna saw
no danger in having sex with his wife because the rules had not yet been
laid down, Buddhaghosa insists that Sudinna had no idea that his having
sex was forbidden. Had he known that it was not to be done, he never
would have done the very thing that would “ruin his life.”53 Moreover, his
thought in agreeing to it was that otherwise his family would never let up
pestering him to rejoin lay life and he would never be able to practice the
Dhamma in ease. But if they were given a child from him he could meet
his obligations as a son, and they would leave him to practice in peace.54
Ironically, he commits the act in order to continue as a monk.
These fine aspirations notwithstanding, Sudinna is riddled with anxi-
ety and remorse after the deed is done, and he becomes “emaciated, discol-
ored, pale, veins popping out, depressed, sluggish, suffering, miserable,
remorseful, and oppressed,” as the canonical text puts it, thereby hint-
ing that at some level he was quite aware that what he did was wrong.55
The deities witness the whole affair and, realizing that impurity has now
entered the community of monks, give a big shout that there is no longer
any place in the world free from evil actions. Sudinna realizes that his
deed has gained him nothing because he is so remorseful that he cannot
practice the holy life of the threefold training, that is, morality, concentra-
tion, and wisdom. Buddhaghosa depicts Sudinna’s condition of remorse

52. Vin.iii.16; Sp.i.209.

53. Vin.iii.19; Sp.i.213.
54. Sp.i.212.
55. Vin.iii.19. Curiously, Buddhaghosa describes Sudinna’s very first encounter with the
Buddha’s teaching when he decides to become a monk as his realization that the holy life
entails the threefold brahmacariya (morality, concentration, and wisdom), which are incom-
patible with living in a household, and that lapsing even once imperils them (Sp i.203). This
makes it difficult to see how later he would not have seen danger in having sex with his
wife. Dhirasekera is quite skeptical of Buddhaghosa’s view that Sudinna did not know he
was doing wrong (Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 47), which is a point well taken, but I think
Buddhaghosa wants to play up Sudinna’s good intentions. He does not want to make it easy
for us to condemn him.
154 the forerunner of all th ings

quite vividly: sluggish, his mind is so withdrawn and lethargic that he can

do nothing; he is oppressed, burdened, like an ass.56 He discovers directly
and empirically that the religious life is incompatible with the remorse
that follows from sex.
In this last point, we see at work the idea that the rules of defeat indi-
cate standards that are constitutive of the monastic life. To violate them
means, simply, that one is no longer a monk; one has tried but has been
defeated in wearing the robes and the practice of the religious life that they
represent. The defeats are not punitive—there is no outside actor such
as the Buddha punishing a monk by excommunication; even before the
Buddha enters the scene to establish a rule, we see that to be defeated is to
act in a manner so opposed to what monasticism is that one is simply no
longer a monk thereafter. This is why there are no rituals or procedures
for excommunication; in doing the action, one is leaving the monkhood,
as Sudinna discovers for himself.57 We also see how remorse follows natu-
rally from a breach of vinaya/sīla, the reverse of the natural progression
of nonremorse following from sila/vinaya that we explored earlier. Here
we see a natural process of remorse following a violation of moral conduct
that then cuts off further religious progress.
His fellow monks admonish Sudinna that the Buddha taught the
destruction of the passions and the absence of desire, and they promptly
report on him to the Buddha. Their scolding is nothing compared to the
Buddha’s, however, who calls him a “foolish man” and says that surely
Sudinna should have known from the teachings against desire that sex is
completely inappropriate for a monk. He accuses him of indolence, dis-
content, lust, and for making himself hard to sustain and support. Sudinna
has fallen into low ways, “village Dhamma,” lewd and wicked things. The
Buddha rebukes him so harshly that Buddhaghosa feels moved to say that
the Buddha scolded him out of compassion, just as parents sometimes
need to scold their children harshly, even with terrible words (something
we know about from chapter 1).58 In the end, one is left with no ambigu-
ity about the wrongfulness of this action and its incompatibility with the
monastic life.

56. Vin.iii.19; Sp. i.215. Buddhaghosa frequently says that remorse from violating the pre-
cepts makes concentration impossible, as, for example, Sp. i.237.
57. Dhirasekera, Buddhist Monastic Discipline, 10.
58. Vin.iii.20; Sp. i.220.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 155

What can we say about intention from this account? Janet Gyatso has
noted that Sudinna’s motivations do not seem to be terribly problematic.
He is not interested in passion, and he has sex purely for instrumental
reasons to help his parents and to free himself of their entreaties. It is
his behavior that is problematic—the doing of the action—rather than the
motivation underlying it or reason behind it. She says, “It is still incum-
bent upon Sudinna, who in his earlier days had been particularly struck by
the impossibility of leading the holy life as a householder, to confront the
brute fact that he performed householder activity—no matter what the miti-
gating circumstances, and no matter what his particular intention or sub-
jective state.”59 In Gyatso’s reading, sex with women is the worst violation
because of its “practical upshot: marriage, children, the householder’s life;
in short, saṃsāra.”60 His action is simply incompatible with monasticism,
regardless of why he did it. Intentionality is narrowly construed in the
Sudinna case—he consented to it, and he knew what he was doing (even
if he did not know it was a violation, he most certainly knew he was hav-
ing sex). Issues of motivation or the reasons given for actions, here as
elsewhere in the rules, are largely irrelevant for determining culpability.61
The Buddha’s censure demonstrates that Sudinna is culpable and that
his action is contrary in every way to the monastic life, and thus his con-
demnation is strong. The Sudinna story precedes the account of the 10
reasons for the rules, and the Buddha shows how his act is counter to
the institutional, moral, and religious values of monasticism. In terms
of establishing a clear precedent for what constitutes a violation, the
Buddha’s harsh condemnation of Sudinna is apt. But why does the story
itself, and particularly Buddhaghosa’s development of it, take pains to
present Sudinna’s situation in such a sympathetic and multivocal light? If
the message of this rule is simply that sexual intercourse with women is

59. Gyatso, “Sex,” 281. Holt, in contrast, takes a dimmer view of Sudinna’s motivations,
arguing that his act means that he retained a passion (rāga) for riches so he sought an heir
for his family (Holt, Discipline, 90).
60. Gyatso, “Sex,” 280.
61. An interesting exception to this is the case of the monk who released a pig from a trap.
He is not culpable of theft because his aim was compassion (kāruññādhippāya) (Vin.iii.62).
The motive of compassion does not work, however, in the case of the monks who praise the
beauty of death (that is, encourage suicide) to a gravely ill monk out of compassion for him;
they are guilty of a pārājika for murder (Vin.iii.80). One of the key differences in the two
accounts is that in the latter case, the monks have remorse. Remorse is a clue that one has
acted wrongly.
156 the forerunner of all th ings

prohibited, then there are more expedient ways of saying so than telling
Sudinna’s sad tale with the rich detail and feeling that the vinayapāli sug-
gests and Buddhaghosa embellishes.
Both the vinayapāli and Buddhaghosa are not concerned merely with
fastening onto an ethical or legal judgment of a case, but with the cultiva-
tion of a broader moral education. We can see some of this moral educa-
tion in noticing how Buddhaghosa trains us to attend to the emotions
of the main players, such as the parents’ anguish and loss, Sudinna’s
yielding to them out of compassion, and his visceral grief and remorse
following his action. We see also complex treatments of motivation and
the reasons offered for Sudinna’s action and their ultimate irrelevance
from the standpoint of his culpability. We also observe a humaneness in
Buddhaghosa’s treatment of the complex ties between parents and chil-
dren and how they are explored in small, almost imperceptible moments,
such as in the nature of the encounter between Sudinna and his father
when words fail the father and a small gesture of taking his son by the
arm to bring him into his home is explored with great tenderness. The
training one is gaining by this exposition is a moral sensitivity and a
deep and nuanced moral anthropology. One suspects that a monk trained
in the particular details of such cases will greet human affairs with a
wiser eye.62
Even in the few details we have had the space to explore, we see
that Buddhaghosa is deeply interested in questions of motivation, not
because a transgressor’s motivations will determine the outcome of the
case, but because trying to discern people’s motivations requires a closer
look at them and the predicaments, conflicts, and confusions they face.
Buddhaghosa does not want vinaya experts to rush to hasty and unchari-
table judgments in human affairs. The moral stature he attributes to them
that we considered earlier in this chapter is earned by a careful and gener-
ous study of human beings. He picks up on the fact that the other monks
reported Sudinna’s act to the Buddha. Why did they do so? They reported
on him neither because they wanted to ingratiate themselves with the
Buddha nor because they wanted to get Sudinna expelled. Rather, they

62. Rebecca French describes a legal anthropology in pre-1959 Tibet that is similar in some
respects to what we see here, in which the legal system is infused with moral values, and
a proper legal education involves standards of moral self-regulation, discernment of emo-
tion and motivation, and close and careful considerations of character (The Golden Yoke, see
especially ch. 6).
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 157

simply realized that an impurity had occurred in the community, and they
were eager that the Buddha now lay down the rules.63
Lest a reader of the rule be quick to condemn Sudinna’s parents,
Buddhaghosa fills out their predicament with detail. Their worry is that
with their only child gone to the monastery, they will be heirless and upon
their death their property will go to the Licchavi rulers, presumably leav-
ing the extended family and their childless daughter-in-law in penury.64
These are not craven people trying to lure back Sudinna to a life of wan-
tonness, but ordinary laypeople whose loss of their son is heartfelt and
whose concern for the continuation of their household and property is
entirely legitimate for them. The larger implication of Buddhaghosa’s
treatment of people’s motivations here is to suggest that it is possible for
someone to break even the most important monastic rules without being
entirely condemnable. And the people involved in the narrative are com-
plex human beings, vulnerable and dependent in their relationships with
others—in other words, real human beings in very real and often not fully
resolvable predicaments.
Before leaving Sudinna’s case, we may use this first instance of sex-
ual lapse to explore briefly the distinctive dimensions of intentions in
cases of sexual transgression. It is in the context of sexual transgressions,
the intricacies of which were a topic of meticulous attention at both the
vinayapāli and commentarial levels, that we see the notion of consent
(sādiyati) emerge.65 While having good motives or reasons is not exculpa-
tory when a person knowingly engages in sexual acts, the lack of consent
is: the nun Uppalavannā, raped in her forest hut, is not culpable of a viola-
tion.66 Buddhaghosa defines consent to sexual activity as the presence of a
thought of sex (sevanacitta) and agreeing or giving in to it (adhivāseti) dur-
ing the act.67 These two dimensions of having the thought and putting it

63. Sp. i.218.
64. Sp. i.212.
65. There are numerous instances of the word consent in the case law of pārājika 1 concern-
ing a variety of sexual infractions of men and women, such as rape and monks being forced
by their enemies to have sex with women (Vin.iii.29–30). While consent is an important
idea particularly in sexual contexts, it is sometimes used in other areas, as when monastics
are said to consent to accepting money, for example.
66. Vin.iii.35.
67. Sp. i.261.
158 the forerunner of all th ings

into action are the “bridge moment,” as Gyatso puts it, that conjoins desire
and physical realization.68 Neither one taken separately—merely having
unrealized desires or the body acting entirely reflexively—constitutes a
violation, as the many cases she explores demonstrate.69 She also suggests
that much of the discussion of sexual transgressions in the Suttavibhaṅga
“is exactly about trying to determine what functions as such a bridge,”
exploring how to determine precisely where intention is put into action in
a domain of human behavior that often admits of great subtlety. Moreover,
what is at stake in the moment of decision, consent, or refusal is mem-
bership in the monastic community itself, that is, how one is defining or
constituting oneself.
Consent is particularly relevant in many of the rules for nuns. Often
it is a man initiating sexual contact, rather than the nun, and at issue
is whether she consented.70 As is well known, the nuns’ rules are much
stricter and harsher in this regard than the monks’ rules:  nuns, unlike
monks, may be defeated due to the presence of sexual contact (short of
intercourse) that is perceived to involve their consent (though not neces-
sarily their instigation). How is their consent established? Often it is deter-
mined to occur if pleasure is thought to be present, as we see in the first
of the nun’s additional defeats.71 The idea of consent, as in our own legal
discourse, is fraught with gender politics and demonstrates how opaque
(and suspicious) women’s sexual desire and intentions were to the male
authors who sought to regulate them through these texts.72

68. Gyatso, “Sex,” especially 285–88. In a certain sense, this is restating the identity of inten-
tion and karma; what is relevant morally is the intention reaching the doorway of action, in
the idiom of the last chapter.
69. Cases of nocturnal emissions of semen while dreaming are particularly challeng-
ing according to this criteria. They involve both intention (cetanā) and a physical act but
do not rise to the level of transgression because they occur in dreams, which are not, in
some very important sense, real. The commentary says that dreams are a matter to be dealt
with in Abhidhamma, not Vinaya, as they are, it seems, mental phenomena (Vin.iii.111–12;
Sp.iii.520).
70. For instance, among the four additional defeats for nuns, the first is a case of a nun
who consents to inappropriate sexual activity (literally, physical contact between the collar-
bone and the kneecaps) with a man (Vin.iv.211–15; Sp.iv.900–2). See Shih (Controversies over
Buddhist Nuns) on the extra rules for nuns and how female desire and consent are construed
in these texts.
71. Vin.iv.213–15; Sp.iv.901. See Shih, Controversies over Buddhist Nuns, 32–63.
72. This is an area for further exploration, but see Shih, Controversies over Buddhist Nuns;
Horner, Women under Primitive Buddhism; Collins, “The Body in Theravāda Buddhist
Monasticism,” 190, and “Remarks on the Third Precept,” 269; Gyatso, “One Plus One
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 159

Dhaniya Builds a Hut
The second case of defeat concerns a monk who, like Sudinna, is not an
obviously wicked character. The monk Dhaniya violates what becomes
the prohibition of theft by taking building materials that do not properly
belong to him. Huxley says: “If the word ‘thief’ conjures up images of a
pickpocket or shoplifter, think again: Dhaniya’s offence was to build his
meditation hut using some government material that hadn’t been cleared
through the appropriate bureaucratic channels.”73 He comes to take these
materials after a run of misfortune in acquiring a meditation hut. He first
made himself a grass hut, but it was dismantled three times by women
gathering grass. Then he made himself a mud hut, which, since he had
been a potter’s son and could work with clay, turned out to be quite lovely.
The Buddha chastised him for this, though, since using mud destroys tiny
creatures, and anyone who makes such a hut cannot be compassionate,
kind, or merciful. It is at this point that Dhaniya goes in search of wood
materials and asks the overseer in a lumberyard for extra wood, claiming
that the king desires to give such things to recluses.
Later this overseer is brought before the king on charges of theft, and
Dhaniya intervenes and assumes responsibility. The king, unwilling to
flog a monk even though he regards him as shameless and unscrupu-
lous, lets him off with a stern warning not to do it again. But people are
annoyed, vexed, and angry at the monks, whom they call “shameless,
immoral liars,” because of Dhaniya’s action; they are piqued because he
has been pardoned only because he is a monk, even while his actions were
not in accordance with what they deem to be monastic propriety.74 A group
of “well-behaved monks”—whose scruples and discomfiture with other
monks’ failings are assigned great weight throughout this literature—also
becomes angry at Dhaniya for damaging the reputation of the Saṅgha.
When the Buddha confirmed with Dhaniya that these events had
occurred, he rebuked him, citing some of the reasons we have already seen
for the rules—his action does nothing to increase the faith of the faithful

Makes Three” and “Sex.” Some discussion of a difficult case of a false accusation of rape
made by a nun against a monk (a kind of he-said-she-said case), though not dealing centrally
with the issue of intention, can be found in von Hinüber, “Buddhist Law According to the
Theravāda Vinaya II” and Hüsken, “The Application of the Vinaya Term nāsanā.”
73. Huxley, “Buddhist Case Law on Theft,” 314.
74. Vin.iii.44.
160 the forerunner of all th ings

or gladden nonbelievers. The Buddha lays down the rule: “Whatever monk

having taken by theft what is not given in such a way that kings seize this
thief for stealing, and flog, jail, or exile him, denouncing him ‘you are a
thief, fool, rascal, robber,’ then that monk, taking what has not been given,
is defeated, no longer in communion.”75
The case of Dhaniya illustrates how important the image of the monas-
tic ideal is and how the rules are designed to protect it. We might at first
think that the paradigmatic case against theft would involve a culprit who
is driven by greed, just as we might assume at first that Sudinna’s fail-
ing was a matter of lust. But in Dhaniya’s case, the considerations are
rather that he has gotten in trouble with the king, stirred up ire against
the Saṅgha, and made well-behaved monks uncomfortable. At worst, we
can say that there is a shamelessness in his pursuit of a meditation hut
that leads him first to damage creatures in making one of mud (which
then becomes a lesser offense) and then to acquire building materials
inappropriately.
Even so, he is hardly without scruples. The vinayapāli mentions and
Buddhaghosa expands that when his fellow monks tore down his mud hut
at the denunciation of mud huts by the Buddha, Dhaniya readily acqui-
esced once he learned that the dismantling was ordered by the Buddha.
And the moment he heard that the overseer was in danger because of his
own action of taking the wood, Dhaniya is filled with horror that someone
else should be harmed by his own wood-seeking gambit, and he immedi-
ately comes forward to accept responsibility.76
Both the vinayapāli and Buddhaghosa are constantly interested in how
people in the future will interpret the rules. One thing that the cases of
Dhaniya and Sudinna suggest is that these flawed but still decent charac-
ters deliver the rules with particular clarity and force, making it difficult
for future monks to say that they have good reasons or motives for hav-
ing sex or taking something not explicitly given. There are plenty of bad
monks about, most notably the notorious “band of six,” who violate rules
out of the crassest and lowest motives. Such monks could easily be made
the paradigmatic cases of wrongdoing. But the problem with bad people
doing bad things is that they are easily condemned, and good people do
not see their own motivations, rationales, and reasons in the bad actions

75. Vin.iii.45.
76. Sp. ii.294.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 161

of bad people. Sudinna and Dhaniya, because they have flawed but still
sympathetic rationales for their actions, provide a more complex moral
education.
As Huxley has shown, the case law that follows this first rule on theft
has a kind of expository function that works variously to inspire confi-
dence in the rulings, to establish precedent, to illustrate legal reasoning,
and to clarify the nature of ownership, all of which are trainings in a legal
education.77 Thanissaro Bhikkhu has argued that the working out of all
the nuances on theft is so complex because there are so many forms that
ownership and theft can take, including what is meant by taking some-
thing, to what extent the value of the object is relevant, and what is the
nature of ownership of things belonging to the Saṅgha collectively. These
matters, while interesting, are largely matters of legal instruction that
have been amply discussed by Thanissaro and Huxley, and we can leave
them here.

The Case of the Murderous and Suicidal Monks

This case, the third rule of defeat prohibiting killing human beings, was
initiated by a rather bizarre set of circumstances. The account begins in
the vinayapāli with the Buddha teaching the monks at Vesāli about medi-
tations on the disgusting, that is, how to counter lust and attachment by
contemplating the repulsiveness of the body. He then goes into retreat for
two weeks. The monks have been so convinced of the frailty of the body
that they become disgusted by their bodies and filled with loathing for
them, and they begin to kill one another to be rid of life and their attach-
ments to saṃsāra. Some also approach the false monk Migalanḍaka and
beseech him to end their lives. He does so with a large knife and then,
while he is washing the knife in the river, feels remorse. He realizes that
no benefit or goodness can come from such killing (again we see that
remorse frequently kicks in and offers an affective guide to identifying
wrongness of actions). But one of Māra’s wicked minions approaches him
and dissuades him from his remorse, arguing that he has in fact helped
the slain monks attain release from saṃsāra. Migalanḍaka then decides
that what he has done is highly meritorious, and he goes from monastery
to monastery slaughtering monks.

77. Huxley, “Buddhist Case Law on Theft,” 319.

162 the forerunner of all th ings

When the Buddha returns from retreat, he notices that the ranks of
the monks are depleted and asks nanda why. Upon hearing the full
explanation, the Buddha assembles the Saṅgha and teaches contempla-
tion of the breath. He then prohibits monks from taking life: “Whatever
monk should deliberately (sañcicca) destroy the life of a human being or,
seeking [death], bring a weapon [ for another to do so], is defeated, no longer
in communion.”78
Buddhaghosa does several things with this account that change and
deepen our understanding of what is going on here. He first emphasizes the
advantages that accrue from meditations on the disgusting, since they are an
entrance to samādhi and lead to the jhānas. He contextualizes these medita-
tions because, if they are wrongly understood, they may lead to calamitous
results. He then provides a backstory of the monks of Vesāli. In a previous
life, they were 500 hunters who killed deer. Though they had been reborn
in bad births for this violent karma, they had also done good things, and
they now enjoyed human births as monks. But their karmic retribution had
not been fully exhausted, and their murders in this account are attributed
ultimately to their bad karma from hunting deer. Buddhaghosa says that the
Buddha knew that this was the case, foresaw their impending deaths, and
was also aware that he would be powerless to prevent them. He taught medi-
tations on the disgusting to them not because he wanted to commend death,
but to free their minds from attachment prior to their deaths so that they
would have a good rebirth. And then he went on retreat so that when they
were killing one another, people would not accuse the Buddha of claiming
to be omniscient even while knowing and allowing his monks to kill and
be killed. If he is in deep meditation away from these events, he cannot be
blamed.79
These are extraordinary revelations. First, we learn that 500 monks are
involved, raising this incident to the level of a massacre. Second, we learn
that there is a karmic inevitability to the proceedings that the Buddha is
aware of but unable to prevent. As much as the monastic life is premised
on self-mastery and control, the inexorable grip of karma overrides the
Buddha’s own powers, not to speak of the agency of the well-meaning monks
themselves (some of whom, we learn, are streamwinners, once-returners,

78. Vin.iii.71. The account of this case is Vin.iii.68–71; Sp.ii.392–446.

79. Sp.ii.397.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 163

nonreturners and even arhats!)80 under the sway of their own karmic past.
And third, while the Buddha cannot stop this suicidal massacre from occur-
ring, he does orchestrate the particulars of the grisly affair in a manner that
will ensure that he appears unaware of the slaughter of 500 of his followers.
Buddhaghosa also has a substantial amount to say on the meditation
teachings the Buddha offers here, both the meditations on the disgust-
ing and on the breath. He describes how breathing contemplations work
to bring the mind to calmness. One of the things he mentions is that
development of breathing contemplation allows a monk to accomplish
several things:  such a monk does not violate the rules, he confesses if
he does violate them, and he is not oppressed with defilements.81 This
shows how breathing exercises support morality; it is not just that sīla
and vinaya make concentration possible, as we have already observed, but
that meditation makes sīla and vinaya—that is, the nonviolation of moral
rules—possible. He also emphasizes the nature of meditations on loving-
kindness to the Saṅgha, which seem particularly pertinent to this case. In
this section, he is pointing to the whole system, outlined at even greater
length in the Visuddhimagga, of the 40 meditation practices that calm
the mind (samatha) and make possible insight meditation (vipassana). In
other words, what might appear like a digression on meditation is rather
part of a larger teaching on the whole—the entire ethical and soteriologi-
cal path of which discipline is the foundation (even as discipline itself is
supported by meditation).
Buddhaghosa spends a bit of time parsing the word deliberately in the
statement of the defeat, and here we get a quite nuanced language of inten-
tionality. He follows a gloss by the word commentary in the vinayapāli
that defines deliberately (sañcicca) as “knowingly (jānanta), fully know-
ing (sañjānanta), purposely (cecca), going through with it (abhivitaritvā),
transgressing (vītikkama).” He adds several touches to this indicating that

80. Ibid. We must assume that the more advanced among the monks did not engage in kill-
ing or beseeching Migalanḍaka to kill; they were slaughtered in their huts when Migalanḍaka
went on his killing spree. But generally and, I think, importantly, the account itself does not
make much of a distinction between the victims and perpetrators of this massacre. Mills
(“The Case of the Murdered Monks”) describes, but does not resolve, some of the many
challenges and oddities of this case. One possible interpretation is that Migalanḍaka and
perhaps some of the other monks were suffering deleterious psychological effects of the
meditation, which may be a rare reaction to meditation practice, but one that is anecdotally
mentioned in the sources and in meditation contexts today.
81. Sp.ii.415. The section on meditation forms a large part of Buddhaghosa’s treatment of
this case: Spii. 404–35.
164 the forerunner of all th ings

intention and knowledge of one’s action admit of fine degrees or stages.

He sees the verbal form intend (ceteti) in sañcicca and an added prefix of
sa that adds an element of eagerness to the intention. Knowingly means
that one knows that life is present, and “fully knowing” is that one has the
thought “I will take life.” Purposely means “intending with the intention
(cetanā) to kill, planning.” “Going through with it” means one commits it
or orders it to be done, crushing any hesitation.82 He also parses the lan-
guage of “thought and intention” (cittasaṅkappa) in the vinayapāli as bring-
ing together perception (saññā), intention (cetanā), and aim (adhippāya).83
A full intention, then, would require that one be aware that life is pres-
ent and will be destroyed, one intends to destroy it, and one aims at the
person’s death.
Also of interest for us are the mitigating factors described as the
Suttavibhaṅga works through other cases of killing. Here a standard for-
mula is given (with small variations) in most of the rules:  “there is no
offense if it was done not deliberately, unknowingly, by one not aiming at
death, by one who is mad, and by the first offender.”84 Buddhaghosa clari-
fies: someone has been killed, but it is not done deliberately means that
one does not intend “I am killing someone by this attack.” “Not knowing”
means that one does not realize that “by this I will kill someone.” “Not
aiming at death” means that one does not want the person to die. And
those who are mad or are the first offenders never incur a penalty. We see
in this language (and similar language throughout the rules) that inten-
tions are of paramount importance in assigning culpability and that they
are a matter of several factors of knowledge and perception, desire or aim,
and soundness of mind. Both the vinayapāli and Buddhaghosa provide
examples of cases that demonstrate how these factors work in practice,
considering cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide, accidental killings,
cases of mistaken identity (as when a monk intends to kill a human but
kills an animal instead), and verbal acts urging others to kill or describing
how they might do so.85

82. Sp.ii.436–37; Vin.iii.72–73.

83. Sp.ii.442; Vin.iii.73.
84. Vin.iii.78; Sp.ii.463.
85. Thanissaro, The Buddhist Monastic Code, 66–78. Harvey, “Vinaya Principles for
Assigning Degrees of Culpability.”
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 165

The most intriguing dimension of the defeat against killing is situating

it within a story, particularly the strange backstory of these monks’ kar-
mic past. If we take the larger karmic context that Buddhaghosa provides
together with these fine distinctions about intention, we are confronted
by a fascinating juxtaposition of agency and patiency. The monks act as
a consequence of a karmic heritage of which nobody is aware except the
Buddha and that makes their actions inevitable. Yet they are culpable and
accountable for such inevitable, causally determined actions. And within
this larger context of karmic determinacy, we see a highly nuanced pars-
ing of agents acting deliberately, with knowledge of what they are doing,
and apparently (to themselves and others) acting freely. For Buddhaghosa,
these two accounts of the action are allowed to exist side-by-side, neither
undermining the force of the other.

The Case of the Boastful Monks

The fourth defeat concerns a group of monks who during a famine plot
among themselves strategies to increase their take of alms. They decide
on a plan to praise their religious achievements to the laity—some lay
claim to have attained the fourth jhāna, others to have become streamwin-
ners, still others claim to be arhats—so that people will be inspired to give
ample alms to them, and they can spend the rains retreat in comfort. And
it works! At the end of the rains, they visit the Buddha, who asks them why
they look so robust when other monks are thin and weak from want. They
report to the Buddha their strategy with its lies and deception. The Buddha
rebukes them strongly and likens them to thieves: to take almsfood on the
pretext of being spiritually advanced is to acquire it by stealing. The fourth
defeat is laid down:

Whatever monk claiming for himself a transcendent state free of

covetousness that consists of knowing and seeing truly the noble
wisdom, saying “thus I know, thus I see,” so that later, he, whether
or not he is questioned carefully by others, is miserable and seek-
ing purification, says “friends, not knowing, I said I know, not see-
ing, I said I see—vainly, falsely, carelessly,” is defeated, no longer
in communion.86

86. Vin.iii.90.
166 the forerunner of all th ings

The rather convoluted articulation of this rule builds a sense of remorse

or misery into the rule itself. Whether or not he is found out, a monk in
violation of this rule will find himself in a state of misery and will wish
to come clean and confess to his fellows. The vinayapāli glosses the sense
of miserable or, more literally, fallen as “having evil wishes, he claims a
transcendent state that is not real or true because of those evil wishes.”87
Buddhaghosa works this in the direction of a rather complicated psy-
chological state by quoting from the Abhidhamma Vibhaṅga:  “a certain
monk though immoral wants people to know him as virtuous,” and he
becomes “defeated, overwhelmed, undone because of those evil wishes.”88
Buddhaghosa is also interested in the mental state of the monk who might
be closely questioned by others: if he is truly an arhat, he has nothing to
fear, but the hypocrite would be terrified—“frozen in fear with hair stand-
ing on end”—at the prospect of his claims being investigated.89
As in all of the four defeats, the presence of remorse or some element
of anguish is a key indicator of the wrongness of the action that occurs,
even before the perpetrator is rebuked by the Buddha and the rule laid
down. Consider Sudinna’s wasting away, Dhaniya’s horror at learning
that the overseer is in danger, and Migalanḍaka’s initial remorse at the
river. Their anguish demonstrates a moral empiricism—people know
when they have committed something gravely wrong quite independently
of rules, and they know this through their emotions. The remorse can
be overridden (and often is, as in the case of Migalanḍaka), and it can
be absent (particularly in the lesser infractions) among the shameless.90
Its presence in the defeats (which are, of course, violations of four of the
sīla precepts) indicates that a moral order has been violated and there is
a deeper awareness of this affectively. But while remorse can be said to
be useful here in indicating the presence of an immoral action, it does
not have any particularly redemptive or reformative value. Remorse (kuk-
kucca, vippaṭisāra) is a problematic condition of mind of worrying and fret-
ting that cuts off religious progress. In Abhidhamma terms, kukkucca is

87. Vin.iii.92.
88. Sp.ii.492; quoting from Vibh 351.
89. Sp.ii.492.
90. A shameless person (alajjī) is someone who commits offenses deliberately (sañcicca),
hides his or her offenses, and follows the wrong course (Vin.v.158). Minoru Hara has shown
the linkages in broader South Asian discourse between vinaya and shame (“A Note on
Vinaya”).
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 167

a “bad factor” (akusaladhamma) and one of the five hindrances (nīvaraṇa)

of the mind.91 In his Abhidhamma commentary, Buddhaghosa says that
“since one cannot undo a bad deed nor do a good deed that was neglected,
returning again to it in remorse is ugly” and, more viscerally, “it scratches
the mind like the point of an awl on a metal bowl.”92
The moral instruction developed in the four cases encourages us
to attend to the subjectivity of remorse as an acute experience of one’s
patiency, the ways one is subject to previous conditions of one’s own mak-
ing, something one cannot undo. In remorse, we also observe the theme
of time: remorse, and the anticipation of remorse, is the work time does in
bringing to the surface the subjective reality and experience of one’s past
actions and omissions. If intended wicked actions were not experienced
as painful at the time of committing them, time will ensure that their pain
will arrive. Remorse thus enforces the dictum that we experience subjec-
tively and internally the quality of our actions. We see in and through
time the unfolding of conditions, and so in remorse we see patiency writ
large. But while it can lead to self-disclosure and to awareness of that very
patiency, remorse is not an edifying moral factor (as Abhidhamma dis-
course depicts morally good factors) and does not constitute or lead to
reform or self-transformation (important to Vinaya); it is not a key com-
ponent of agency because it entails merely a crippling awareness of past
wrongdoing, marked most poignantly in these four cases with the affec-
tive and legal experience of defeat.
What makes this particular violation of the boasting monks rise to the
level of a defeat—other lies are considered lesser infractions—is that it,
like the other defeats, strikes at the heart of the ethical and institutional
foundations of the Saṅgha. For a monk to claim arhatship, thereby secure
the esteem of others, and then be observed backsliding is to bring the
entire monastic project into question. To earn alms by making extrava-
gant claims about one’s attainments is, in effect, to steal them. To falsely
claim higher wisdom because one wishes to fill the belly is to cheapen

91. I have been treating both vippaṭisāra and kukkucca interchangeably as “remorse,” as
in fact they are often treated in the texts. More technically, kukkucca has as its character-
istic regretting, its function is sorrow at what has been done, its manifestation is remorse
(vippaṭisāra), and its proximate cause is what has been done, according the Buddhaghosa’s
Abhidhamma commentary (As 258). For more on this mental experience, see Heim, “Shame
and Apprehension.”
92. As 384.
168 the forerunner of all th ings

the achievements of the Buddha, which, Buddhaghosa reminds us, were

acquired only after four incalculable eras and 100,000 eons of earnest
spiritual growth.93 This is an action, according to Buddhaghosa, that is
clearly “blamable for the world”; it is done with full awareness and with
an akusalacitta.94
There are several amendments to the rule. There is no offense if claims
are made “due to the conceit of overestimation, without aiming to boast,
or by one who is mad, deranged, in pain, or by the first offender.”95 One
not “aiming to boast” is someone pursuing vigorously the holy life in
front of others but not intending to boast or be hypocritical about it.96
And we have seen that first offenders, mad people, and now here, those
deranged or in pain, are not culpable. Those guilty merely of conceit are
not culpable. There are several varieties of conceit, but what makes this
particular conceit, “overestimation,” relevant here is that it involves a false
and prideful construal of one’s spiritual achievements. One thinks one is
more advanced than one is. This conceit, though problematic, is not the
same as making false claims of one’s spiritual advancement to acquire
alms. Rather, it involves a false perception of one’s accomplishments and
an attendant pride in them, but it is not the falsehood of a truly immoral
person.97
Both the vinayapāli and Buddhaghosa describe cases in which monks
may misrepresent themselves in ways that do not rise to the level of a full
offense. If one allows others to suspect one’s high achievement but does
not make explicit claims, one is not defeated. If a monk makes claims and
no one believes him or understands what he is saying, then the action has
not reached completion, and he is not culpable. The vinayapāli says that
the violation concerns “deliberate lies” (sampajānamusā), which means

93. Sp.ii.483.
94. Sp.ii.502.
95. Vin.iii.100.
96. Sp.ii.502.
97. In his commentary on the Vibhaṅga’s treatment of the conceit of overestimation (Vibh
355), Buddhaghosa says that it does not occur to noble disciples, people of bad conduct
(since they are not eager to attain noble qualities anyway), or virtuous monks who are just
lazy. Rather, it occurs to virtuous monks who are sincere in their meditation practice but
reckon they have accomplished more than they have (Vibh-a 488; Ñānamoli, The Dispeller
of Delusion, vol. 2, 245–46). For more on this and other kinds of conceit, see Heim, “The
Conceit of Self-Loathing.”
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 169

that one knows one is lying before one speaks, while lying, and afterward.
To elaborate on this, Buddhaghosa says that it is possible that one can plan
to lie, but when one opens the mouth, the truth pops out.98 In bringing
out a lie, we can be conflicted against ourselves, planning one thing while
doing another. The emphasis is on fully aware lies from start to finish.
This case thus allows a deeper examination of the moral psychology of
lies, which is most penetrating in the case of self-deception. As we learn
how to read the canonical and commentarial narrative settings for each of
the four defeats, we not only discern the rich complexities of case law but
also learn to seek deeper psychological meaning in the fundamental con-
cerns of human life: sorting out the irreconcilable demands of family life
and monasticism in the case of Sudinna, the psychology of acquisitiveness
in Dhaniya, the long and inexorable reach of karma and its violence into
the present intentions of the murderous monks, the intricacies of conceit
and deception in the boastful monks. Never far removed from these moral
and psychological concerns are institutional matters, as the Buddha is for-
ever pragmatic in establishing a community that can survive the moral
frailties of its members and go into the future. Reading the rules with
Buddhaghosa suggests that proper legal and moral education begins not
so much with rules but the contextual and narrative particulars in which
they emerge.

Disciplinary Culture: Techniques of Admonishment

and Confession
We may sum up what we have learned so far about intentions in Vinaya
texts in the following way. When arriving at ethical and legal judgments
of culpability in serious moral cases, it is the intention or thought in act-
ing that matters. To count as a serious transgression, an action must be
done knowingly, with consent, deliberately. A  person’s motivation for
committing an infraction is usually not relevant to the judgment of the
case. But motivations and the reasons why people do what they do are not
unimportant to the larger body of moral instruction offered by both the
Suttavibhaṅga and Buddhaghosa, an instruction that goes substantially
beyond learning the criteria that decide legal cases. Instead, it is impor-
tant to know the circumstances in which a violation is committed, and a

98. Sp. ii.499; Vin.iii.93.

170 the forerunner of all th ings

vinaya expert will track the motivations and emotions that prompt people
to do what they do. This training in moral psychology in Vinaya goes in
a different direction than the reductive and analytical phenomenology of
Abhidhamma. In the Vinaya cases, narrative and biography provide the
content and context for examining human character and disposition and
the nature of our entanglements with others.
There remains one further arena to look for agency and its conditions,
and it lies anterior to the operations of all of these processes of intention
and motivation. That is, the Vinaya is concerned not only with arriving
at judgments of discrete cases but also with a larger way of life or disci-
plinary culture that, ideally, comes to constitute in an essential way the
practitioners who adhere to it. That is, well before we decide, consent,
or agree to do things, and before we marshal our reasons and rationales
for doing them, we are constituted or disposed to be and to act in certain
ways by the institutions we are a part of, by the traditions and cultures that
circumscribe us, and by the people with whom we are in contact. We have
seen Buddhaghosa’s recognition of these diverse conditions before, in the
previous chapter when he considers in a broad way the habits, traditions,
and varied external promptings that can go into a good or bad thought.
He recognizes that we are shaped by many forces prior to our engaging in
particular intentional actions.
Vinaya discourse is a particularly useful body of material for tracking
these forces because it is quite explicit about how its disciplinary culture
works. The Vinaya literature identifies the forms of subjectivity that it
encourages and the techniques it uses to shape monastic identity. Recall,
for example, the Parivāra passage defining disciplinary practice in terms
of the actual thoughts one will come to have: “I won’t do this anymore.”
In this final section, I turn to technologies or techniques of self-formation
that we can discern in these texts, borrowing language and ideas from
Michel Foucault. This strategy can help us to see more clearly how the
Vinaya literature provides additional supports for monastic life beyond
simply its prohibitions. These supports or techniques make possible
certain kinds of subjectivity that in turn shape intentions. Community
processes—the expectations and watchful eyes of others, admonishment,
public confession, and the ritual practices that formalize these—disci-
pline subjectivity in ways prior to, and in certain ways, constitutive of
intentional action.
One of the firmest impressions one gets in reading the Vinaya is of the
distinctively communal nature of this way of life. Only the most advanced
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 171

monks may live independently of other monks.99 Silent retreats are pro-
hibited.100 Relationships and duties between teachers and students are
matters of utmost importance.101 The constant presence and watchful gaze
of “well-behaved monks” is ever before the monastic subject, who learns
to become alert to their considerations and sensibilities; their uprightness
stands in sharp contrast to the instructive folly and wickedness of, for
example, the notorious gang of six. Monks are enjoined to imitate admired
monks,102 to train under teachers, to become admired teachers themselves,
to admonish others, and to be admonished. Formal legal actions such as
determining verdicts, ordination, meting out penalties, and rehabilitating
offenders are corporate matters involving the assembly of monks.103 And
the rhetoric of communal purity is at work throughout.
One particularly striking example of this rhetoric is an incident in the
Cullavagga in which the Buddha is beseeched by nanda late into the
night on the occasion of the twice-monthly Uposatha ceremony to recite
with the monks the Pāṭimokkha. The Buddha remains silent through
three entreaties until finally he says, simply, “nanda, the assembly is
not pure.” Moggallāna, who can read minds, immediately casts about
to discover the guilty presence among them. He approaches the miscre-
ant and instructs him to leave. Ignored, Moggallāna is ultimately forced
to toss him out bodily. The Buddha observes that there are “strange
and marvelous things” about the great ocean that make it similar to the
Dhamma-Vinaya. The great ocean deepens gradually without sharp preci-
pices as one enters it; it is stable and does not overflow its borders; it does
not tolerate a corpse, casting it from its body at first opportunity; all rivers
flowing into it lose their individuality; though rivers and rain flow into
it, its fullness is not affected; it has one taste throughout; and it is brim-
ming with treasures and great beings. So, too, the Dhamma-Vinaya: the
practice is gradual, its rules are stable, and it does not tolerate a transgres-
sor, casting him out at first opportunity. Monks and nuns joining it lose
their individual social identities, and the Saṅgha has “one taste.” Though

99. Vin.i.80.
100. Vin.i.159.
101. The Mahāvagga goes to great length describing duties of teachers and students,
Vin.i.60–67, for example.
102. Vin.i.98: “The good follows through imitating.”
103. Horner, The Book of the Discipline, vol. 4, xix.
172 the forerunner of all th ings

many join and many within it attain final nibbāna, the Dhamma-Vinaya
becomes neither fuller nor emptier. And of course, many treasures and
great beings are found within. Thereupon the Buddha states that he will
no longer observe the Uposatha with the monks and that they are to do
so without him. This first instance of an impure community on the occa-
sion of the Uposatha makes it inappropriate for the Buddha to be pres-
ent. Hereafter, the monks must do what they can to regulate themselves
through the communal recitation.104
There is much here to observe in the imagery of this collective: its uni-
formity and stability, its effacement of individual identity, its tossing out
of transgressors. (We may also recall how the Abhidhamma was likened
to the ocean as an expression of its endlessness in the previous chapter.)
Moreover, that the Buddha is hereafter not present at the Uposatha rein-
forces the way the community regulates itself. While he lays down the
rules as they come up, he does not enforce them (leaving to Moggallāna
the unpleasant duty of ferreting out the miscreant and driving him off).
The status of a Buddha situates him far above a tribunal context of meting
out justice or enforcing the rules. Since the rules govern but, more impor-
tantly, constitute the community, the Buddha may remain in dignified
aloofness from the business of purifying the assembly, and he treats the
Dhamma-Vinaya like a natural phenomenon, constituted with the same
“strange and marvelous” qualities as the ocean. This is simultaneously a
highly cultivated and contrived community that yet operates through pro-
cesses likened to natural phenomena.
Turning to Foucault can offer a way to understand how a disciplinary
culture of restraint, tied to institutional forces with their rules, laws, and con-
straints, may be understood as enhancing, rather than inhibiting, agency.
Foucault defined “technologies of the self” as permitting “individuals by
their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations
on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to
transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity,
wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”105 In addition to the rules concerning
the violations of immoral actions that we have been considering, we can iden-
tify several other technologies made possible only through the communal

104. Vin.ii.235–41.
105. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 18. I have also learned much on the role of disci-
plinary practices and ethical formation from Asad, Genealogies of Religion, and Mahmood,
Politics of Piety.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 173

disciplinary and pedagogical practices of the Saṅgha that, the texts suggest,
allow people to transform themselves as subjects and as agents.
The Vinaya rituals of admonishment and confession are disciplinary
practices crucial for ethical formation. Formally built into the monastic rules
is the construction of a community of people that can function best through
the mutual correction of its members. The regulations stipulate that monks
and nuns make themselves “easy to speak to” and that they in turn be ready
to admonish their fellows.106 One easy to speak to is able to endure admon-
ishment (ovāda) and is malleable rather than obdurate.107 Admonishment
can lead to confession, another technology oriented, in a manner similar to
what Foucault describes for certain Christian practices of confession, toward
“the discovery and the formulation of the truth concerning oneself.”108
The Parivāra offers several reflections on how the technology of admon-
ishment may be brought to bear on individuals’ capacities for restraint.
The text reads:

For what purpose is there admonishment? For what reason is there

remembering?
For what purpose is there the Saṅgha? For what reason is there men-
tal action?
Reproving is for the sake of remembering; remembering is for the
sake of constraining.
The Saṅgha is for the sake of examining, but a mental act occurs
individually.109

There is much going on here. Admonishment is a matter of jogging the

memory: our readiness to forget our failings must be met by the presence

106. This is saṅghadisesa 12 (Vin.iii.178). Dhirasekera is helpful on the many passages in

Sutta and Vinaya literatures on the importance of being easily corrected (Buddhist Monastic
Discipline, 129–31). Particularly notable is how ovāda establishes and reinforces patriarchal
structures; seeking out admonishment from monks is incumbent on nuns according to the
third garudhamma.
107. Sp.iii.613.
108. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 163.
109. Vin.v.158. The word matikamma, translated here as “mental act,” is, as Horner
notes in her translation, not found elsewhere. As she notes, Buddhaghosa glosses it as
“mantaggahaṇa,” learning mantras, even as he goes on to describe it as a matter of individ-
ual discrimination and conviction by vinaya and sutta experts (Horner, Book of the Discipline,
vol. 6, 255, n. 2).
174 the forerunner of all th ings

of attentive others to call them to mind. Remembering—a far more affec-

tively neutral experience of past wrongdoing than remorse and its scratch-
ing—can then allow for redress and transformation. It is only when faults
are remembered that can they be constrained (niggaha), a word encapsu-
lating both rebuke and restraint and thereby suggesting how others can
invoke one’s own restraint.
I read this passage as an exploration of the play between the communi-
ty’s role in shaping a person and a person’s own mental space—you need
the community to admonish you in order to remember your faults, and
the Saṅgha to come together to deliberate on your faults, as Buddhaghosa
explains.110 The Parivāra goes on to explore how shame (or bashfulness,
lajjā) works, as one is keenly aware of the eyes of the community upon
him. Still, “a mental act occurs individually”—there remains space for an
individual mind to make its own determinations within these processes.
The passage is exploring how the processes of discipline and community
create the conditions for inner examination and restraint, even while those
processes will not fully pervade or determine that interiority.
Admonishing works both ways: those admonished are reshaped, and
those who do the admonishing are expected to engage in self-examination
before they take to the task of reproving others. In fact, the vinayapāli
is particularly concerned with the motives of those wishing to admon-
ish others. The Cullavagga requires that those willing to admonish oth-
ers must examine their own bodily, verbal, and mental conduct, asking
themselves, for example, if they are filled with lovingkindness and free
of ill will before seeking to reprove others. An admonisher should turn
inward and contemplate his state of learning: “have I heard much?” “Have
I studied enough Dhamma, which is lovely in the beginning, lovely in the
middle, and lovely at the end?” The admonisher should consider his state
of understanding and mastery of the rules before jumping to reproach
another. Admonishers should look for evidence of their own compassion,
good wishes, tenderness, forgiveness of offenses, and devotion to disci-
pline. They must consider the appropriate time for admonishing another,
have full command of the facts of the case, be gentle, reprove in a manner
that leads to the right goal, and be motivated by lovingkindness. Failing in
any of these areas, a reproving monk will himself be a victim of remorse.111

110. Sp.vii.1359.
111. Vin.ii.248–50. (Much of this is also in the Parivāra, Vin.v.158–62.). Buddhaghosa’s
exposition does not add substantially to the pāli.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 175

The Parivāra takes these considerations in a more formal and proce-

dural direction, asserting that an admonisher be overseen by an adjudica-
tor and that adjudicator, admonisher, and admonished are overseen by the
Saṅgha as a whole. All parties must be assessed, and all involved in a dis-
pute are to examine themselves and others. Commenting on a line in the
Parivāra that states that both self and other must be assessed as they deal
with a conflict, Buddahghosa says that one must ask oneself: “am I able
to judge this case and bring it to resolution?” Moreover, “the measure of
oneself must be known.” When assessing others, one considers whether
the case is being taken up by an assembly possessing shame, whether they
are people with whom one may effectively remonstrate.112 In this context,
the Parivāra mentions monastic rituals and formal procedures.

For what purpose is there Uposatha? For what reason is there

Pavāranā?
For what purpose is there probation? For what reason is there
starting over?
For what purpose is there penance? For what reason is there
rehabilitation?
Uposatha is for the sake of coming together; Pavāranā is for the sake
of purifying.
Probation is for the sake of penance; starting over is for the sake of
constraining.
Penance is for the sake of rehabilitation; rehabilitation is for the sake
of purifying.113

Here we have a concise description of what the monastic rituals of

Uposatha and Pavāranā do. All of these penalties require a monk to make
known to his fellows his penitent status.114 The coming together of the
community in Uposatha makes possible the scrutiny of conduct necessary
for regulating it, and the sense of purifying the community as a whole
is emphasized for the Pavāranā (the annual purification ceremony at the
end of the monsoon retreat). Penance is a six-day period of forfeiting one’s

112. Sp.vii.1364 on Vin.v.164 (Horner, Book of the Discipline, vol. 6, 265).

113. Vin.v.161.
114. Thanissaro, The Buddhist Monastic Code, 154–56; Dhirasekera, Buddhist Monastic
Discipline, ch. 10.
176 the forerunner of all th ings

seniority and abiding by additional strictures that one incurs from com-
mitting saṅghadisesas. Probation is an additional penalty and status one
incurs for committing and then hiding a saṅghadisesa. Rehabilitation is
the act of readmittance to the community that penance makes possible.
Perhaps most interesting is the language of “starting over” or “drawing
back to the beginning” (mūlāyapaṭikassana), as though the violation can
be erased, time can be tampered with, and one can begin afresh with
restraint through these rituals.
The tone throughout these considerations is pragmatic. Even consci-
entious monks and nuns will forget their faults, and they will need others
to reprove them. They cannot restrain their conduct without awareness of
it. But admonishers must be especially wise to their own motivations, and
there are very important considerations as to how to go about the business
of reproving—one would need to do it at an appropriate time, for example,
and only with the gentlest motives. The monastic rituals of the culmina-
tion of the monsoon retreat and of fortnightly meeting and confession are
experiences of communal reflection and cleansing. Penalties are useful
where needed for rehabilitating and purifying serious infractions and for
making possible the agency of a fresh start.
Admonishment as a technique suggests that attaining monastic ideals
requires the presence of watchful and helpful others. The texts dilate on
the importance of various kinds of teachers a monk must seek out to fully
engage in self-interpretation.115 While it is difficult to overstate the impor-
tance of the “voice of another,” in the processes of self-cultivation in the
Vinaya literature, the monastic texts, unlike their Christian counterparts,
do not exalt the importance of obedience. Rather, as we see in the Parivāra
passage, people have a propensity to forget their faults and need remind-
ers of them. Monks and nuns need the watchful eyes of others constantly
upon them and should themselves turn gentle but steady eyes on others.
And of course, the shameless need to be called out. But Christian obedi-
ence—the sacrifice or subordination of the will116  —as a religious value
in and of itself is not in evidence here. A more apt term is malleability: a

115. Dhirasekera offers a most thorough explication of the role of the two principal types
of teachers in the Vinaya, the ācariya and the upajjhāya, their duties and qualities, and the
reciprocal relationships they have with their students (Buddhist Monastic Discipline, ch. 12).
116. On Christian obedience as the “sacrifice of the will,” see Foucault, “Technologies of
the Self”; for a slightly different but still complementary view on how obedience works to
reorganize the soul, see Asad, Genealogies of Religion, especially 139–47.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 177

person should be malleable, pliable, easily guided and shaped by admired

others, and never obstinate and disconnected.
Also in contrast to certain Christian hermeneutics of the self described
by Foucault, wherein the self is anticipated to be clouded by dark and
depraved intentions lurking within, the subject of Vinaya discourse is not
particular opaque, his intentions are not masked, and his motivations
may be discerned by careful contemplation (rather than by public per-
formances of disclosure and exposé). We see throughout the texts monks
and nuns at the first pangs of remorse turning promptly to their fellows
or the Buddha and confessing all. With some exceptions, when asked
about their infractions, they readily confess and speak with clarity and
honesty about their intentions.117 Monks do not begin this life in a place
of bad conscience, as it were, searching for the sinner within and eagerly
seeking out technologies of humility. Although there is an essential ele-
ment of social exposure in the penalties (but only before other monastics,
never the laity), and the texts are keenly aware of the power of communal
censure, monastic rituals of confession and penance are not particularly
designed to humiliate the penitent, nor is there anything quite like the
notion of bearing public witness against oneself. We do not find penitent
monks and nuns smeared in ashes and wearing hair shirts.
The rituals of confession occur prior to the recitation of the Pāṭimokkha
during the Uposatha ceremonies twice a month. All monks must gather
together apart from nuns and laypeople, and nuns must gather together
also in the presence of monks. The Uposatha ceremony requires that
monastics declare their misdeeds before the recitation of the rules (the
Pāṭimokkha) and that all (unless ill and properly excused) be present. The
purity of all (even absentees) must be declared, or if there are offenders,
their offenses revealed. Revealing or confessing offenses, according to the
Mahāvagga, allows one to be comforted in a manner that will allow prog-
ress in meditation. Silence means one is not guilty of an offense, or, if
guilty, one’s silence is to be regarded a fully conscious lie. It is through

117. Mentioning the “inordinate amount of trust” put into the accounts of offending monks
and the “extraordinary” willingness monks have to confess their faults to the Buddha, Holt
suggests a paradox: how can the very monks who are undisciplined enough to commit these
offenses so readily and truthfully confess all? (Discipline, 92–93). One possible “resolution”
to this paradox that Holt does not consider but may be supported by evidence in the cases
we have explored here is that the burden of remorse weighs heavily upon them, generating
an impulse to come clean. The Cullavagga says that monks concealing offenses experience
pain (Vin.ii.65).
178 the forerunner of all th ings

this ritual that the community affirms to itself its own purity on a regular
basis.118
Monks may also be permitted to confess in private to another monk
prior to or during the ceremonies, and there is a ritual formula for doing
so wherein the offender crouches down with palms together, acknowl-
edges the offense, confirms to his friend that he sees what he has done,
and then is told to restrain himself in the future.119 Such confessions,
described in the Cullavagga, are legal remedies sufficient to purify the
offender of certain classes of lesser offenses. Graver offenses require
accepting additional penalties in an assembly, as we have mentioned.
Both Dhirasekera and Thanissaro Bhikkhu have suggested that as some
of these ritual procedures became mere formalities, their ethical possibili-
ties were hollowed out, but we can see in the way the texts describe them
that they are intended to foster self-examination, disclosure, and reform.120
The Pavāranā is an annual rite at the end of the monsoon retreat before
receiving an annual gift of requisites from laypeople, with certain elements
of purification similar to those of the Uposatha but involving also a com-
munal rite of each monk formally inviting other monks to judge his con-
duct. Each monk assumes a bodily posture of crouching down with palms
together and invites his fellows to come forward with anything they have
seen, heard, or suspected with regard to his conduct and to mention it out
of compassion. Seeing it, he can then redress it.121 Again, the language
of seeing appears; people need to see their infractions to restrain them-
selves in the future and can be brought to see them when others expose
them. The bodily posture of crouching low is also considered important,
for immediately following this instruction from the Buddha, the group of
six shameless monks is observed remaining sitting on their seats and are
then commanded to crouch—all must participate in this ritual. The text
goes on to say that bringing charges against another monk in this context

118. Vin.i.103. Holt, Discipline, offers a helpful account of these rituals.

119. Vin.ii.103.
120. In particular, Thanissaro Bhikkhu says that when the formula of confession is recited
by rote by every monk before the Pāṭimokkha, it becomes “little more than a formality” (The
Buddhist Monastic Code, 543). Dhirasekera charts how the rites evolved to a “ritualistic purge
from guilt” at the start of the ceremonies and that confession to a single person was permit-
ted, so that, evidently even in the vinayapāli, “the Pāṭimokkha recital thereafter ceases to be a
powerful instrument in the proper maintenance of monastic discipline” (Buddhist Monastic
Discipline, 105).
121. Vin.i.159.
 Culpability and Disciplinary Culture 179

is not to be taken lightly, for if an accusation is unwarranted, the accuser

is guilty of a wrongdoing himself.
These measures formalize and structure the requirements of admon-
ishment. They depend on the honesty and integrity of the participants,
though, as the vinayapāli itself shows, they are not without loopholes that
shameless monks and nuns will try to exploit. Regardless, they demon-
strate the way this community, as imagined by these texts, regulates itself
legally and morally through requiring its members to watch others and
learn to be watched. These rituals, at once legal and ethical, have a gentle
and civil tone—monks are “invited” to come forward and should make
accusations only “out of compassion.” Although quite serious matters
are taken up, the texts do not suggest a spectacle of public shaming or
humiliation.
The theoretical importance of intersubjectivity that we have seen
in the Sutta and Abhidhamma contexts is developed here in practical
terms: monks and nuns are ideally constituted to be open to their fellows
in ways that comprise who they are and how they act. These processes are
both subtle (a general awareness of watchful eyes) and overt (being called
to account in an assembly). They operate on a person in a manner that
inclines and disposes, though does not determine, what one does.

Conclusions
The Mahāvagga says that even if the Abhidhamma and the Suttanta were
to be destroyed, the Buddhist dispensation could continue so long as the
Vinaya was present.122 Vinaya, through both its overt prohibitions and
its techniques of self-formation, is restraint, which in turn fends off the
remorse that obstructs joy and spiritual progress. According to the neat
divisions of labor Buddhaghosa attributes to the three piṭakas, Vinaya
makes possible the practice and realization of the teachings found in the
other two.
Let us now draw together the lessons to be learned from the Vinaya’s
approach to intentional agency. From both the ethical and legal standpoints,
intention and action are so closely bound up with one another (once again)
that to do an act means that one has intended it. What Foucault referred
to as “ethical substance,” the element of one’s behavior or conduct that

122. Vin.i.98–99.
180 the forerunner of all th ings

is the domain for ethical judgment, is here the very conscious awareness
one has while constructing and performing an action.123 It is this element
that is generally identified with culpability, not the motivation or reason
for acting. If a monk or nun has unwittingly done something immoral,
then in some sense the action has not been done, a principle consistent
with the close linking of karma and intention and with notions of karma
we have seen elsewhere.
The Vinaya’s anthropology is a pragmatic one. The community is ini-
tially pure, but, human nature being what it is, its members will eventu-
ally and inevitably fall and must be regulated by rules. The Vinaya’s focus
on physical and verbal actions (rather than mental actions and factors)
indicates an awareness of its own limitations; the law cannot effectively
reach into and govern people’s minds and thoughts. In addition to curb-
ing action, the rules come also to constitute the people in it, displaying
who they are to themselves and to others. Intentional agency is inflected
by others and by the institutions and practices by which one lives. Within
its vision of ideal action, we discern the formation of persons with certain
dispositions: one becomes alert to the gaze of others, easily chastened by
admonishment, sensitive to remorse. Moreover, study of these texts results
in a moral education whereby, if we may borrow a line from Buddhaghosa,
“the measure of oneself can be known.”

123. Foucault identified four main aspects of ethics: the “ethical substance,” the part of our
conduct most relevant for morality (e.g., feelings in our present society, desire in medi-
eval Christianity, intention for Kantian ethics); the “mode of subjection,” that is, the way
people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations; the “self-forming activity,”
how one works on one’s ethical substance, how one changes to become an ethical subject;
and the telos, the kind of being one aims to become in acting morally (Foucault, “On the
Genealogy of Ethics,” 352–59).
 4

Making Actions Intelligible

intention and mind in stories

the opening stanza of the Dhammapada famously asserts:

Mind is the forerunner of all things. Mind is chief, and they are
mind-made. If one speaks or acts with a wicked mind, suffering fol-
lows even as the cartwheel follows the hoof of an ox.1

The mind is the source and creator of all experiences, a theme with which
we are, by this point, quite familiar. The stanza suggests that actions are
inseparable from what is occurring in the mind, echoing in its own idiom
our formula that karma is intention. The stories in the Dhammapada
Commentary flowing from this first stanza explore and elaborate this idea.
Mind, Buddhaghosa has suggested, can be a conventional and everyday
term for intention widely construed, appropriate for Vinaya teachings and,
we may extrapolate, narrative teachings also. We are also familiar with
the idea that Buddhaghosa saw jātaka as a distinct method of teaching

1. Dhp 1. The translation of dhamma as “things” is imprecise, according to the Dhammapada

commentaries on this verse; it should be translated as cetasikas, mental factors. The inter-
pretation of this verse is complicated, and the commentaries on it disagree with one another
on what it means to say that mind precedes mental factors (Dhp-a 21–24; Mp.i.73; and the
commentary on Nett 129), as explored thoroughly by Palihawadana, “Dhammapada 1 and 2
and Their Commentaries.” My reading, in contrast, is operating at a conventional level in
interpreting this stanza as it speaks to the story in which it occurs. The narrative commen-
tary concerns a blind arhat who accidentally squashes bugs. The stanza is taken to comment
on how suffering inexorably follows wicked deeds produced by bad thoughts:  the arhat’s
blindness is the result of his greed as a physician in a previous birth who gave a woman eye
ointment that caused her blindness because she was reluctant to pay his fee (which involved
her slavery and that of her children). In taking “mind” conventionally here (rather than by
parsing it by an Abhidhammic method), I have the precedent of Buddhaghosa, who in the
Atthasālinī treats this stanza as a worldly teaching, like the Vinaya, in which analytical dis-
mantling of mental experience is not appropriate (As 68).
182 the forerunner of all th ings

(pariyāya), at least for some purposes, though of course it is not consid-

ered a piṭaka. Buddhaghosa had good reason to see the distinctive exegetical
potential of stories. The story collections that comprise the Dhammapada
and Jātaka commentaries that we explore in this final chapter provide an
exegetical movement from the general to the particular and from the abstract
to the concrete that serves to develop a specific kind of knowledge that the
texts prize highly.
These commentaries are, in effect, large story collections attached, some-
times apparently tenuously, to the aphoristic stanzas of two collections of
canonical verses; the Dhammapada also circulated as its own collection of
aphorisms, but the Jātaka stanzas are seldom (if ever) known without their
attending stories that expand and frame them. Scholars have sometimes
doubted that the Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā and Jātakatthavaṇṇanā are com-
mentaries at all. Eugene Watson Burlingame suggests that their exegetical
purpose has receded to such a degree that “what was once a commentary
has become nothing more or less than a huge collection of legends and
folk-tales.”2 While it is certainly the case that these stories take on a life of
their own quite apart from the root texts on which they are commenting, it is
worth considering the tradition’s defining them as commentary (aṭṭhakathā)
so that we might expand our notion of what commentary is and what it can
do. Commentary as narrative has its own techniques for developing mean-
ing, shaping our interpretative capacities, and providing moral education.
We have already seen how the Vinaya treats narrative context as essen-
tial to the interpretation of general rules. The rules are grounded in and
predicated upon the particular narrative settings in which the need for
them arose. The stories in which the rules are nested in both Vinaya canon
and commentary are not expendable garnishes to the rules but guides for
interpreting and practicing them. They tether Vinaya knowledge to the
everyday, quotidian circumstances in which particular monks and nuns
learn how to live the monastic life. The Dhammapada and Jātaka are part
of the Sutta piṭaka, and within this genre, they exemplify Buddhaghosa’s
expectations that Suttanta knowledge embodies “conventional teach-
ings,” in keeping with the popular understanding of the world. Unlike
the Vinaya, which is geared to monastics, the Suttanta is said to be taught
“according to circumstances” appropriate to beings of “diverse disposi-
tions, biases, practices, and inclinations.”3 It has a wider application and

2. Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 1, 26.

3. As 21.
 Making Actions Intelligible 183

audience and thus makes use of a more widely accessible range of idioms
and registers, which stories, and especially the great variety of stories that
these collections offer, can do particularly well.
Perhaps the most essential way narratives may be said to develop our
understanding of intentional action is that they render actions intelligi-
ble. They do this by first selecting out what is to count as an action from
a stream of movement or behavior. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued,
even selecting and naming an action as an action requires a narrative that
provides it a setting and history. Consider, for example, the various ways
the question “What is he doing?” might be answered in the example he
provides:  the replies “digging,” “gardening,” “taking exercise,” “prepar-
ing for winter,” or “pleasing his wife” may all be truthfully offered even
while they each identify the action differently. These various replies sig-
nify quite different, though possibly overlapping, intentions as they iden-
tify the primary action a person is engaged in. MacIntyre says that we
cannot “characterize behavior independently of intentions and we cannot
characterize intentions independently of the settings which make those
intentions intelligible to agents themselves and others.”4 Moreover, the
histories behind those settings may be framed differently, and as they are,
the identity of the intentional action is renegotiated.
These considerations suggest that narratives are the settings and histo-
ries that identify intentions and actions and begin to render them intelligi-
ble. But narratives differ according to who is telling them and toward what
end, suggesting that actions and intentions are products of eminently
social and dialogic processes. Intentions and actions exist in and through
narratives in the ways that narrators choose to select and organize expe-
rience. Narratives are also temporal in character, requiring that selected
actions be identified through a chosen arrangement of time. For example,
narratives are often after-the-fact reconstructions of an event that identify
the relevant action or intention only post hoc. Such a construction of an

4. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 206–7. The insights in this section are indebted to MacIntyre’s
ch. 15 and to other scholars who have written helpfully on narratives, including Nussbaum,
Love’s Knowledge; Schofer, The Making of a Sage, 12–15; and in relation to Buddhism, Hansen
and Hallisey, “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life”; Hansen, “Story and World”; and
Lang, Four Illusions. The importance of storytelling in giving an account of other people’s
actions is also helpfully treated in Daniel Hutto’s work. He argues, synthesizing work from
a range of fields, that folk psychological accounts of others’ intentions and actions are not
a matter of reading others’ minds or offering mentalistic explanations or predictions, but
are conditioned by narrative practices and tailored to the exigencies of everyday encounters
(Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives).
184 the forerunner of all th ings

action depends on events that run downstream of the action it attempts to

render intelligible.
If narratives are essential for behavior to be intelligible as intentional
action, much of what has been kept at the margins of the more abstract
and generalized discourses of the Abhidhamma and Suttanta analyses of
intentional actions is, in fact, indispensable. Insofar as these other genres
assume that for purposes of analysis actions may be lifted from the very
narratives that constitute them, they ignore how actions are identified
to begin with. From this perspective, narratives are not expendable but
rather essential to a full understanding of intentional action.
Buddhaghosa provides a helpful clue in the Atthasālinī about how
we might begin to interpret the relationship of the abstract inner work-
ings of the mind offered by the Abhidhamma with the particular narra-
tive accounts in the story collections. In a section in which he is working
out the nature and history of the Abhidhamma within the biography of
the Buddha, he asks, “Where did Abhidhamma originate? Where did it
mature? When, where, and by whom was it mastered?” It originated, he
continues, in the Bodhisatta’s confidence in the aspiration for enlighten-
ment (the vow of the Bodhisatta). It matured in the 550 jātakas, and it was
mastered, of course, by the Buddha on the full moon day of the month
of Visākhā under the Bo Tree.5 More details follow, to which we need not
attend, but we might linger on the idea that the “maturing” (literally, the
“ripening” [paripācita]) of the Abhidhamma occurred in the jātaka stories.
This is a biographical reference referring to the narrative of the Buddha’s
past lives when he, as a person named Sumedha, first made the aspiration
for awakening under the Buddha Dīpaṅkara and then, in his many sub-
sequent lifetimes, developed his character and insight as the Bodhisatta
(some of these lifetimes comprise the jātaka tales). Thus the idea that
the knowledge of the Abhidhamma (the ultimate truth of the Dhamma),
originates (is first glimpsed?) in the encounter with Dīpaṅkara but comes
to maturity in the jātakas is a biographical or historical truth about the
development of the knowledge of the Dhamma in the Buddha’s life. But
it might also work at another level as well. Abhidhamma insights—that
is, the most abstract distillation of the truths about mind and reality that
we have—are matured in the concrete and particular narratives of the
Bodhisatta’s life.

5. As 31.
 Making Actions Intelligible 185

This notion of the ripening or maturing of abstract truth in concrete

stories of life as it is lived suggests how Buddhaghosa read narratives. It
is not, as scholars sometimes assume, that stories provide simple moral
instruction for the unlettered or unsophisticated, but rather that they are
the location and condition in which general insights reach maturity. This
movement from the general and abstract to the particular and concrete
is not a move from the complex to the simple but rather an expansion
and growth of general teachings in and through the contingent realities
of actual circumstances. In this sense, the Jātaka and Dhammapada com-
mentaries are exegeses very much in Buddhaghosa’s expansive sense of
“commentary”:  commentaries grow the teachings and expand them in
almost infinite directions, and they do this by caring tremendously for
details. Recall that Buddhaghosa wrote the 850-page Visuddhimagga on
just two verses: the brilliance of the text lies in the concrete working out of
the details and implications. And the particular details to which narrative
exegesis attends are the pragmatic, messy, often prosaic, but stubborn-
ingly unavoidable details of living a life.
If we allow ourselves to see how narratives develop and mature the
Dhamma rather than simply exemplify or illustrate it, we can better
appreciate the ethical knowledge they offer. One way that stories might
be said to develop or mature more abstract formulations of the teach-
ings is in their capacity to produce affective experience. The stories model
valued emotional experiences in the characters and promote them in
readers and listeners. We find characters experiencing shame, joy, and
energy, prized experiences in moral consciousness as cetasikas in the
Abhidhamma lists. But the stories can create such morally good experi-
ences in ways that, say, the analysis provided in a Abhidhamma list might
not. In this genre, such experiences are inhabited rather than observed, by
characters and audience alike. The sting of remorse does its work in these
tales, and a certain feeling of sadness or sorrow teaches its own particular
lessons about saṃsāra. Charting the affective work these tales do begins
to show a further ethical dimension of the development and expansion
of the teachings.

Points of View and Shifting Frames of Reference

The Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā and Jātakatthavaṇṇanā as we have them con-
sist of several layers: the root stanzas, commentarial glosses of those stan-
zas, and the stories that frame them. These layers are likely the products
186 the forerunner of all th ings

of different hands at different points in time.6 We are not entirely clear

how the attaching of the stanzas with the stories came about. In many
stories, the stanzas appear at the end of the tale as a sort of moral of the
story, where they seem to comment on the tale (rather than the tale com-
menting on the stanza). The stanzas are short epigrammatic verses that
provide general moral exhortations and principles; they often mention
characters and events but are opaque without the attending commen-
tary (particularly in the Jātaka collection). The stories involve a character
(usually the Buddha) uttering the stanza and offering it in the context
of a conversation where it is deployed to provide a general maxim, an
ethical argument, or a pithy statement of key events in the plot. The
Dhammapada stanzas are usually self-contained enough to stand as gen-
eral maxims free of a larger narrative (and sometimes their insertion into
the narrative is far from seamless), but the Jātaka stanzas, though likely
to be older than the prose narratives that we now have, are themselves
kernels of the tales.
The stories report their author as the Buddha, who alternates between
first-person and third-person point of view in the frame stories and nested
stories in both texts. In the Jātaka stories, which are stories of the Buddha’s
own previous lives as the Bodhisatta, he is a central character in all the
tales; in the Dhammapada stories, he is not usually a main character in
the narratives beyond his role as teacher and interpreter of the events. In
this sense, these stories are Buddha’s words quite regardless of how we

6. The translator and redactor of both collections is considered by the traditional sources
to be Buddhaghosa; more so than his involvement with the other commentaries we have
been considering, modern scholarship has called this claim into question. The colophon
of the Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā names Buddhaghosa as the author, but the rest of the text
does not mention him. On the authorship of the Jātakatthavaṇṇanā (which he refers to as
the Jātakaṭṭhakathā), see Jayawickrama, The Story of Gotama Buddha, xiii–xiv; Cowell, The
Jātaka, vol. 1, x–xi; T. W. Rhys Davids, “Translator’s Introduction,” lxii–lxvii; Malalasekera,
The Pāli Literature of Ceylon, 117–22; and von Hinüber, A Handbook of Pāli Literature, 131–32.
On the authorship of the Dhammapadaṭṭhakathā, see Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol.
1, 45–60; Law, The Life and Work of Buddhaghosa, 80–83; von Hinüber, A Handbook of Pāli
Literature, 132–35; and Palihawadana, “Dhammapada 1 and 2 and Their Commentaries.” The
Dhammapada Commentary is thought to be later than Buddhaghosa’s commentaries and
the Jātaka collection it frequently mentions. But both collections are large and layered; while
some versions of the Dhammapada stories differ significantly in style from the same sto-
ries told in Buddhaghosa’s commentaries on the Nikāyas, others bear almost word-for-word
similarities to them. There are also some tales in the Dhammapada collection that suggest
that Dhammapāla had a hand in them. We find a great deal of material shared across both
collections and shared with other texts, such as the Vinaya, the Therīgāthā, the Udāna, and
the Nikāya commentaries. Burlingame provides synoptic tables of these versions (49–15).
 Making Actions Intelligible 187

understand the chronological layering of the texts we now have or the pre-
cise distinctions in this genre between “canon” and “commentary.”
The structure of the stories in both texts follows a standardized pat-
tern wherein the particulars of time and occasion are given (for example,
“the Teacher told this tale in Jetavana concerning a certain monk”) and
the “story of the present” or frame story is related. Its events lead the
characters to ask the Buddha to fill in further background of the present
case, prompting the Buddha to tell the “story of the past,” which reveals a
previous life of the present characters and their relationships. This back-
story casts light on the events and characters of the present. The story of
the past usually ends with the Buddha identifying who was who in both
stories (“In those days, monks, nanda was the king, Sāriputta was the
minister, and I myself the wise stag”). He also often identifies, particularly
in the Dhammapada tales, the fate of the main characters, the sequel to
the events in the present story (“At the conclusion of the stanza, the execu-
tioner attained stream-entry and upon departing this life went to Tusita
heaven”). This overall pattern is flexible: sometimes the story of the past
precedes the story of the present; sometimes additional stories are nested
in either tale; sometimes more than one story of the past is given.
What might we observe so far about what the structure of the stories
can teach us to interpret them? The importance of the use of time to frame
events cannot be overstated. Past and future render present events intel-
ligible; they give them meaning and interpretability. Moral teachings and
the stories in which they are embedded have backstories to which the
Buddha has direct access and which he shares with us for any number of
purposes. Often scholars have seen the purpose of the rebirth story motif
as principally rendering explicit the operations of karma, how tit follows
tat in the inexorable fruition of karmic action.7 But other possibilities are
at work in the use of past and future to interpret the present in ways that
have direct bearing on our investigations into intentional agency. We can
read them not only to glimpse the workings of karmic justice but also to
interpret human psychology. We can begin to see, for example, how inten-
tionality in the present has roots through habit or causes from the past.
The stories insist that nearly every event has a prequel, and that prequel
is the key to unlocking the meaning of the present. A longer perspective
on time also gives us access to the concrete workings of intersubjectivity

7. Burlingame (Buddhist Legends, vol. 1, 29–34) provides a helpful discussion of how this
motif works to teach the fruit of past deeds.
188 the forerunner of all th ings

in the lives these stories tell; people are involved in intricate relationships
with others in the past that continue in the present. These relationships
shape what people do and why they do it.
“Only the Buddha,” the Tittha Jātaka informs us, fully “knows the
intentions and inclinations” of others.8 His omniscience takes several
concrete forms. In some stories, he knows minds because he is an astute
observer of beings and infers what they are thinking, such as in the story
from the Tittha Jātaka, wherein the Bodhisatta infers the thoughts and
bruised feelings of a vain and pampered horse. In other stories, he reaches
directly into a character’s head and reports what they are thinking. Finally,
he knows what is going on in a character’s mind because his own thoughts
traverse time; knowing the past, he knows what drives one’s thoughts
now, and knowing the future, he knows where one’s thoughts tend. This
recourse to past and future is in and of itself a teaching about how to think
about intentions and minds:  they never exist in an isolated present. By
providing a much longer timescape in which to locate and interpret the
present, the Buddha provides access to the long view of cause and effect
and the shaping of disposition.9
The Buddha’s insistence that actions have prequels that, once revealed,
give them meaning and significance demonstrates that the true meaning
of the action is unavailable to those who see merely the present. Many
tales employ a group of bystander monks who discuss, debate, register
astonishment at, query, and generally scrutinize the doings of the main
protagonists in the tale. The Buddha comes upon these bystanders, learns
their conjectures, and then sets them right about what has just happened
by telling them the story of the past. This device teaches that actions are
penetrated by the past: their meaning, their significance, and their nature
cannot be discerned by observers acquainted solely with the present facts.
Intentionality is biography, and what a person does now is a product of the
things they have done in the distant past.
Shifting narrations of actions indicate the degree to which intentions
emerge through conversation and dialogue: the act of narrating itself con-
stitutes intentionality in an important way. Attributions of intentions are
negotiated dialogically and are thus socially constituted. Intentions are
posited and revealed in the conversations of bystanders and the Buddha

8. Ja.i.182. Cowell, The Jātaka, vol. 1, 64.

9. See Hansen, “Story and World,” 61, for a similar point about how the Gatilok works.
 Making Actions Intelligible 189

and, more rarely, in the first-person report of the characters themselves.

Anthropologist Lawrence Rosen has suggested that intention, while long
treated as the “preserve of philosophical abstraction, psychological theo-
rizing, and religious dictate,” is “above all, a social and cultural phenom-
enon.” Leaving the attribution of inner states “at the level of the universal
and analytically abstract does injustice to their varied roles in human rela-
tionships.” What might at first appear to be a “wholly ideational phenom-
enon” is in fact entwined with cultural and social life. He suggests a host
of questions that a turn to the social and cultural context can raise:

Who controls the way in which inner states will be attributed to oth-
ers? How do different sectors of a population—or the state itself—
characterize the intentions of those who fall within the ambit of
their power? Why, in some cases, has the language of intent devel-
oped as a predominant vehicle for characterizing persons and their
conduct, and what is the relationship of this emergent discourse to
the rise of new social groupings? Are the interests of a religious and
political elite, for example, served when they characterize others’
inner states in a way that justifies the elite as intercessors, manag-
ers, or rulers?10

If intention is a dialogical phenomenon negotiated in the ways we tell

stories about ourselves and others, then those negotiations invite scrutiny.
When we pay attention to the processes of ascribing intentions in our nar-
ratives, we begin to notice that certain people attribute certain intentions
and motivations to others and can begin to ask what leads them to do so
in the way that they do.
The Buddhist stories before us are particularly inviting for questions
about the ascription of intentions because they so often involve people,
usually bystander monks, debating and discussing people’s actions and
what lies behind them. These monks, even as they so often get things
wrong, model a lively curiosity about why people do what they do as they
construct folk theories of mind. We also have an extraordinary omniscient
narrator always on hand—the Buddha—to fill in the blanks about what
a given action means. His selecting of what is even to count as the rel-
evant events, as well as his reframing the interpretative scope of time and

10. Rosen, Other Intentions, 3.

190 the forerunner of all th ings

biography, constructs the intentions of the main protagonists in the tales.

The stories thus show what it is to read the intentions of others naively as
well as omnisciently.
The insights of cultural psychology can take us deeper into the ways
that intentions and social life make up each other. Richard Shweder
argues:

No sociocultural environment exists or has identity independently

of the way human beings seize meaning and resources from it,
while, on the other hand, every human being’s subjectivity and
mental life are altered through the process of seizing meanings and
resources from some sociocultural environment and using them.11

This dialectical model for interpreting intentions moves back and forth
between cultural forms and a posited inner space or psyche of a person,
suggesting finally that they mutually constitute one another. People attri-
bute intentions for diverse purposes from assigning moral or legal cul-
pability or responsibility, to selecting and idealizing certain pious modes
of being, to selecting other dispositions and motivations for censure and
reproach. These ascriptions, in turn, shape people’s intentions and how
they experience them. Shweder posits the idea of “intentional worlds”
that gets at how “subjects and objects, practitioners and practices, human
beings and sociocultural environments, interpenetrate each others’ iden-
tity and cannot be analyzed into independent and dependent variables.”
Nothing real “just is,” but “instead realities are the product of the way
things get re-presented, embedded, implemented, and reacted to in vari-
ous taxonomic or narrative contexts.”12 Focusing explicitly on discourses
about particular characters’ intentions allows us to examine how and why
actions and motives are described, framed, selected, and put forward in
the way that they are.
Cognitive scientists are also increasingly resisting a conception of
intentions as private mental states residing in the minds of individuals
by not only paying more attention to folk constructions of intentions
(how observers describe and locate intentions) but also seeing intentions
themselves as irreducibly a complex unity of self in action with others. As

11. Shweder, Thinking through Cultures, 74.

12. Ibid., 74, 76.
 Making Actions Intelligible 191

they shift to recognizing the “dynamic, interactive nature of intentional

action,” they see intentions as “emergent products of social interactions.”13
Not only are ascriptions of intentions matters of collaborative and negoti-
ated narrative effort but also intentional actions themselves are very often
collaborative. Consider where the intentions lie in a couple ballroom danc-
ing or in an interaction between a mother and her baby—they emerge in
an irreducible way in the interplay of self and other.14
The story collections offer an enormously heterogeneous body of causes,
reasons, and explanations for why people do what they do. Often the reason
people do what they do is simply because they are inveterately foolish, greedy,
miserly, lustful, angry, or abusive in past lives as well as present. Such stories
reveal little more than the intransigence of vice and the horrors of repeated
folly. Other stories involve dramatic transformation in which the past is pro-
logue to a stunning reversal in disposition and insight. Still other stories reveal
a long and interwoven history with others to show how our entanglements
with other people across time shape present intention. This chapter begins
to inventory—though neither systematically nor exhaustively—the sheer vari-
ety of the sources and shapers of human intentions as they are constructed
through narratives. Intentions as social processes can now be given full play.
In the next three sections, we consider several contrasting depictions
of intentions and how they work in time. In the first, we find a story (repre-
sentative of many stories in this literature) of a character whose intentions
are not easily held apart from her entanglements with others in present
and past lives; past lives shape and explain present intention. In sharp
contrast to this kind of account, we find in the section following the inten-
tions of arhats and other highly advanced practitioners treated as quite
insulated and remote from the messy circumstances in which they occur;
unlike those of ordinary people, arhats’ intentions are not conditioned by
past or present entanglements in saṃsāra. We then turn from how the
past shapes and interprets the present to how the future might do so. The
final two sections in the chapter carry forward these concerns about time
but shift to stories that explore the subjectivities such understandings—or
better, the lack of understanding—produce in narrative characters about
the nature and moral value of their intentions.

13. Gibbs, “Intentions as Emergent Products of Social Interactions,” 105–9.

14. Ibid., 113, 120. See Malle, Moses and Baldwin (Intentions and Intentionality) for an excel-
lent collection on recent cognitive science on intention.
192 the forerunner of all th ings

A Game of Cat and Mouse

In our first story, told in both collections, a young married woman named
Kānā returns home for a visit with her mother and is about to return to
her husband when her mother insists she not go back empty-handed and
instead take him a cake.15 She bakes a cake and is about to leave when a
monk happens by for alms, and she gives him the cake. But again her
mother requires her to bake a cake for her husband, and again a monk
drops by for alms. The same events happen yet again, and then a fourth
time. Finally, the husband, unwilling to wait for her, takes another wife.
Kānā is so distressed that she weeps and takes to reviling any and all
monks who come near, to such a degree that they learn to avoid going near
the street on which she lives. The Buddha, knowing what has happened,
pays Kānā and her mother a visit to investigate the matter. He suggests
that the monks only took what she had offered and were not to blame
and that she is blameworthy for abusing them, whereupon Kānā begs his
forgiveness. He teaches the Dhamma to her, and she attains the fruit of
stream-entry (that is, a highly advanced conversion wherein she will attain
nibbāna within seven lifetimes). The incident draws the notice of the king,
who adopts her as a daughter and marries her to a nobleman. Thereafter,
she gives alms generously to all monks and nuns.
Bystander monks take up her case and discuss it among themselves,
noting how she first hated monks but after her encounter with the Buddha
now enjoys a change of heart and is renowned for her almsgiving. The
Buddha finds them in this discussion and says, “Monks, this is not the
first time those monks offended Kānā; the same thing happened in a pre-
vious existence also.” And at their request, he gives a brief summary of
the Babbu Jātaka, which recounts her previous existence, and then con-
nects the whole matter to the Dhammapada stanza on which the story is
commenting: “even as a deep and calm lake is serene, so too wise people,
listening to the Dhamma, become serene.”16 The story thus ends on the
point of the Buddha’s ability to calm and transform minds.

15. Dhp-a.ii.148–52 (Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 190–92); Jātaka 137, Ja.i.477–80
(Cowell, The Jātaka, vol. 2, 294–96). There is yet a third intertextual reference to the story
mentioned by the Dhp-a, which directs us to the Vinaya, in the context of the rules of expia-
tion, where Kānā’s story of her loss of husband is related and the Buddha comes to be con-
cerned about monks overly taxing lay alms donors and seeks to limit their demands (Vin.
iv.78–79; Horner, Book of the Discipline, vol. 2, 321).
16. Dhp 82.
 Making Actions Intelligible 193

The Babbu Jātaka to which this story directs us offers a rather truncated
account of this story of the present and omits the part about Kānā abusing
monks; instead, she simply weeps from the loss of her marriage. The bulk
of the Jātaka account is given over to the story of the past, and the framing of
the story suggests that it is the four alms-seeking monks who are responsible
for the sorrow befalling this young woman. In the story of the past, Kānā is a
miserly woman born as a mouse who comes to guard a treasure of gold coins
left behind by a family who has since perished. As a mouse, Kānā befriends
the Bodhisatta, a worker in a nearby mine, and she brings him coins daily on
the proviso that he share meat with her purchased from the money. But then
she is caught by a cat and is able to buy her release only by providing him a
daily share of the meat. Another cat catches her, and she has to share her por-
tion of the meat with him as well; and so with another cat, and then a fourth.
Oppressed by their voraciousness, she turns to the Bodhisatta, who devises
a stratagem to stop them. He puts the mouse in a block of pure crystal and
instructs her to revile and abuse the cats to draw them close (here paralleling
the reviling of the monks in the Dhammapada version of the story of the pres-
ent), whereupon they attempt to spring on her and are broken and killed by
striking the crystal. Thereafter, mouse and Bodhisatta live happily as friends.
It is not an easy matter to locate, much less judge, the main protago-
nist’s agency or culpability in any of these accounts. In the Dhammapada
version, Kānā is urged by her mother to stay back and make cakes, and she
is responding to the request of alms by the monks to whom she gives them.
The only real act that seems to be her own is her reviling monks, which is
regarded as blameworthy, and for which she apologizes. The four monks,
for their part, are merely doing what monks do, that is, seek alms, and the
Buddha establishes (at least in the Dhammapada version) that they are not
blameworthy, even though, he admits, they have brought her great sorrow.
But in the story of the past, as the hungry cats, they are clearly the aggres-
sors and opportunists. She is here represented as a victim of their rapa-
ciousness, but of course, they are just cats doing what cats do. This shifting
of blame across the stories suggests that these five people are entangled in
complicated ways through these events and have collectively created a situ-
ation that is sorrowful. Though the story ends happily (and most tales do),
the sadness evident in these futile entanglements with others is salient.17

17. Martin Wickramasinghe (The Buddhist Jātaka Stories and the Russian Novel) suggests that
the Jātaka tales inspire in particular the feeling of sadness, as they comment on and make
vivid what life in saṃsāra entails.
194 the forerunner of all th ings

Particularly important for our purposes is noticing how the story of

the past is deployed to deepen our understanding of Kānā’s actions in
the present. In both accounts, when monks try to analyze the events and
understand Kānā, the Buddha offers the cat-and-mouse story to reframe
her action. It is not just that she lost her husband in this life because of
these four monks; she was tormented by them in a previous life as well.
The emotion that drove her action is not something located just in her
head, but is in a complicated way tangled up with these particular monks;
it exists between them. Her moral condition cannot be understood apart
from the complicated relationship with these monks in which she has
been a victim of their rapacious hunger for a long time. What we learn
is that people have histories with others that stretch over time, residual
traces that construct action and disposition in the present, and that the
real moral work here is properly framing the action to see this. We develop
sympathy and understanding for her not so much by getting inside her
head as by stepping back and getting a larger sense of time and personal
narrative.
There are many stories of cycles of revenge and hatred where the
story deliberately obscures the primacy of individual intentions. As help-
fully analyzed by Ranjini and Gananath Obeyesekere in its Sinhala ver-
sion, a well-known Dhammapada tale describes a barren cowife who,
out of jealousy, brings about repeated miscarriages in her fellow wife,
setting in motion a long chain of revenge between them in which they
take turns at killing each other’s babies across lives until we lose sight of
the original perpetrator and victim and can see only the endless cycles of
vengeance.18 The cycle ceases only when one of the women seeks refuge
from the Buddha, who then brings the whole thing to a stop. Stories like
this suggest that people are prey to their own deepest and ugliest motiva-
tions that, once fueled by others’ actions, run on with their own impetus.
Moreover, these motivations are inextricably wrapped up in our dealings
with particular others as we respond and react to them: we get tangled up
with certain people. These narratives sketch out the idea of intersubjec-
tivity introduced by Buddhaghosa in our first chapter, where, as we saw,
Buddhaghosa acknowledges how our intentions are shaped by others in
his exegesis on cetanā. He argues that other people’s intentions can affect
our fate. An example is jealousy and anger, which are contagious: as he

18. Dhp-a i.45–53. Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 170–75. Obeyesekere and
Obeyesekere, “The Tale of the Demoness Kālī.”
 Making Actions Intelligible 195

puts it, “the anger of one is the condition of anger in another, and they
both fall.”19
These stories depict a porousness of our moral condition and how
others’ emotions and actions shape our responses, intentions, and emo-
tions; they suggest that in our interactions with others, there is often little
autonomy in our emotional or intentional lives. This vision of the inter-
subjectivity of moral intention may capture quite accurately much of our
ordinary workaday moral lives in which, in fact, we rarely do seem to step
back from distinct options and make, cool and gimlet-eyed, clear moral
choices. Actions are reactions in a vast narrative scaffolding of intersub-
jective relations with others unfolding in the large stretches of time the
stories construct.

The Intentionality of Arhats and Other Highly

Realized Persons
We are presented with a very different kind of agency in the following sto-
ries, which feature arhats or other highly realized people. Unlike the case
of Kānā, the intentions of these characters are much less intersubjective,
and their actions are interpreted as held apart from previous conditioning
and the actions of others in important ways. Our first tale is the opening
story of the Dhammapada Commentary, which is the narrative exegesis of
the root text’s very first stanza that “mind is forerunner of all things.”20
This story traces the development of a monk who, through meditation
practice, attains arhatship and in his old age becomes blind. His blindness
is the result of exacting austerities that led him to neglect his eye disease.
(The story of the past attributes the cause of his blindness to an earlier life
in which as a physician he caused a woman to become blind because she
refused to become his slave to pay him for his medical services.) Despite
his blindness, he is a keen observer of people and knows what they are up
to. He discerns that a nephew sent to bring him to a monastery has been
up to no good, and he is able to tell when the king of the gods, Sakka, has
come to test his extraordinary qualities. But the part of the tale interesting
to us occurs right at the story’s end. One day the blind arhat, fond of stroll-
ing, roams around the monastic grounds after a rain shower and steps on

19. Mp.iii.147.
20. Dhp-a i.3–21; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 146–58.
196 the forerunner of all th ings

and destroys many insects (the grounds had not been swept by the monas-
tic attendant). Other monks see the carnage left behind on the footpath
and, offended, approach the Buddha to report on the arhat’s deeds. The
Buddha asks them if they saw him do it, which they deny, and then asserts
that just as they did not see him tread on the bugs, the blind arhat did not
see the bugs as he walked: “monks, those whose depravities are destroyed
(i.e., arhats) have no intention (cetanā) to kill.”21
The Buddha’s reasoning here is that the arhat is not culpable because
he is blind so he simply did not see the bugs he killed, but more impor-
tant, he is an arhat, and so, by definition, is incapable of such intentions.
The nature of this man’s intentions is determined not by the actual action
or its effects, but by his religious status. His blindness just reinforces
that he is incapable of seeing or constructing the world in such a manner
that he would be destructive. In this story, a quite different logic than the
story about Kānā is at work. Where Kānā’s action can be understood only
through the long arc of time and entanglement with others, this action
is to be understood principally by reference to the protagonist’s religious
status.
This suggests a rhetorical sealing off of the blind arhat’s subjectivity
as a way of establishing or reinforcing his high moral and religious sta-
tus. Arhats, as we have seen in the more systematic treatments of their
intentions, are never going to have wrong intentions no matter what
actions they commit; important work is being done here to separate this
monk’s intentions, which must be pure, from his bodily actions, which
appear problematic. Stan Royal Mumford, an anthropologist working
with Gurung shamans in Nepal, suggests that intention can function as
a metaphor. Mumford argues that “virtuous intent, as a metaphor that
seals off subjectivity, may be viewed as historically emergent”; it arises
in religious and moral systems like Buddhism that emphasize purity of
mind and is not found universally.22 Buddhist discourses that promote
an ideal inner intent erect boundaries around certain minds:  “within
a bounded self-image, the subject can deny its complicity in the world

21. Dhp-a. i.20. “Those whose depravities are destroyed” is an epithet for arhats.
22. Mumford, Himalayan Dialogue, 26. Mumford is describing ritual practices among
Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal that allow their participants to claim and signify, at least tem-
porarily, a status of pure and virtuous intentions. The ritual context allows them to extricate
their “inner life from its relational entanglements,” in keeping with the logic of renuncia-
tion espoused by Buddhism (but quite foreign to the shamanistic elements of the Gurung
context to which he contrasts these practices).
 Making Actions Intelligible 197

of intersubjectivity that would otherwise make the idea of pure motives

inconceivable.” According to Mumford, this “tight imagined boundary”
or extrication of pure intention from relational entanglements is a denial;
it is not that it is false, but that it is a metaphorical truth that operates to
deny another truth.23
When and why do some stories and not others seek to extract, con-
struct, and isolate an agent’s pure intentions, denying intersubjectivity
rather than invoking it? When arhats are protagonists, the purity of their
intentions is known in advance of any action they may commit, and their
high religious attainment is emblematic of their pure intentions. Unlike
the rest of us who are, like Kānā, still embroiled in entanglements with
others in saṃsāra in ways that shape what we think and do across time,
arhats are, rhetorically, removed and sealed off from acting and reacting
with intentions shaped by such processes; we might say their intentions
are constructed as a repudiation of the intersubjective and collaborative
world of acting and reacting that inflect others’ intentions. Arhats’ actions
are not framed within a larger relational psychology that might otherwise
be invoked to give them meaning.
Another example of an arhat’s pure and “sealed off” intention is appar-
ent in the sad story of Uppalavannā, a nun who was raped in her forest
hut.24 Monks discuss the incident and wonder if Uppalavannā was in some
sense culpable for this rape since, they conjecture, it might have been pos-
sible for her, even as an arhat, to consent (sādiyati) to the pleasures of
sex. Arhats are not Kolapa trees or anthills, they suggest, but living crea-
tures who have bodies with moist flesh, so why should they not consent to
and experience sexual pleasure? The Buddha shuts down this possibility
quickly: “just as a drop of water fallen on a lotus petal rolls off” without
staining it, so, too, “arhats do not consent to or pursue sexual pleasure.”
In addition to ruling out the possibility of her consent and intentional

23. Ibid., 25.
24. Dhp.-a.ii.48–52; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 48–52. Uppalavannā is one of the
Buddha’s closest female disciples, and this tragedy results in nuns being prohibited from
staying alone in their own retreats (the rapist himself is swallowed up by the earth and
plunged into Avīci Hell). The Vinaya and its commentary discuss this rape, as we have seen,
also arguing that because she did not consent, she is not culpable of a sexual transgression.
There are fascinating stories about Uppalavannā’s previous lives in the Therīgāthā commen-
tary (see Pruitt, The Commentary on the Verses of the Therīs, 232–51; and Murcott, The First
Buddhist Women, 80–85) but no backstory about what in her past might have precipitated
this rape: the rape is not configured karmically as the consequence of some previous mis-
deed on her part.
198 the forerunner of all th ings

involvement in the rape, this simile has the pleasing and compassionate
effect of referring directly and particularly to Uppalavannā, whose name
means “Lotus Complexion” and who has a long association with lotuses
in her past existences. The Buddha speaks quite pointedly to her: what has
happened to her has not really touched her.
Arhats also act from reasons that elude bystanders. The Milindapañho
considers the actions of a band of 500 arhats who scatter to the four winds
when a rogue elephant, goaded by Devadatta, charges the Buddha.25
nanda, who is not yet spiritually awakened, alone tries to protect the
Buddha by putting himself between the elephant and the Buddha. Surely,
King Milinda asks, we can say that the fleeing arhats had fear, despite the
fact that the scriptures say they are supposedly free of such emotions.
No, Nāgasena counters, they needed to flee for nanda’s good qualities
to be demonstrated and so that the Buddha can approach and tame the
elephant. Here what might seem obvious in how one could infer inten-
tions from actions is wrong—the merely apparent is dubious, and there
must be a different logic to arhats’ actions than meets the eye.
Given what we know about arhats’ intentions from the more systematic
genres—that is, that they are kiriyacetanās and thus are not conditioned or
conditioning—pure intention is constitutive and emblematic of arhatship.
They are thus sealed off from the entanglements with others and over
time that constitute intentional action in stories like that of Kānā. But this
rhetorical move is not just made for arhats. The Buddha also sometimes
wants to seal off an agent’s subjectivity for certain others as a way to signal
their religious potential or advanced status. A favorite motif in the story
collections concerns the travails of young beautiful women of high social
standing who boldly defy parental authority and social convention and run
off with men of low degree. These women are usually quite plucky and
are treated with surprising sympathy and complexity in the stories.26 In
one such account, a young woman from a wealthy and well-placed family
is hidden away by her parents on the top floor of their seven-story palace,
guarded by slaves.27 Despite this enforced isolation, she happens to see a

.
25. Mil 207–8. Horner, Milinda’s Questions, vol. 1, 300–2. Milinda is referring to the Cullahamsa
Jātaka, #533; Ja v.333–54.
26. See Wickramasinghe, The Buddhist Jātaka Stories and the Russian Novel, 5–9. The sto-
ries of Pāṭācara (Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 250ff.) and Kunḍalakesī (227ff.), also
involving young women fleeing seven-story mansions with inappropriate men, belong to
this motif.
27. Dhp-a. iii.24–30; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 276–80.
 Making Actions Intelligible 199

hunter walk by, falls in love with him, and manages to sneak out and run
off with him, leaving her parents bereft from their loss. They marry and
have seven sons who become hunters too, and they arrange their mar-
riages. One day the entire family comes to the Buddha’s notice. He per-
ceives their ripeness for spiritual attainment and intervenes to bring about
their conversion. His intervention involves staying the hunters’ traps until
they are poised to shoot him with their bows. But when the wife sees this,
she cries out, “Do not kill my father.” Her husband and sons stop in their
tracks, thinking she means her actual father (rather than her spiritual
father, whom she has instantly recognized) who has now found them, and
they then become friendly. With their hearts softened, they become open
to the Buddha’s teaching them the Dhamma, and soon attain stream-entry.
When the story ends, monks debate among themselves the woman’s
intentions. In their account, she was actually already a stream-enterer as
a young girl in her parents’ house! How then could she have married a
hunter, and beyond this, whenever he asked her to bring him his weapons,
she did so, becoming an accessory, as it were, to his violence? The Buddha
arrives at this point to clarify the matter: of course, stream-enterers cannot
be involved in taking life; when she helped her husband in this way, she
was actuated only by the thought “I will obey my husband,” and it never
occurred to her to think “He will take what I  give him and go out and
kill.” She did not have a bad intention (akusalacetanā), nor did she commit
evil. Since stream-enterers cannot be involved in taking life, her inten-
tions are quite narrowly construed. This tidy move is meant to serve the
larger moral of the stanza that this story in the Dhammapada Commentary
is meant to expand, which asserts that people who are morally upright
are not sullied by what occurs around them, just as a hand with no open
wound can safely carry poison. The stanza spells it out: highly spiritually
advanced people are those whose intentions are in large part extricated from
the compromises of life lived with others.
The story of the past explains that these people—the hunter, his wife,
and their seven sons and daughters-in-law—had in a past birth been a fam-
ily who gave their fortune and dedicated their lives to the construction and
maintenance of a relic shrine of the Buddha Kassapa. Because of this meri-
torious act, they went to the realm of the gods after death and then were
born in the story of the present, where the woman had, as a mere child,
attained stream-entry. As a stream-enterer, she seeks to bring the others to
the Dhamma, and so when she spots her former husband, she immediately
falls in love and elopes with him.
200 the forerunner of all th ings

 the past is invoked to explain the intentions of the

As in the story of Kānā,
present. The opacity of present actions—how could a rich young woman run
off with this hunter and seemingly support him in his violence?—is made
clear. Events that seem problematic can be seen, in the fullness of time, as
having causes from a distant life propelling them. But though the hunter’s
wife is involved in previous relationships with others that account for some
of the plot here, in the end her intentions are largely not forged through
these relationships. We instead have a quite different kind of framing than
the story of Kānā, which depicts moral agents and their intentions as insepa-
rably bound up with others. But in this tale, a person is created who, no
matter what form her involvement with others takes, remains uncompro-
mised by it. When the stories speak with this voice, they seek to deny inter-
relationality, the ways actions and the meanings of actions of certain people
are constructed through involvement with others. The Buddha sees her, as
a stream-enterer, as above reproach. One of the fascinating aspects of this
story is that the sealing off of intention here is not reserved solely for an obvi-
ous class of religious elites. One never knows, at first glance, who among us
acts from pure motive: stream-enterers number among their ranks young
women who elope with inappropriate men. And again, the conjectures of
bystanders concerning such people are likely to be wrong.
A final example of a story that constructs and sequesters its protagonist’s
pure intentions concerns a child prodigy. In this story, we get the tale of the
past first, which involves a poor man unable to afford alms for the beloved
elder monk Sāriputta and is thus reduced to hiding when Sāriputta comes
for alms.28 But when he finally does receive some milk-rice and a cloth, he
rushes to give them to Sāriputta, for whom he has much affection. Due to
this devotion, he is reborn in the womb of a wealthy supporter of Sāriputta.
This new rebirth is shaped profoundly by his devotional gift in the last
birth. From the start, his mother’s pregnancy is marked by great longings
to give milk-rice to Sāriputta and his monks constantly. When the child
is born, he is brought before Sāriputta. The baby recognizes his former
teacher, and, wrapping his expensive blanket around his finger, he flings
it upon him. Then the story notes the following:

Instead of saying, “this young child did not know what he was
doing,” his relatives said this: “our son has given and presented this

28. Dhp-a. ii.84–103; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 150–62. The motif of the
seven-year-old prodigy can be found also in the Atthassasdvāra Jātaka (#366), Cowell, The
Jātaka, vol. 1, 211.
 Making Actions Intelligible 201

to you. Please accept his honoring you with this blanket worth a
hundred thousand coins, and confer upon him the ten precepts.”29

In this small detail, the narrator draws our notice to the construal of the
event by the characters. The relatives could have taken the actions of the
baby to be purely random wriggling and tossing, but instead they sought
to construct them as an intentional gift. Moreover, his mother insists that
hereafter she “will not interfere with the wishes of her son.” The story
goes on to construe the boy’s intentions as single-minded religious devo-
tion to Sāriputta. They name the child Tissa after the elder (as Sāriputta
was called in his younger days). Tissa becomes a monk by age seven and,
not long thereafter, an arhat. The boy is remarkable for his attractiveness
to others and the ways that he inspires their automatic affection and gen-
erosity, attracting especially gifts of milk-rice and cloth.
All of these details work to construct a person with an enormous
degree of moral agency and intentionality beginning even in utero. The
mother stands back very deliberately from what she takes to be very force-
ful desires and intentions of her son, and the characters labor to construct
an agency for this child that is highly purposeful.30 On one level, this story
raises questions about intentions in children. When do genuine moral
agency, affections, and goodness start? Do these require higher thought
processes or moral deliberation? The story works to create a moral world
in which infants act generously if undeliberately:  goodness is not only
a matter of rational thought (many stories of animal benevolence do a
similar kind of thing). But the story particularly calls into question the
possibility of purely spontaneous actions, even by infants. Instead, we see
intentional trajectories from past lives directing the autonomous will of a
child. Like the previous stories in which a person’s intentions are sealed
off, there is a sense here that the child’s agency is unfolding simply of its
own impetus. A baby’s actions are not random but purposeful, driven by a
past that the characters do not know, but yet are confident is real.

29. Dhp-a. ii.86.
30. In her ethnography of Shan Buddhists in Northwest Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt
describes and analyzes a similar reluctance among parents to interfere with what they take
to be “an independent or autonomous will in even very young infants and babies.” Babies
are treated as “social agents almost immediately,” not blank slates, but rather “preloaded”
in significant ways. Thwarting the desires of a young child might entail going against past
forces that, though mysterious, are “essential” or “emblematic” to the person that the child
is (Eberhardt, Imagining the Course of Life, 80–82).
202 the forerunner of all th ings

The story is inflected by both past and present:  the boy’s intentions
are both rooted in a previous birth and shaped by his future attainment.
The story knows what happens later—the boy grows up to be an esteemed
arhat—and so its construction of events immortalizes early episodes of
a baby’s gestures that are taken to signal who he is. The baby’s apparent
autonomous and purposeful desire to give to Sāriputta is also emblem-
atic of his future destiny. His autonomy of will in early childhood is fully
realized in his later renunciation and arhatship (the stanza on which the
story expands praises renunciation and solitude). Meanwhile, the whole
process is shaped by others negotiating and determining who this boy is
and what he intends to do; the social processes at work assigning moral
agency are particularly obvious in this story, even though, ironically, they
are represented as the child’s own independent intentions. We must
ask: why does the story grant so much agency to a baby? To ingratiate him
with a senior monk and thus set his life on a certain course? To display a
family’s extraordinary piety and devotion, symbolized by their baby’s art-
less giving? To account post hoc for a young prodigy? Many parents will
recognize the desire and ease with which we construct who our children
are from infancy. These possibilities suggest that intention is not so much
something located inside the baby’s head as something constructed by
other people.
The stories in this section subordinate appraisal of ordinary moral
actions to a soteriological status that reframes what is really occurring.
Once arhats and religiously advanced people are recognized as such (by
the Buddha who knows all minds), questions of their intentions are clari-
fied. Or to put it in a different way, a certain kind of sealed-off subjectiv-
ity and intentionality is shorthand for high religious status. But there is
another point of reference at work in how we come to understand these
stories. As we saw in the story of the hunter’s wife, the Buddha knows who
she is because he can perceive the future: her family is ripe for conversion,
and if handled just right, she can help the Buddha coax them into transfor-
mation. We turn now to the ways in which the Buddha’s awareness of and
ability to help engineer the future are just as important as his grasp of the
past for interpreting minds and explaining why people do what they do.

The Offended Monk and the Remorseful Executioner

In our next story, a young granddaughter of the eminent laywoman
Visākhā offends a young monk by calling him “cut head” as she serves
 Making Actions Intelligible 203

him alms; he returns the name-calling and makes her cry.31 Visākhā inter-
venes in the quarrel, asking that the young monk not be offended since
in fact “cut head” is an accurate description of his shaved head. But the
young monk persists in taking umbrage. A senior monk as well tries to
end the quarrel by playing down the insult, to no avail.
But the Buddha sees the whole thing differently. Perceiving that the
young monk possesses the capacity to attain stream-entry with just a
little encouragement, he chooses to side with him. The Buddha’s sup-
port causes the young monk to be quite kindly disposed to the Buddha.
He feels uniquely understood: “Bhante, only you understand this matter
which eludes both the laywoman and the monk.” The Buddha sees that
the monk is amenable to the teaching and seizes this opportunity to frame
the events in such a way that will make his receptivity to the teaching
grow. The final framing is simply not interested in the woman’s intentions
when she commits her alleged fault, or in assigning moral culpability in
what is doubtless a rather trivial quarrel to begin with. Rather, this is an
event that should be understood with reference to the future. The alleged
insult creates a possibility, a new opportunity:  we can surmise that the
monk will look back on this moment not as the action by which he was
offended, but as the day he developed a new relationship with the Buddha
and a new spiritual conversion.
A far more challenging story is the account of an extremely violent and
wicked man, Tambadāṭiko (“Red Beard”), who is spurned even by a band
of dacoits because they deem him too cruel, “capable of cutting out the
breast of his mother and eating it, or drawing the blood from his father
and drinking it.”32 One day the dacoits are rounded up and brought before
the king to be sentenced for their crimes, and Red Beard willingly becomes
their executioner. Since he is so good at what he does, he becomes the
permanent executioner and works in this capacity for 55 years, beheading
criminals on a daily basis. As he gets old and frail, he is able to kill crimi-
nals only with several blows to the neck, causing them great torture, and
so he is eventually retired on a modest pension of a single final portion of
milk-rice.
At that particular moment, the great elder Sāriputta comes out of medi-
tation, perceiving that he might be received kindly for alms by the former

31. Dhp-a.iii.161–63; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 3, 1–2.

32. Dhp-a. ii.203–9; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 218–221.
204 the forerunner of all th ings

executioner, which would bring the man great merit. And indeed, when
Red Beard sees Sāriputta, he is filled with joy and wishes to give him the
milk-rice. But Sāriputta can tell that even though he has received him
with great hospitality, his host longs for the milk-rice, and so he in turn
offers Red Beard the meal. Then Sāriputta attempts to give him a blessing
of thanks but notices that his mind is distracted. Upon questioning, he
learns that Red Beard is anxious about his past murderous deeds, where-
upon Sāriputta decides to deceive him to stop his anxious mind. He asks
him if his deeds were done by his own inclination or due to another’s. The
executioner replies that he was ordered by the king. If that is so, continues
Sāriputta, then he should be assured that he did nothing bad. His mind
now at ease, the former executioner is able to listen to Sāriputta’s blessing
and teaching, and he approaches the path of stream-entry. He later dies
and is born in Tusita heaven.
Will it surprise us to learn that nattering monks discuss this affair,
astonished that a murderer so cruel would achieve such a spiritual attain-
ment and such a fabulous rebirth? “How,” they ask, “could a mere bless-
ing of thanks be so transformative of so great an evildoer?” The Buddha
replies that his teachings are not to be measured as small or great and that
their power works only if a person can hear them.
The story ends here without providing a story of the past to set the execu-
tioner into a larger framework of time. We are left only with the story of the
present and its trajectory into the future. What is striking (in addition to the
extraordinary fact that Red Beard seems to get off so easily for his crimes) is
that the story emphasizes not the executioner’s actual intentions but rather
the opportunity for religious conversion made possible by the encounter
with Sāriputta. Sāriputta’s deceiving this man about his own intentions is a
skillful device to calm his mind. What is not important to the story is deter-
mining the executioner’s culpability in his intentions: the fact that Sāriputta
has to deceive him into believing that the old standby “I was just following
orders” frees him of culpability suggests that such a plea does not let him
off the hook. But the point of the story is not culpability, but conversion, and
Sāriputta’s account of his intentions is subordinated to this aim.
Like the story of the offended shaved-headed monk, this story empha-
sizes the fact that the Buddha (and sometimes his disciples, like Sāriputta)
can perceive in events seeds of the future, potentialities that if success-
fully managed can reframe the meaning of the events and shift our focus
away from ordinary moral culpability. The site of debate about people’s
 Making Actions Intelligible 205

intentions is sometimes, for the Buddha, a place for a major interven-

tion that makes possible a future that transcends ordinary considerations
about moral accountability. In fact, a key message of the executioner’s
story counters the usual theme of the inexorability of karmic causality; the
Buddha’s teachings can bring karmic causality to an abrupt halt and effect
radical transformation. This transformation, in effect, seals off the agent’s
intentions from saṃsāra.
The stories in this section and the previous two explore the work differ-
ent perspectives of time can do in the hands of an omniscient narrator to
constitute or to make sense of intentions. This works differently with the
past than the future. Stories that appeal to past lives such as Kānā’s can
illustrate long-developing entanglements with others that repudiate the
notion of an autonomous or present-bound intention. In sharp contrast
to this, stories of the pasts of arhats are invoked to explain the religious
status they enjoy as a way to deflect any possibility of an intersubjectivity
or conditionality of their intentions (a perspective supported by what we
know of the intentions of arhats in the more systematic genres). Finally,
the setting of a story in relationship to a future conversion or transforma-
tion changes everything about a present intention, averting attention from
moral considerations of accountability and culpability and toward the real-
ization of a soteriological aim.
The final two sections in this chapter explore stories where intention
and agency are opaque to others and, perhaps more importantly, to self.
Set against the sort of timescapes we have been considering, where past
and future inflect present moral experience and its interpretation, narra-
tives in which past lives and future trajectories are inaccessible to ordinary
people portray present intention as mysterious. We find characters who
find their own intentions, actions, and moral character obscure (though
to others they are often transparent). Such timescapes take us into terrain
that psychoanalytic theory would treat as subconscious processes under-
lying conscious thought and action. The gaps in self-knowledge about
intention produce at least two kinds of subjectivity. Explored in the next
section is the moral (and often comic) subjectivity of the confused, and
the last section depicts the anxious subjectivity of the scrupulous. In both,
we find a prominent theme in the narratives (which is at odds in many
ways with certain impulses in the other three genres) that suggests that
moral knowledge, especially in the particular circumstances in which life
is lived, can be elusive.
206 the forerunner of all th ings

Knowing Minds
If mind is the forerunner of all things, how do we access it? How do we
know our own thoughts and intentions, much less those of others? The
stories depict a fascination with knowledge of minds, even while a com-
mon motif is the opacity of one’s own mind to oneself. How might I know
what my thoughts really are? If, as we have seen, the unawakened mind
is a product of a karmic past, without knowing that past, the full range of
our deepest dispositions and motivations is inaccessible to us. We do not
know the claims the past might have on our present and what our minds
are capable of thinking. Fortunately, the stories are populated with other
people who can know one’s thoughts and expose them in sometimes quite
humorous but always psychologically illuminating ways.
In one story of the past from the Dhammapada collection, a king of
Benares is said to make a careful examination of his thoughts, words, and
deeds to discover if he had been guilty of any fault. He sees nothing prob-
lematic but reflects that “a person never sees his own faults; it takes other
persons to see them,” and so he roams his kingdom in disguise to learn
what people say about him.33 One’s own thoughts and deeds are opaque
to oneself, and the king perceives that his subjects will know things about
him that he cannot.
What follows is a comedy of errors involving a previous life of the monk
Little Wayman, who in this tale is a devoted but simpleminded young man
incapable of learning anything but a single stanza: “you’re rubbing, you’re
rubbing, why are you rubbing? I know too!” which his teacher gives him
to make his way in the world. Quite by accident, this young man thwarts a
band of thieves who are trying to enter a house through burrowing a tun-
nel and who hear him reciting his stanza. Thinking that “you’re rubbing”
refers to their digging the tunnel, the thieves fear they are found out and
flee. The disguised king happens to witness this incident and makes this
impressive stanza his own. And he just happens to be repeating it himself
when a barber in league with the king’s military commander to have him
assassinated is sharpening his barber’s tool (with which he had planned to
sever the king’s windpipe). When the barber hears the king utter “you’re
rubbing, you’re rubbing, why are you rubbing? I know too!” he thinks the
king has found him out and he confesses the assassination plot. The king
then exiles the treacherous commander and replaces him with the young

33. Dhp-a.i.249–54; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 1, 306–10.

 Making Actions Intelligible 207

simpleton who gave him the stanza. The story celebrates the idea that
even a dullard can rise to the top through sheer devotion to the advice of a
teacher, but along the way, the reversals and cases of mistaken identity are
quite hilarious. No one who recites the silly stanza (which is quite mean-
ingless in itself) intends to thwart thieves or stop assassination plots—they
have no idea that they are even afoot—but no matter, sometimes people
do things effectively without having any notion of what they are doing.
Though the story begins with an earnest king wishing to discover the true
nature of his thoughts and deeds, it ends with an ironic tale of no one
knowing the true intentions of anyone!
Another funny story concerns a young man who enters the monkhood
as a junior monk to his uncle.34 He feels affronted by this senior monk
when the senior monk refuses to accept a robe from him, and so he con-
siders returning to the household life. He then wonders how he might
earn a living and drifts off in his imagination to fancy himself selling his
robe to buy a goat, whose offspring he can then sell to acquire some capi-
tal, whereupon he will marry and have a son, whom he will name after the
uncle. He imagines that he and his family will go to visit that uncle, but
that his wife will be careless and allow the child to be run over by their cart,
whereupon he will beat her with a stick. He is awoken from this reverie to
find to his horror that he beating the senior monk with his palm leaf fan!
And he becomes even more mortified as he realizes that the senior monk
knows every thought that passed through his mind as he daydreamed.
He runs off to hide but is found by the Buddha and brought back from
his discontent and taught a stanza about controlling wandering thoughts.
The possibilities here are playful: he meant to strike his imaginary wife,
but did he mean to strike his uncle, the senior monk? Since the whole
daydream was precipitated by his annoyance at him, it is hard to rule out
entirely a certain sublimated hostility aimed at the uncle. Humor and dis-
placement allow for other truths to be entertained.
Another tale recounts a group of monks supported lavishly by a female
lay disciple.35 She attends to them closely and even adopts their meditation
practices, which make her capable of knowing their thoughts. This abil-
ity to read their minds allows her to anticipate all of their needs. A young
monk hearing of her great hospitality travels to be in her presence and

34. Dhp-a.i.300–5; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 10–12.

35. Dhp-a.i.290–97; Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol. 2, 1–7.
208 the forerunner of all th ings

observes that she meets his every need and desire without his asking. But
then he is filled with anxiety, knowing that she can also become aware of
his bad thoughts: “This is serious,” he frets; “ordinary folks [like me] think
both good and bad thoughts, but were I  to think something improper,
she would discover my transgression and seize me by the topknot like a
thief seizing goods.” So he tries to flee the area, but the Buddha prevents
him: “This is the very place you should stay.” As the Buddha foresees, her
knowing his thoughts stimulates the young man to purify his mind, and
he becomes an arhat. He then wonders about his previous life experiences
with this woman and learns that in 99 previous existences they had been
married and she had conspired to have him murdered. This insight into
their history she reads in his mind, and she mentally asks him to look
further into their past lives together. He digs deeper into the past and sees
that in one lifetime she, as his wife, had spared him. This memory causes
him a great burst of joy, and he at once attains parinibbāna.
This story, like the one immediately before it, takes it for granted that
others can come to know our thoughts and cause us acute embarrass-
ment. Also intriguing are the rich psychological possibilities these charac-
ters’ long pasts together suggest: she appears in this life as an all-knowing
mother figure, anticipating his every need for food and nurture and read-
ing his mind to know when he has been naughty (she calls him, according
to convention, “my son,” and she is referred to by the monks as “Mother of
Matika”). Their past lives expose another dimension: they were previously
married and she had murdered him many times over (perhaps she could
read his thoughts then, too?). Here their psychological connections take
on a violent edge, and his present fear of the harm she might do to him if
she knew his thoughts is not unfounded. But then the bliss he experiences
in recalling the single lifetime in which she spared (forgave?) him knows
no bounds, and he is released to final nibbāna.
Martin Wickramasinghe is perhaps not far off to claim that these tales
reveal with great subtlety the workings of the subconscious mind. He sug-
gests that karma theory allowed Buddhist storytellers to become “instinc-
tive psychoanalysts” able to probe human feelings and desires as the
accumulated inheritance from previous lives.36 Intriguing also is the way
that other characters make self-discovery possible in these last two stories.
Characters gain access to others’ interiority more readily than their own,

36. Wickramasinghe, The Buddhist Jātaka Stories and the Russian Novel, 5, 26–27.
 Making Actions Intelligible 209

and it is their mirroring back one’s mind that allows one to determine who
one really is.

A Righteous Kingdom
One of the most fascinating stories from the standpoint of both investi-
gating how intentions are ascribed and the limitations of self-knowledge
is the Kurudhamma Jātaka.37 This jātaka is particularly useful for us as
one of the few instances where we encounter characters speaking in
first-person voice about their own intentions. The plot is this:  a certain
kingdom plagued with drought and famine seeks the counsel of the
neighboring kingdom of the Kurus whose righteousness (dhamma) keeps
the realm in peace and prosperity. A delegation of brahmans sets out to
inquire of the Kurus their principles of statecraft and morality. They learn
that the Kurus’ righteousness is rather straightforward—following the five
precepts—but that the Kurus, from the king on down through the social
hierarchy, are skeptical of their own capacity to follow it.
The brahmans begin by interviewing the king (that is, the Bodhisatta),
seeking to record his advice on a golden tablet. In the king’s case, the crux
of his doubt about his intentions concerns a particular action he com-
mitted during a ceremonial occasion in which he, according to custom,
is required to shoot arrows in each of the four directions. On this occa-
sion, everyone saw where three of the four arrows landed, but they never
found the fourth arrow. The king is anxious that the stray arrow might
have impaled a fish (thus violating the first precept not to kill). He says,
“Friends, I have worries about my following the Kuru Dhamma, but my
mother protects it well, and you should seek [knowledge of it] from her.”
But the delegation protests: “Your Majesty, you did not have the intention
(cetanā) ‘let me take life,’ and so did not kill anyone.” They request that
he tell them what he knows, and so he gives them the first precept, “do
not kill,” to write on their tablet. The king remains anxious, however, and
insists that they seek out his mother for advice.
They find the queen mother to be equally scrupulous. She is filled
with grave doubts about the propriety of a certain gift she gave. She
had received fine sandalwood and a necklace as a gift but chose to give
them to her daughters-in-law. She gave the elder daughter-in-law the less

37. Ja. ii.365ff. Cowell, The Jātaka, vol. 2, 251 (Jātaka #276).

210 the forerunner of all th ings

expensive necklace since she was already quite well off and gave the much
more expensive sandalwood to her younger daughter-in-law, who was not
as well-to-do. But she worries that she has not treated them equally and
suspects that this action has called into question her virtue (sīla). The del-
egation is again aghast that she is anxious over such a trifle, and they
assure her that giving a gift as she pleases does not violate virtue. Her
anxieties do not subside, however, and she urges them to seek out her vir-
tuous daughter-in-law. This young woman confesses that on one occasion
she happened to see the handsome viceroy passing in procession from her
balcony and she fell in love with him and briefly fantasized about him. But
she quickly chastened herself for such thoughts and never acted on them.
But this flaw in her virtue weighs heavily upon her and she confesses
her remorse to the delegation. The brahmans, increasingly finding them-
selves not so much suppliants for moral knowledge but rather judges of
these people’s conduct, protest that mere thoughts and fancies are not
cause for moral disgrace and that her scruples are unwarranted.
The story continues in this vein: the daughter-in-law sends the delega-
tion to the viceroy, who is himself anxious over his own trifling misdeed,
and so the brahmans are passed from person to person down the royal
hierarchy through 11 different people until they arrive finally at a courtesan
who is anxious about her own commitment to honoring contracts. In her
case, she had been contracted for her services by a client who paid her but
did not come to her for three years, during which time she waited loyally
for him. She eventually fell into penury and sought legal advice about
whether she might resume her trade with others. She is pronounced to be
in the clear legally and is urged to go about her business, but she remains
troubled. She is about to contract to another person when the original
client reappears and she hastens to honor her contract to him. Again the
delegation protests her doubt and regards her behavior as impeccable. The
story ends with the delegation bringing the principles of the Kurus back
to their own kingdom, where they are put into effect and bring prosperity.
There are different frameworks for reading this story. Andrew Huxley
parses the legal and ethical reasoning the cases show as they negotiate
questions of intention, negligence, recklessness, and conflicts of interest.
He sees in it a nascent political and legal philosophy that develops in a
much later textual tradition in Southeast Asia around this story.38 From

38. Huxley, “The Kurudhamma.” He also discusses an elaborated version of the tale, the
Kurudhammakaṇḍapañho, which may be as late as the 18th century and composed in the
Middle Mekhong region.
 Making Actions Intelligible 211

a “management” point of view, the tale can be read for its various “job
descriptions” and their attending responsibilities from the top to the bot-
tom of the social scale. Huxley points out, too, that this is perhaps the first
account we have of rulings on the five precepts, and it provides a glimpse of
“the transition from uninteresting generalised ethics to semi-professional
case-specific ethics.”39 His article illuminates both the ethical casuistry
and the legal criteria at work in each of the cases.
For our purposes, the story is most interesting for the fastidious sense
of self-doubt revealed in the interviews with the Kurus. Each has a clear
sense of moral propriety but is exacting and doubtful about how his or
her particular actions may fall short of it. The Kurus are anguished about
their intentions—whether they intended an action that yields unintended
consequences, whether they have truly honorable and virtuous intentions,
whether intentions not acted upon count in some morally important
way. The story raises, but never decisively answers, the following ques-
tion:  do the Kurus owe their righteousness to their actions or to their
scrupulousness?
A Weberian reading would suggest that a certain cultivation of anxiet-
ies about intention is at work here. The text intimates that the protection
of a kingdom lies not so much in following the five precepts per se as in
this peculiar quality of self-doubt and anxiety evinced in the king on down.
The story promotes an idealized social and political order by inscribing an
overweening preoccupation with one’s social duties. Each person knows
his or her responsibilities and is exacting about fulfilling them, above and
beyond the letter of the law:  even the prostitute knows the importance
of loyalty. We also see the delegation of brahmans from a neighboring
kingdom playing a curious role. They speak with authority about these
cases, despite being from a land where no one is even aware of the five
basic moral precepts. They offer appealing and reasonable advice about
how intentions ought to work, and yet since it is their kingdom that suf-
fers natural calamity from their failure to know morality, their readings of
moral intention are suspect, and the Kurus are not easily convinced. Could
it be that the success of the Kuru kingdom lies in its people never presum-
ing their moral intentions are adequate?
Although we will not acquire a grand theory of goodness, virtue, or
intention from this story, the questions and possibilities it raises are

39. Ibid., 193.
212 the forerunner of all th ings

suggestive. The story offers some of the few first-person narratives of

people describing their own intentions and the reactions of others to their
intentions. When good people offer a reflexive account of their inten-
tions, we encounter an anxious and doubtful subjectivity.40 Even so, the
delegation’s interviews with the Kurus entail negotiating the meaning and
significance of their intentions. The delegation’s protests attempt to deter-
mine what each person’s intentions really were (“but sir, you did not have
the intention ‘let me take life,’ and so did not kill anyone”), and they plead
that the Kurus are overanxious. Nevertheless, each of the Kurus remains
skeptical of these attempts to absolve them and can readily point to a wor-
thier model of behavior. Their skepticism points to not only a certain val-
ued self-doubt and humility but also the difficulty of genuine self-knowledge
about one’s own intentions and motivations. At least in this story, the more
virtuous one is, it seems, the less sure one is of the virtue of one’s intentions.

Conclusions
It may be useful to review, by way of concluding, the work intention does in
these stories. In most of the stories considered here, the business of deter-
mining a character’s intentions—asking, “Why did she do that?”—becomes
a chief preoccupation of bystanding monks and the Buddha and thus for
readers and listeners. Answering this question provides access first to the
limited perspective of the present and then to a larger framework of time
that reveals the inadequacy of the present for rendering actions intelligible.
History and personal biography, selected and construed ultimately by an
omniscient narrator, come to constitute the action itself.
Within such accounts, intentions come to signify who a person is and
their level of religious attainment. For many characters, a given inten-
tional action represents the culmination of a long entanglement with oth-
ers in a complex and dynamic saṃsāric timescape. Their intentions are
collaborations with or reactions to others in which the possibility of an
autonomous agency or personhood is denied. Their intentions stand in

40. Consider the monk in Dhp-a.iv.115–17 who regularly goes to the root of a tree to admon-
ish himself for his discontent with the religious life: “you shameless, immodest fellow! So
you have actually decided that you wish to put on these rags, return to the world, and work
for hire.” He in short order becomes an arhat, and his story illustrates (even as it in another
sense defies) the maxim of the stanza: “rebuke yourself by yourself; examine yourself by
yourself. Protecting oneself by mindfulness, a monk lives happily” (Burlingame, Buddhist
Legends, vol. 3, 260–62).
 Making Actions Intelligible 213

for the intersubjective relationship itself. However, for other characters,

most notably arhats but also those approaching their spiritual attainment,
pure intentions are emblematic of an autonomous agency they alone pos-
sess. Arhats act in the world and have intentions (we recall that the more
systematic discourses call these kiriya intentions) that are extricated from
the relationality of life enmeshed in saṃsāra. Their intentions represent
and signify this fundamental feature of what it is to be awakened and truly
free of saṃsāric conditioning.
If arhats alone are entirely free of an intentionality constituted by others,
we may discern more clearly the constraints on freedom within saṃsāra
and the ordinary human condition. MacIntyre suggests that agents “are
never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narra-
tives.” We enjoy agency in our creative capacities for action, even while
that agency is shaped by the actions and narratives of others. As he puts
it, “we enter a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part
of an action that was not of our making.”41 Kānā, our foremost example of
a person represented as acting and reacting in a world she only partially
created, is acted on as much as she acts, and her actions themselves are
not intelligible or even identifiable without recognizing her simultaneous
agency and patiency. Not so the arhat, whose freedom from contingency
is operative at the level of intention. The religious program these texts
advance holds out the possibility of free autonomous agency but only for
these extraordinary persons. They are people with pure motives no mat-
ter what they actually do, and their intentions are scrupulously carved out
and separated from the intersubjective incursions that give shape to moral
agency for those still muddling through saṃsāra.
Intentions are also sometimes deployed as a tool for self-scrutiny
(at least among nonarhats). The Kuru story suggests that the more vir-
tuous a person is, the more anxiety and scrupulousness she brings to
self-examination. Does true virtue lie in following moral norms or in anx-
ious fretting over one’s incapacity to genuinely observe them? Moreover,
sometimes we are more transparent to others than to ourselves and can
surmise others’ intentions more easily than gain access to our own. A kind
of psychoanalysis is at work in these stories, although instead of lying on
the analyst’s couch and talking, the characters are probed by others’ for-
ays into their minds forged through meditative insight. These stories por-
tray and enact a religious program aimed at penetrating deeply into one’s

41. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 213.

214 the forerunner of all th ings

psyche and fomenting an anxious awareness of other minds observing

one’s own. There are no private interior spaces with the Buddha and other
advanced meditators around.
The narratives provide a different rubric of self-work than the more
systematic literatures do and have to be read differently, even as they are
complementary modes of knowledge and were developed in the same con-
texts that produced the three piṭakas and their exegeses. Stories reflect on
action in particular ways and value a particularism that does not necessar-
ily lead to universals or to grand theory. They are open in important ways
to multiple interpretations, and they place value on the process of puzzling
through the opacity of human action. The bystander monks are always
trying to figure out why people do what they do; the world is a diverse
and mysterious place with people acting from past histories and entangle-
ments with others that are not apparent on the surface. But, the stories
seem to urge, be like these monks and get together with friends to try to
understand the forces at work on people’s actions. Unlike them, we do not
have the fortunate presence of the Buddha, the omniscient narrator, to
supply the missing pieces of biography that render action fully intelligible,
but we have seen how his knowledge works and the ways that evoking an
agent’s biography, past and future experience, and religious status make
sense of present action.
Stories also work affectively. We have mentioned the affective experi-
ences prompted by the stories—the sadness at Kānā’s situation (though it
shifts to joy at her conversion), the embarrassment and horror of minds
being exposed, the relief and bliss at being exposed yet forgiven, the laugh-
ter at folly being ridiculed. The emotional experience of the characters
themselves and the way the stories make us respond to them are a large
part of the work they do. The reader’s subjectivity and autonomy are com-
promised by these tales in ways that are, we might say, potentially ethically
productive.42 To be open to these tales of others’ travails and successes is to
begin to allow one’s own subjectivity to be penetrated and shaped by them
in a manner that can generate moral sensitivity and sensibility.
A story can demonstrate explicitly how this works. The Dhammapada
Commentary recounts the tale of ungrateful sons who neglect their
aging father. The story then shifts to offering and then explicating the

42. On the ways that literature works to shape moral sensitivity and awareness in Buddhist
sources, see Hallisey and Hansen, “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life”; Hansen,
“Story and World” and How to Behave; Heim, “The Aesthetics of Excess” and “Buddhism.”
 Making Actions Intelligible 215

following stanza:  “the elephant Dhanapāla, wild and rutting, when

bound, refuses to eat even a morsel: the elephant remembers the ele-
phant grove.”43 The commentarial gloss fills in the background story
here. It seems a wild elephant was captured and caged but, though
offered even choice delicacies, refused to eat because he could not stop
thinking of his mother left alone and uncared for back in the jungle.
His anguish in imagining her without him makes him go on a hunger
strike. Then the text says this:

As the Teacher told this story of the past, relating it in detail, he

caused floods of tears to fall in all present, softened their hearts and
opened their ears. Then he, knowing what was beneficial for them,
made known the truths and taught the Dhamma.44

Stories soften hearts and open ears, making possible the teaching of
the Dhamma. This story is beneficial because it sensitizes the reader
to general truths by experiencing the sorrow of the particular loss and
grief of this elephant and his mother. The elephant remembers (or
imagines) his mother in her distress, and we, too, “remember” with the
Buddha as he tells this story of the past. These imaginative acts—and
the very act of becoming a person who can so imagine (here, as else-
where, animals show the way)—make us sensitive and alive to others’
distress and sorrow. It may be, too, that sadness opens observers and
makes them vulnerable to the experiences of others, which is here an
intersubjectivity that is regarded as a valuable part of the path (at least
in its initial stages). The stanza and the commentary on it then have an
immediate effect on the characters in the frame story, the unfilial sons,
and lead to their dramatic conversion. But the stanza alone could not
do this without the narrative commentary providing the particulars of
context and history.
Thus narrative commentaries ripen or mature our knowledge of the
general truths we have explored in the other genres. They do so not so
much by exemplifying them as by inhabiting them. The Bodhisatta may
have begun to glimpse the entire architecture of the Dhamma upon his
aspiration of buddhahood, but only through the eons of living, feeling,

43. Dhp 324.
44. Dhp-a. iv.14. Burlingame, Buddhist Legends, vol.3, 205.
216 the forerunner of all th ings

and inhabiting these truths of life in saṃsāra did they became truly devel-
oped in the affective spaces that comprise knowledge and experience. It is
the tacking back and forth between general and particular truth (whether
between the general stanza and the particular story within a narrative, or
between the more systematic genres and the narrative genres) that brings
knowledge to maturity.
 Conclusion

intention has been a moving target as we have traced its meaning and
significance through the different domains of Theravādin thought. This
is as it should be. If we abandon the idea that there is an essential core
meaning to the constructs of psychological and social life (and there are
very good reasons for doing so within both Buddhist thought and modern
psychology),1 we can attend more closely to the ways that meaning is a
product of the explanatory systems used to explore it. By way of summing
up, we might briefly recap the key insights about intentional agency in
the Pāli sources and then explore a few of the broader implications these
insights suggest.
The technical discussions on cetanā in the Suttas link it to the con-
structing and constructed processes of saṅkhāra. Cetanā is arranging the
other factors of mental life to put together and “accumulate” experience.
It involves subjective experience but need not be deliberate, and it can be
shaped by others. Most importantly, cetanā has moral valence, depending
upon the other factors it marshals in the performance of action, and the
texts are chiefly concerned with its morally good and bad expressions. The
most concrete treatment of intentional action is offered by discussions of
the 20 full courses of action, where Buddhaghosa provides careful pars-
ing of an action’s main components and the criteria for determining its
moral quality. Full courses of good actions are, intriguingly, nonactions
or abstentions from the bad actions, a matter that presents challenges for
how we understand the nature of intentional action. We also come to see
that good intentions per se are not part of the nibbānic experience and to

1. Kagan, “The Meaning of Psychological Predicates.”

218 the forerunner of all th ings

appreciate the necessity for carving out a special kind of intention specific
to the activity and experience of arhats.
As but one factor in the Abhidhamma matrices of factors, cetanā is
defined and constituted according to the larger relational system of which
it is a part. In any given thought, its moral valence is open to what else is
present in that moment of conscious awareness. But it can be defined by
its particular characteristic, function, mode of expression, and immedi-
ate conditions. Cetanā so defined is a quite rudimentary and prerational
operation of the mind that arranges and galvanizes other factors toward
realizing an aim or, more precisely, “producing its object.” It is thus highly
constructive in the making of experience; its identification with karma
indicates that karma is the constructive function of mind that with and
through its other factors creates an agent’s present and future experience.
Karma is what the mind does to craft experience, a process that is condi-
tioned by what is present in the mind even as it is a highly creative and
constructive activity.
There are both moral and soteriological dimensions to these processes.
The mind can create healthy, blameless, skillful, and happy experience,
depending on the whole array of other factors—feelings, motivations,
dispositional tendencies, and various moral sentiments—present to it as
it generates experience. But from a strictly soteriological perspective, the
constructed and constructing functions of cetanā and karma make them
problematic from a standpoint of seeking absolute freedom. This led the
early Theravāda thinkers in several directions. First, much of the religious
life is conceived not as accumulating constructed experience but as ceasing
the constructive and acquisitive activity of mind that grasps and perpetu-
ates existence in the restless and conditioned reality of saṃsāra. In this
context, it became useful to talk of the many ways the mind can relin-
quish, abandon, and abstain from its habitual constructions and to iden-
tify the “presence of absences” as a key feature of religiously and morally
advanced experience. Second, Buddhaghosa posited the idea of a kind of
cetanā/karma that is not constructed or constructing but rather consists
of a free and spontaneous kind of intention that arhats alone experience.
The Vinaya texts construct cetanā and, more generally, “mind” to their
own purposes. Concerned with issues of culpability in interpreting the
rules of monastic life, the texts construe intention as a central criterion for
establishing whether a rule has been breached and for exploring the dif-
ferent ways one can be said to “know” what one is doing. Intention in this
genre is the deliberate doing of an action (at least with regard to morally
 Conclusion 219

significant action) but is not to be confused with motivation. Nevertheless,

the Vinaya texts provide a moral and legal education that is highly sensi-
tive to motivation and how it works in the situated particulars of human
life. This literature depicts a disciplinary culture that shapes an idealized
subjectivity and intentional agency through ritual and communal prac-
tices of admonishment, confession, and other techniques.
The narrative sources have focused our attention on how context and
setting identify intentional actions and render them intelligible. We come
to see the social and dialogic processes at work in attributing intentions.
Stories cultivate interest in why people do what they do and how various
first- and third-party perspectives interpret intentions. They also provide
a final and decisive interpretation by an omniscient narrator. The omni-
scient view always perceives the operations of time, both past and future,
as crucial for interpreting present intentional action (at least for the
actions of nonarhats). Finally, the intersubjectivity of intention becomes
concrete in the stories: intentional action is often reaction shaped by entan-
glements with those others who comprise and constrain the possibilities
of experience.
What are some of the implications of these ideas for the study of
Buddhist ethics? The foregoing pages have not managed to locate the free,
autonomous, and rational agent who is the subject of moral action in cer-
tain modern Western ethical systems and who is the chief protagonist
in one strand of current work in Buddhist ethics. For this agent, moral
thinking is a matter of determining moral obligations, weighing options,
and making deliberative choices. He enjoys an autonomous will, and his
moral activity consists in making decisions. Such an agent, though often
presumed, is seldom argued for, and he belongs to a historical tradition
peculiar, most likely, to the modern West.
Iris Murdoch has likened this conception of moral agency to visiting a
shop. Enjoying total and responsible freedom, the agent surveys the value
of the goods and selects among them, commanding the full resources of
reason and objectivity. Murdoch criticizes this image of moral agency as
“behaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian.”

It is behaviorist in its connection of the meaning and being of action

with the publicly observable, it is existential in its elimination of the
substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will,
and it is utilitarian in its assumption that morality is and can only
be concerned with public acts. It is also incidentally what may be
220 the forerunner of all th ings

called a democratic view, in that it suggests that morality is not an

esoteric achievement but a natural function of any normal man.2

This conception of human nature may be traced to or represented by Kant

but is assumed in many other quarters as well.3 In these conceptions, we
encounter an “inflated yet empty conception of the will,” where choice is
considered paramount in moral agency yet we are never told what pre-
pares agents for their choices, nor are we directed inward to the “empiri-
cal self” to learn of the psychic energies, desires, frailties, and capacities
undergirding choice and action.4 The idealized moral agent—“thin as a
needle”—is seen as a “privileged centre of will (forever capable of ‘step-
ping back’),” though all complexities of his empirical nature have been
stripped away.5
Murdoch calls instead for an investigation of moral agency that requires
recognizing how energies, emotions, qualities of consciousness, states of
mind, and most importantly, forms of attention matter.

Neither the inspiring ideas of freedom, sincerity and fiats of will,

nor the plain wholesome concept of a rational discernment of duty,
seem complex enough to do justice to what we really are. What we
really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out
of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways
which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of
the system in between the moments of choice.6

Many of these energies, in Murdoch’s view, are of a dark and depraved

sort, and selfishness, ego, and illusion often carry the day. For her, eth-
ics thus involves positing and exploring a notion of the “Good” and

2. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 8–9. Dreyfus (“Meditation as Ethical Activity”) also
discusses Murdoch in light of Buddhist ethics.
3. While the Kantian subject is often held up as an ideal rational, free, and autonomous
agent—and indeed, for most of Kant’s philosophical project, such an agent is required—
Kant himself was in fact also interested in the empirical ethical subject; he wrote and taught
on the topic of “pragmatic” or “practical” anthropology, what he called “the second part of
morals” that would consist of an empirical science of what human beings are actually like.
See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View; and Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics.
4. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 74, 98.
5. Ibid., 52.
6. Ibid., 53.
 Conclusion 221

investigating possible techniques for reorienting our attention and purify-

ing our energies.
Theravāda Buddhist moral psychology reveals a rather precise account
of that “obscure system of energy” Murdoch gestures toward, rendered
much less obscure than the glimpses provided by Murdoch’s own
immediate resources for exploring it (she mentions psychoanalysis and
Christian dogmas of original sin). We observe in the Pāli sources a close
study of the empirical self of the sort that Murdoch is calling for, as well
as a practical interest in technologies for reorienting it. For these think-
ers, like Murdoch, moral agency must be explored through examining
human psychological complexity and the particular ways that action is
connected to emotions, energies, and motivations. It is not that humans
do not make choices and decisions, but rather that the focus of much
Buddhist ethical thought lies elsewhere than the rational processes of
justifying choice and decision.
In identifying karma with intention, the Buddha was not signaling
autonomous and free agency but something more like the opposite.
Karma is a matter of creative world making and entails agency in this
important sense:  intentional action is the active construing and con-
structing of experience. But this is a process that is also highly condi-
tioned—shaped (though not definitively determined) by past experience,
by deep-seated motivations and dispositions, by the demands of custom
and normative social life, and by intricate entanglements with others.
Genuine freedom lies outside these processes, found not in ordinary
human experience, but aspired to in the rarefied and extraordinary experi-
ence of arhats. Their freedom is not the natural moral condition assumed
by many modern Western ethicists, but rather the highest soteriological
achievement. This achievement is described not solely to gesture to the
final goal of Buddhist teachings but also to illuminate ordinary unawak-
ened human experience, to teach us how conditioned, contingent, and
compromised life in saṃsāra is. In contrast to the arhat’s freedom, the
freedom of ordinary people lies in smaller movements and negotiations
of the mind, rooting out problematic motivations, shaping disposition
and behavior through disciplinary techniques, and pursuing the com-
pany and habits of good and wise people. Freedom is a progressive pro-
cess, not an either-or proposition.
Murdoch, too, has observed that “our exercise of freedom is a small
piecemeal business,” a practice that advances slowly as one learns
to attend and to see the world in a manner less overlaid with ego and
222 the forerunner of all th ings

illusion.7 Her emphasis on attention as a tool for counteracting delusion

and realizing freedom leads to a decentering of choice in ways that might
also be compatible with Buddhaghosa’s ideas. For him also, genuine
moral freedom lies in peeling away the layers of greed, hatred, and delu-
sion by reorienting mind. Murdoch’s analysis suggests why the arhat’s
freedom is expressed not through choices, but through a spontaneous
and fully awakened awareness of the world. Murdoch says, “If I attend
properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be
aimed at.”8 Freedom is acting with a kind of spontaneity (Murdoch pre-
fers “necessity” or even “obedience”) in response to the way the world
really is, where one is not poised between choices that can only arise (that
is, are constructed) from a deluded and conflicted nature.
In addition to offering a thicker conception of moral agency and
depictions of freedom as both gradual process and ultimate attainment,
Buddhaghosa has also led me to a different methodological approach
than is practiced in many styles of Buddhist scholarship current today.
Scholars of Buddhist ethics have sometimes hesitated over the fact that
most Buddhist texts identified as offering moral thought do not typically
proceed by analyzing, arguing for, and justifying reasons for moral choices
and actions. This omission or oversight in their sources has not prevented
many scholars from forging ahead to uncover various rationalities alleged
to be implicit in Buddhist texts (which would then provide the basis for
how choices are to be made and justified). Some argue for a deep struc-
ture based on virtue; others see consequentialist or deontological ratio-
nalities underlying Buddhist moral thinking. These excavations unearth
structures apparent to modern scholars but that have somehow managed
to elude even the most systematic of Buddhist thinkers. Moreover, such
archaeological projects are offered as comprehensive across Buddhist
thinkers and traditions, revealing something called “Buddhist ethics” as
a whole that is larger than any particular thinker or system (though it is
thought to encompass all of them).
Buddhaghosa points to another way to encounter Buddhist moral
thought, one that takes seriously how Buddhist thinkers systematized their
own ideas and how they teach us to read them. With Buddhaghosa as our
guide, we have grown more sensitive to how knowledge occurs and how

7. Ibid., 36.
8. Ibid., 38.
 Conclusion 223

genre and context provide and constrain meaning. If context and genre
are essential to meaning, then it becomes harder for us to pull passages
out of context and reify concepts independently of the relational systems
that help constitute their meaning. Learning to think “abhidhammically”
keeps us from straying too far from the dynamic relational whole in which
concepts and processes of mind are embedded. When the Buddha identi-
fied karma and cetanā, he was, on the readings Buddhaghosa has sug-
gested in the Suttanta and Abhidhamma, pointing to cetanā as a function
of mind that accumulates experience, but this task cannot be understood
apart from the myriad other factors of conscious awareness it gathers and
animates in producing and directing experience. In addition, a key fea-
ture in Buddhaghosa’s treatment of cetanā in this technical sense is that
it is not the site or location where one does moral work. One does not
endeavor to change or improve one’s cetanās; rather, one works on many
other fronts with many factors—motivations, dispositions, ways of see-
ing—in an arduous process of moral cultivation.
The attention to genre and the strategies Buddhaghosa has provided
for reading different kinds of Buddhist texts should not obscure the pat-
terns and the degree of consistency in the overall system. The shift from
cetanā as a technical term to “mind” or “thought” in the more practical and
conventional usages of Vinaya and narrative is appropriate since cetanā
indicates a vital function in the larger relational system we call, more
vaguely, “mind.” In such genres, employing the somewhat coarser folk
category of mind is actually more useful than the fine-grained set of rela-
tional processes offered by Suttanta and Abhidhamma. Either way, what is
salient in karmic agency is the mind’s work of putting together experience
out of the stock of present factors (themselves products of past factors)
in a future-oriented direction. The Vinaya offers disciplinary practices of
developing and altering the empirical self, technologies for reorienting
and fundamentally changing how the mind operates (again in a manner
that does not work directly on cetanā but on motivation, attention, habit,
and culture). The stories render actions intelligible by situating them in
the very particular contexts and narratives that, in fact, constitute them.
Important patterns of intersubjectivity are woven throughout these tap-
estries. The mind of ordinary human experience is not somehow sealed
off from the past or independent of life lived with others. The arc of the
four genres we have explored has gradually shifted from a phenomeno-
logical, first-person, and internal conception of mind to a highly social one
(though recognition of intersubjectivity has been in evidence throughout).
224 the forerunner of all th ings

Humans are porous in nature; quick to anger from others’ incursions on

us; shaped by culture, family life, and habit; and implicated in complicated
histories and relationships with particular others. As long as we are not yet
arhats, our minds and actions do not stand apart from these relationships,
but are made up of them. It is in exposing the fiction of autonomy that the
Buddhist sources can do some of their most important work on modern
conceptions of ethics and their accompanying anachronistic readings of
ancient Buddhist ideas.
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 Index

Abhidhamma Anuruddha, 12
and Buddhist Studies, 2, 88, 90n21, anusayas (biases/latent tendencies), 50,
129–30 120–22
Buddhaghosa’s approach to, 90 Aquinas, Thomas, 22
emphasis on ultimate matters (para- arhats (awakened people), 51, 191, 208
mattha), 87, 90 and abandoning, 116
genre characteristics of, 31–32, 41n17, and cetanā, 59–60, 63–65, 81, 103,
58–59, 83, 85, 91, 96, 119, 133–36, 195–202, 218
170, 185, 233 depravities (āsavas) and, 119
and impersonal analysis, 84 and false claims of arhatship,
on karma, 107 165–67
listing as method in, 85, 88–89, freedom of, 221–22, 224
99–100 and karmic inevitability, 162–63
and meditation, 89 neither dark nor bright karma of,
origin of, 184 60–62
practice as therapy, 87 lack of intersubjectivity of, 213
as training in higher wisdom, 140 and minor violations of vinaya, 146
and unconscious mind, 119–21 and neutral cetāsikas, 92
absences, presence of, 76–80, 101, 143, Aristotle, 19
218 āsavas (depravities) 38, 53, 101
and action as abstinence, 113–19 four types of, 119
action. See karma and Vinaya/Saṅgha, 140–43
admonishment, 126, 154, 169–80, Ashoka, King, 132–33
212n40, 219 Atthasālinī, 9, 55, 58, 101, 107, 184
See also intersubjectivity Augustine, St., 21–26
Aṅguttara-nikāya, 60, 65n100, 68, 78, 138 Aung, Shwe Zan, 18
iii.415 “it is intention (cetanā ) that I author function. See Foucault
call action (kamma),” 3, 20, 37, 40,
132, 107 Babbu Jātaka, 192–93
See also Intention Sutta, No Need for Benares, King of, 206
an Intention Sutta Boastful Monks, 165–69
240 Index

Bodhi, Bhikkhu, 44n24, 46n31, 49–50, Cakkavatti Sutta, 62, 67, 76

84, 128n136 Carrithers, Michael, 19
bodily actions casuistry or case-based reasoning, 149
of arhats, 61n89 cetanā
as cetanās, 72, 108, 115 arranges, collects, accumulates, 39,
kusala factors (dhammas) of, 94 49, 61, 103–06, 108, 110, 115, 131,
intention and doorway of the body 217–18, 223
41–42, 48, 68, 69, 109–10 of arhats. See kiriya
meditation, and repulsiveness of, as constructive activity, 18, 29, 31–33,
161–65 42, 47, 49–53, 60–63, 75, 80–81,
regulated by Vinaya, 32, 133–34, 158 106, 110–12, 128, 133, 147, 217–18, 221
sex, consent, and, 158 (see also saṅkhāras)
size and culpability in, 69 Buddhaghosa’s Abhidhamma defini-
three akusala courses of, 65–70 tion of, 102–106
and training precepts (sikkhāpada), deliberate or not, 40
113–14 as “intention” 48
See also khandhas location of. See three doorways of
Brahmajāla Sutta, 53 action
brahmavihāras, 76, 101 as mental (citta, nāma), not material
Bratman, Michael, 28, 42, 106n63 (rūpa), 109
Buddha Path versus desire realm cetanās,
as omniscient, 13, 33, 54, 162, 188–90, 62–63, 75, 77
202, 205, 212, 214 as synonym of saṅkhāra, 43, 46
and other teachers, 41n15, 64 cetasikas (mental factors) 72, 84, 87,
past lives of, 184, 186–87 (see also 103–4, 108–9, 185
Jātakas) Dhammasaṅgaṇī’s lists of, 91–102
as revolutionary thinker, 3, 19–20 as good, bad, or neutral by associa-
words of. See buddhavacana tion, 91–92, 96
Buddha Dīpaṅkara, 184 list of, as open ended, 99–100
Buddha Kassapa, 199 citta (mind/ thought)
Buddhadatta, 12 comprised of mental factors (cetasi-
Buddhaghosa kas), 87
editor and translator of commentar- cultivation of, 8n11
ies, 6–11 as a dhamma, 84, 87, 93
importance of, 2, 7–12 as distinguished from material (rūpa)
life of, 6–8 factors (dhammas) 84, 109
as a reader, 4–16. 30–33, 35, 58–59, as intention, 32, 134–36, 146, 157, 164,
66, 71–72, 85–87, 89–91, 132–44, 168
149–57, 162, 169, 181–82, 184–85, temporal extension of, 87–88
222–23 as conscious awareness, 91–92, 119–21
works attributed to, 6–9, 186n6 in Vinaya and Abhidhamma analysis,
buddhavacana (Buddha’s words), 4, 6, 91, 134–36
14, 85–87, 90n21, 135–36, 186, 204 cognitive science, 2, 17, 33, 190–91
 Index 241

Collins, Steven, 11, 20n43, 38n9, 70n110, dhammas (factors), 84

145n35 See also, cetasikas, citta, bodily actions,
confession, 133, 145, 170, 173, kusala/akusala, nibbāna
176–78 Dhammasaṅgaṇī, 54n63, 85–86, 88,
conscience, 20, 24, 30, 177 91–2, 98–99, 100n42, 102, 113, 119,
consciousness 121–23
generated by ignorance and inten- 56 mental factors (cetasikas) charted
tion, 50 93–95
See also citta Dhaniya, 159–61, 166, 169
Cousins, Lance, 57–59, 63 Dharmaśrī, 118, 121n114
Cullavagga, 171, 174, 178 Dhirasekera, Jotiya, 138–40, 153n55, 178
culpability, 68–70, 133, 135–36, 148 Dīgha-nikāya, 34, 54
associated with object, 69–70 Dihle, Albrecht, 22
and deliberate action, 163–64
an event parsed for, 110–11 ethics
and lokavajja (universally blamewor- action-based, 66
thy) acts, 146 character-based, 66, 70
and paṇṇattivaja (blameworthy Aristotelian, 19, 35
because of monastic rules) acts, 146 Buddhist, 2, 19, 23, 26, 30, 37n7, 66,
See also intention 79, 130, 219, 221–4
cultural psychology, 33, 190 consequentialism, 130
deontology, 130
dāsa sīla. See ten good and bad deeds Foucault’s aspects of, 180n123,
dependent origination, 21, 25, 43, 49, and intention, 29
50, 52, 79, 81, 119, 139 lay, 90
Depravities. See āsavas moral naturalism, 66
Devdas, Nalini, 21, 47, 79, 115n95, 121, Murdoch on, 219–22
134n5 neuroethics, 35n4, 55
Dhamma/the Buddha’s Teaching particularist and case-specific, 35n4,
endless nature of, 13–14, 86–87 150, 211, 214
how to understand the, 124–25, 174, and skillfulness, 57
215 virtue, 130
Pāli canon and commentary, 4, 8, 10,
12, 30, 86n8, 186–87 factors. See dhammas
preserving the, 142–43 fear, 101–2
and vinaya experts, 137–39 feelings (vedanās), 27, 32, 38, 49n48, 51,
See also buddhavacana 80, 83, 107, 134
Dhammapada, 9–10, 181–82, 185–87, as a cetasika, 92, 93
192–94, 206 and kusala/akusala action, 72–73, 75
Dhammapada-aṭṭhakathā, 9–10, 181n1, and moral psychology, 43, 74
182, 185–86, 195, 199, 214–15 Fiering, Norman, 23–24
Dhammapāla, 12, 35, 39, 43n23, 64, folk psychology or theories of intention,
116n96 15, 17, 129, 135, 183n4, 189, 190, 223
242 Index

Foucault, Michel and culpability and responsibility,

and author function, 10 69, 133–34, 136, 146–51, 155, 157–58,
and ethical substance, 179–80 164, 218
and technologies of the self, 133, 172 dialogic or narrative sense of, 15, 33,
Four Noble Truths, 38, 61n88 183–85, 188–91, 194–95, 202, 205,
Frauwallner, Erich, 88 211–13, 219
free will. See moral agency; will English term, 21, 28, 103, 134, 136
frivolous speech, 65, 68 good and bad. See kusala/akusala
Mahābhārata and Rāmāyana as, 70 Jain views of, 41n15,
Fuller, Paul, 19 legal concept, 15, 136, 151
Western philosophical concepts of, 15,
Gethin, Rupert, 88–89, 99, 101n52 17, 21, 28–29, 42, 91, 106, 111, 129
gift-giving, 41–2, 45n29, 68, 72, 111–12, Vinaya approach to, 15, 32–33, 42n20,
126–27, 135, 178, 192, 200–202, 130, 132–36, 144, 145, 181, 218–19
209–210 Intention Sutta, 40–46, 52, 58, 61n89,
Gombrich, Richard, 19–20, 57n76, 65n99, 107
118n102 intentionality, 28, 29
good deeds. See sīla interpretative and reading practices,
Guenther, Herbert, 20, 26 3–6, 11, 14–7, 19, 89, 149, 182,
Gyatso, Janet, 155, 158 189–90
See also Buddhaghosa as a reader,
Hadot, Pierre, 3–6, 14 Hadot
Hallisey, Charles, 13, 35n4, 90n21 intersubjectivity, 40, 43–45, 125, 179,
Hobbes, Thomas, 24, 27 187, 194–195, 197, 205, 213, 215, 219,
Hutto, Daniel, 183n4 223
Huxley, Andrew, 149, 159, 161,
210–11 Jātaka/jātaka
and Abhidhamma, 184
Intention. See also cetanā as distinct method of teaching/
and absence or abandoning, 61–62, knowing, 16, 181–92
75, 76–80, 113–17, 131 commentaries on, 9–10, 182, 185–87
Abhidhamma approaches to, 31–2, 85, and first-person voice, 209
129–30, 135, 184 and genre, 58, 182, 187
of arhats 65, 195–98, 202, 213, 218 and sadness, 193n17
(see also kiriya intentions) and Sutta piṭaka, 182
an author’s, 5, 14, 29 and Vinaya, 182
as central component of karma, See also Babbu Jātaka, Kurudhamma
1–3, 20, 30, 36, 37, 39, 40, 80–81, Jātaka, Tittha Jātaka
108–11, 117–18, 132–33, 179–80, 181,
221 Kālāma Sutta, 35–37, 56, 80, 133
as choice, 1, 18–22, 24, 30, 52, 57n76, kammapathā. See ten good and bad
83, 105, 128–30, 195, 219–22 deeds
 Index 243

Kāṇa, 192–200, 205, 213–14 kusalacetanā, 62

Kant, Immanuel, 5, 25, 55n66, 180n123, kusala and skillfulness, 9n14, 56n70,
220 57
karma (kamma) and empiricism, 56, see also Kālāma
Brahmanical views of, 3 Sutta
dark, bright, both dark and bright, and genre, 58
and neither dark nor bright types historical development of terms,
of, 60–63, 75, 107–8 57
cessation of, 40 and meditation, 62
as cetanā 3, 39- and merit, 62n93
cetanā as origin of, 40 and nibbāna, 59, 61, 62
Jain views of, 41 and the Noble Path, 59–65, 75
sense contact as origin of, 39 nonmoral aspects, 55, 56, 58
as solely a mental process, 36, 38 and rebirth, 34–35, 39, 44, 49n44,
three types (physical, verbal, and 60–62
mental) of, 40 and saṅkhāras, 58
Karunadasa, Y., 90 and sīla, 114n87
Karunaratna, W.S., 18 and soteriology, 54, 56
Kathāvatthu, 43n22, 107n66, 109, 121 undeliberate kusala intentions, 58
Keith, A.B., 47 See also karma, ten good and bad
Keown, Damien, 19, 20n40, 57n74, deeds
61n89, 61–2n89
khandhas (five” aggregates” comprising language
a person), 38, 43, 46, 48–49, 51, conventional and ultimate/absolute,
81, 135 90, 105, 135
killing/murder, 66–67, 75, 77, 110, 146, Pāli, 8
194 legalistic discourse, see Vinaya-piṭaka
abstention from, 113–114, 116–117, 145 lists, 38, 85, 87, 99–100
murderous monks, 161–65 as mothers, 88–89
kiriya (fruitless) intentions/karmas, Buddhaghosa’s explication of, 90
63–65, 81, 103, 108, 115n95, 198, Little Wayman, 206
213 Locke, John, 24, 27
See also Path cetanā
Kurudhamma Jātaka, 209–212 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 183, 213
kusala/akusala (good and bad intentions, Mahābhārata. See frivolous speech
karmas, conduct, factors, etc.) Mahāvaṃsa, 7, 9, 11
Abhidhamma analysis, 54n63, 55, 58, Mahāvihāra tradition, 8–11
91–95, 98–100 Majjhima-nikāya, 40, 41n15, 43, 60n82,
and children, 45n29 67, 72, 76, 107
bad factors, 92, 98–9, 101, 119 Majjhimanikāya-aṭṭhakathā, 39, 60–1,
definitions of, 54–59 63
good factors, 97–100, 138–139 McDermott, James, 20
244 Index

meditation, 57, 62, 88–89, 100, 128, Western ideas and systems of, 2, 15,
163n81 16, 22, 23, 25–27, 29
jhānas, 64n90, 116, 139, 162, 165 motivation, 1, 3, 25–28, 31–33, 37, 50, 80,
vinaya as preliminary to, 139, 142–43, 81, 83, 101–2, 106, 112, 122, 136, 170,
177 176–77, 194, 218, 221
on the body, 161–163 attributing and discerning, 169–70,
mental actions 176–77, 189–90, 206, 208, 212, 219
and Abhidhamma, 41n17 as cetanā, 18, 27
as cetanās by Sautrāntikas, 109 culpability and, 148, 150, 155–57, 160,
as cetasikas, 72, 108, 115 169, 180
in comparison with bodily and as hetu or mūla, 27–28, 68, 72–73, 75,
speech actions, 41 80, 97, 106, 108–9, 115, 128, 140,
intention and the doorway of mind, 221, 223
41–42 western notions of, 17, 23, 25–27
not regulated by Vinaya, 33, 134, 141, mūla/hetu (three toxic roots or moti-
180 vations), 27–28, 68, 72–74, 98,
six types of, 42 108, 140
three akusala courses of, 65, 72 kusala roots, 75, 98, 108
three kusala courses of, 98 See also motivation
Meyers, Karin, 37n7 Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, 149–50
Migalaṇḍaka, 161, 163n80 Mumford, Stan Royal, 196–97
Milindapañho, 45n29, 49, 68n108, mundane and supramundane (lokiya
92n26, 146, 198 and lokuttara) thought and action,
modernist interpretations of Buddhism, 53–54
19, 24n58, 35, 37n7 and Path karma/cetanā, 63
Moggallāna, 171–72 and Vinaya, 136
moral agency, 1–2, 5, 219–21 Murdoch, Iris, 219–22
of arhats, 213
and Buddhist genres, 15, 31, 33 nibbāna, 45n29, 49, 54, 59, 172, 192,
and children, 45, 201–2 208
and free will 20, 24, 26, 81 and abandoning all intentions, 60–61
and Western thought, 21–30 reached by silā/vinaya, 78–79, 116, 138
not a single faculty 52, 84, 92, 99, an unconstructed dhamma, 84,
100, 102 88n14,
See also intention, will, motivation No Need for an Intention Sutta, 78, 138
moral phenomenology, 1–2, 15, 32–33, Noble Eightfold Path, 38, 39, 51, 59–65,
37, 83, 88, 91–102, 130, 134 75, 81
moral psychology, 2, 15 as abandoning, 77–78
Buddhist, 2, 16, 19n36, 27, 30, 32, 43, nonself, Buddhist theories of, 25, 51,
79, 85, 91, 96–7, 119, 130–31, 187, 87
221 Nussbaum, Martha, 29
Vinaya and, 96, 130, 169–70 Nyanaponika, 84, 92, 97n29, 98
 Index 245

pārājikas (monastic “defeats,” entailing Sāleyyaka Sutta, 66

disrobing) 145, 148, 150 Samantapāsādikā, 137, 139, 149
sex leading to, 151–58 Sammohavinodanī, 100, 111
stealing leading to, 159–61, 165–69 saṃsāra, 120, 185
killing leading to, 161–65 and saṅkhāras/cetanās, 49–51, 60, 62
Parivāra, 137–38, 143–44, 146, 170, 173, See also arhats, āsavas, mūla/hetu,
174–76 nibbāna
Path cetanā, 62–64, 77 Saṃyutta, 46, 50, 103n57
See also kiriya saṅkhāras (mental “constructions”),
patiency and agency of intention/ 46–52, 80–81, 119, 217
karma, 48, 64, 81, 120, 165, 167, 213 among the five aggregates, 38n9, 135
Pāṭimokkha, 138–40, 144–45, 148, 171, and arhats, 60
177, 178n120 constructs the five aggregates, 46
Paṭisambhidāmagga, 114–15 good and bad, 43n23
Pavāraṇā, 141, 175, 178 and objects, 72, 100n41, 105–106
Payutto, Phra, 19, 47, 77, 98 and Path cetanā, 62–63
pragmatic methods as synonym of cetanā, 43, 46
and moral questions, 35 Sāriputta, 66, 140, 187, 200–204
and vinaya, 137, 150, 169, 176, 180 Sarvāstivāda, 109, 117–18, 121
prompted and unprompted thought, Schopen, Gregory, 137n14, 149–50
43–44, 123–127 senses, six, 51, 105, 123
psychoanalysis, 213, 221 shame, 135, 175
hiri and ottappa, 47, 94, 96, 97–8,
Rāhula, 56, 129n139, 151–52 167n91, 185
Rāmāyana. See frivolous speech lajjā, 166, 174
realms of existence, 39, 43n23, 103 Shorter Analysis of Action Sutta
remorse/worry (kukkucca or vivikicchā), (Dīghanikāya), 34, 54
165–67 Shweder, Richard, 190
Ashoka’s, 132–33 sīla (morality, moral precepts) 8n11, 53,
as a bad cetasika, 95, 101 57, 62, 65n100, 114–16, 137–40, 143,
freedom from, (or nonremorse), 145, 166, 210
78–79, 116, 138, 154 as absence of bad thought and action,
as a hindrance/blockage, and defile- 77–79, 115–16, 143
ment, 120, 167 as habit, 59, 126, 141, 145
and moral empiricism, 166 and vinaya precepts, 138–40, 143, 154,
in stories, 185, 210 163
and subjectivity, 167, 174 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, 35n4, 55
Sudinna’s, 153–54 soteriology and ethics, 29n74, 38,
in Vinaya, 133, 138, 153–56, 161, 49, 53–54, 56–57, 61, 79, 138, 202,
166–67, 177, 179–80 218
Rhys Davids, Caroline, 18 speech actions
Ricoeur, Paul, 13–14 of arhats, 61n89
Rosen, Lawrence, 189 as cetanās, 72, 108, 115
246 Index

speech actions (Cont.) narratives and, 183, 187–89, 191,

four akusala courses of, 65, 67–68, 194–98, 200, 204–5, 208, 212, 219
70–74, 76, 109–10, 113 See also temporal issues
as intention, abstinence, and sound, Tissa, Moggaliputta, 133, 135
11n85 Tissa, the child prodigy, 200–201
intention and doorway of speech Tittha Jātaka, 188
41–42, 109–10
regulated by Vinaya, 32, 133–34 Upāli Sutta, 39, 41n15
right speech, 53, 77, 113 Uposatha, 132–33, 141, 171–72, 175, 177
and training precepts (sikkhāpada), Uppalavaṇṇā, 157, 197–98
114
Stalnaker, Aaron, 22 Vasubandhu, 92n26, 117, 121
Sudinna 141, 151–58, 160–61, 166, 169 Vibhaṅga, 46n31, 85, 113–14 121–22, 166
Sutta on Right View, 61n87, 66 See also Suttavibhaṅga
Suttanta. See Sutta-piṭaka vinaya (discipline), 138
Sutta-piṭaka, 16, 34–82, 179 as absence, 143
genre characteristics of, 30–31, 58–59, and Christian counterparts, 176
85, 122n118, 129n139, 133, 140, 182 as fourfold, 142
Suttavibhaṅga, 86n8, 139, 140, 147, 148, and meditation, 163
152, 158, 164, 169 and narrative, 149, 182
as rules, 144
Tambadāṭika (“Red Beard”), 203–5 and sīla, 138
temporal issues and soteriology, 138–39
and the Buddha’s omniscience, 188 and vinaya experts, 137–39, 156, 170
and duration of a thought, 87–88 vinayapāli. See Vinaya-piṭaka
intention does not precede action, 42 Vinaya-piṭaka 31, 132–180
and karmic fruit, 27, 26, 28, 39, 41, and Christian counterparts, 176–77
45, 116, 124 genre characteristics of, 31–33, 41n17,
and karmically fruitless action. See 90, 96, 130, 133, 135–36, 144, 150,
kiriya 170, 180, 219
See also time as “vinayapāli,” 143n30
ten good and bad deeds, 65–76 virtue ethics, 130
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 145, 146n40, Visuddhimagga, 7–8, 11, 139, 163, 185
147–48, 161, 178
three doorways of action, 39, 41, 48, 68, Wagner, Roy, 127
69, 109–10, 123–24, 158n68 Weber, Max, 149, 211
time Wickramasinghe, Martin, 193n17,
work of, 167, 176, 184, 187–88, 205, 208
208, 219 will, 1, 17–26, 128n136, 176, 220
The Forerunner of All Things
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