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The Conditioning of Care

This chapter examines questions of intention, emotion, and self-formation from the vantage point of contemporary interpersonal norms in Thailand and their interestingly direct Pali antecedents. To make sense of the patterns found there, it probes notions of intentionality, agency, and (non)self in the writings of Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century commentator on the Theravada Pali Canon. These notions resonate with karmically inflected understandings of care at intra- and interpersonal levels in the contemporary world. In particular, the chapter describes a Theravada “theory of mind” that distinguishes among acts of body, speech, and mind, but locates intention and karma in each. By simultaneously collapsing and expanding the Cartesian mind–body dualism, this tradition puts great importance on subjective experience as a key to wholesome karmic action; and yet, subjective experience itself is not the focus of cultivation. Internal orientation is not promoted or refined in ways one might come to expect through Western confessional “technologies of the self.” Rather, this tradition guides people to refrain from certain actions and states, with ideal practices characterized by the absence of key defilements. What reads at first as a holding in of, or a distraction from, painful emotional states ultimately reflects a highly developed and centuries-old moral psychology with incredible continuities evident throughout contemporary society.