AGENCY AND THE ETHICS OF MASSIVELY CUMULATIVE CAUSALITY

We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world …” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

CIORAN WAS a cynic and rejected the possibility of salvation, but his reading of Buddhism here is apt. We are trapped, and destined to suffer, by the fact of our birth. Our suffering has, in fact, beginningless causes, and is properly conditioned to continue endlessly. What’s more, the Buddhist denial of the personal self—ordinarily the seat of freedom—seems to deny as well the possibility of meaningful human agency. Vasubandhu, as we have seen, is repeatedly found denying agency—even agency in a single momentary event. Yet salvation is possible. It is proposed not through a new kind of agent, but through the very causal, karmic effects that have kept us imprisoned for so long. This chapter seeks to explain how this can work.

For Buddhists, the kind of agency that is available to us sits very close to moral nihilism, but rather than being a rejection of morality, it is best read as a reframing of ordinary action so as to take in the full range of causes and conditions in which one participates—both more than and less than the imagined self. Morally significant acts may, on the one hand, take place within causally efficacious, individual moments of self-aware action (cetanā), and on the other hand, provide a limitless potential for gradually transforming nearly deterministic nihilism into boundless freedom and beneficence. This chapter will interrogate the moral underpinnings of the views of causality and knowledge discussed thus far. We will see how turning away from the agent self and adopting a stance of epistemic humility allows one to focus on the true causes of suffering and the true potential for freedom.

BUDDHISM AND RESPONSIBILITY

Who is responsible for my actions? Ordinarily the answer would be, “I am.” If I kill someone, I’m the one to put in prison. If I write a popular novel, I’m the one to get the royalties. But how can this be understood without a real “self”? For Buddhists, there is no aspect of the person that is the same—exactly the same—when “I” kill and “I” go to prison. By the time the murder trial comes around I might well regret what I’ve done. By the time I’m on my book tour, I’ve forgotten the names of the minor characters in my own novels. Should a regretful murderer have to go to jail? Does a forgetful novelist deserve royalties? We might say so for conventional purposes, to discourage murder and encourage good writing, but the simple truth is that if there is no self, then there’s no one who is truly responsible him- or herself. There can’t be, because there isn’t really anyone at all, responsible or not. Given the complex causal chains through which every event is conditioned, the responsibility for every action may be spread across a wide range of potential culprits.

The Buddhist doctrine of karma therefore provides a full and sophisticated explanation of moral culpability, but it leaves one wondering whether it is really very fair, if the one who is punished is not the one who has done evil.1 What makes murder punishable, and novel-writing praiseworthy? (The two extremes of human action.) Most scholars today would say that morality-talk, for Buddhists, takes a descriptive perspective that is only conventionally, but not ultimately, real.² We use conventions of language and law to impose rules on conventional persons who, we know, are really only conceptual constructs. You don’t need to declare the ultimate truth of the author’s identity through time just to know where to send the royalty check.

Yet for many observers of Buddhism and many modern Buddhists, such a view is very unsatisfying, because by denying the ultimate reality of moral agents, it seems to undermine the genuine effectiveness of moral actions: I may not be exactly the same person when I’m in a murderous rage as I am when I’m put on trial years later, but such conceptual abstractions pale against the tangible reality of the knife I plunged into another person’s body, and the bars that slam shut when I’m finally put away for good. These are real things—knives and bars—and the fact that their moral significance does not exist at the ultimate level seems to deny that their relationship is morally significant. The denial of the ultimate reality of the person seems, then, to deny the moral quality of moral actions, which are by their nature temporally extended.

The response I will propose in this chapter in order to alleviate this feeling is to notice that (based upon a reading of Vasubandhu) although the person has no ultimate existence, what is “substantially” real gains that status by its participation in causal relationships. There is a very definite causal connection between the knife and the bars. What we conventionally take to be a person is a string of events integrated only as a causal stream. I may have no ultimate unity, but the causal results of my actions have ramifications within “my” causal continuum. Still, I place the “my” in quotation marks to highlight the primary difficulty to be addressed here. If I do not exist as an ultimately real self, then there is no single entity that may be named as the murder victim and another called the perpetrator. To distinguish “myself” from others, and so to privilege the interests of my own continuum over those of others is, to put it bluntly, the quintessential mistake of living beings. Yet it would appear that without such a distinction, we are left without any ground for moral attribution.

Vasubandhu has provided, if not a solution, a way of thinking about this quandary, which will be our topic in this chapter. Vasubandhu is, of course, always an advocate of the view that we are each merely a series of ever-changing parts that come together to generate the illusory appearance of a self. As I will explain, however, Vasubandhu nonetheless characterizes the universe as quite powerfully charged with moral significance. The moral significance of the universe, it turns out, does not depend upon the existence of temporally extended events. Instead, every element that makes up the person, moment to moment, is individually morally charged in accordance with its orientation toward or away from liberation (nirvāṇa). Each element of reality, each dharma, is accordingly either “defiled” (kliṣṭa) or “undefiled” (akliṣṭa). As Vasubandhu writes in the AKBh, all dharmas are “defiled” except those that are on the path, or conducive to nirvāṇa.3 Thus, while persons are not by nature morally culpable, or morally charged, the elements that make up individuals, and which lead the personal continuum either toward nirvāṇa or away from it, are.

This way of putting things makes Buddhism seem pragmatist, because morality is relative, in a sense, to the pragmatic goal of attaining nirvāṇa. We might be inclined to think that this is countered by the notion of nirvāṇa as an unmoving, literally “unconditioned” (asaṃskṛta) goal, which provides an ultimate, not merely pragmatist, test of morality.⁴ Yet for Vasubandhu, as we know, what is “unconditioned” is by definition disconnected from the causal flow of conditioned entities, and so must be admitted to be a mere conceptual construction, not an ultimately real entity. Furthermore, as we have already seen of causality more generally, the notion of an entity as placing one on a causally conditioned path to liberation is clearly a conceptual construction. If change is itself unreal, surely moral valuation that is dependent upon change is unreal as well.

Yet this way of undermining our ordinary concepts of morality is hardly unique to Vasubandhu. Even without Vasubandhu’s denial of the ultimate reality of change and nirvāṇa, I think it is important to acknowledge that the Buddhist denial of the conventional self veers quite close to moral nihilism.⁵ For the significance granted to momentary events on the path to nirvāṇa may, when viewed from the proper perspective, compensate for the loss of meaning of an ordinary life. But momentary events do not ever return meaning to conventional constructs; on the contrary, Buddhist teachings emphasize, in a very extreme way, the meaninglessness of ordinary cyclic existence (saṃsāra). Except in a particular interpretation of Madhyamaka philosophy—which I believe postdates Vasubandhu—Buddhist thinkers do not resuscitate or enliven the value of ordinary lived experience.⁶ As a simple example, I offer the following humorous poem by the much-beloved Tibetan saint, Milarepa:

In the beginning a daughter is a smiling little goddess,

Imperiously monopolizing your best possessions.

In the middle, she endlessly asks her due:

She openly demands things from her father,

And steals them from her mother on the sly.

Never satisfied with what she’s given,

She’s a source of despair to her kindly parents.

In the end, she’s a red-faced ogress:

At best, she’s an asset to someone else,

At worst, she’ll bring calamity on you.

How frustrating she is, this ravaging monster!

I’ve cast off this incurable sorrow.

I don’t want a daughter who’ll lead me to ruin.7

Granted, Milarepa never met my daughter. But the purpose of this poem, and similar teachings about sons, and friends, and other loved ones, is to place these apparent goods within a larger context that drains them of value—really, exposes their lack of ultimate value. Hearing this, and thinking about it, I am supposed to realize that my attachment to my daughter is deluding me and preventing me from renouncing my home and family and pursuing nirvāṇa. But from a conventional perspective, the actual perspective from which I view my own life, to see my daughter (or my son, or my wife, or my work, etc.) as a fetter would be to deny what I experience to be the meaning of my life. This is a stark example, and that makes for some of the humor in Milarepa’s poem. Surely there must be some positive karmic benefit from caring for a daughter.

For traditional Buddhists, however, there is a genuine divide between the ultimately meaningless pursuits guided by what are considered worldly concerns—whether involving this life or the next—and a life with purpose, namely, a life where one has renounced such concerns and taken up the path to liberation. Renunciation, therefore, as the crux of the Buddhist path, serves to illustrate well the location of meaning within a Buddhist worldview. With regard to ordinary life, it appears to be largely negative; but that is only part of the story. For this reason, before returning to Vasubandhu’s discussion of karma and dependent origination, I will take a detour and examine the most famous and widely discussed Buddhist text on the meaning and purpose of renunciation, the Sāmaññaphalasutta from the Pāli canon.

LEVELS OF FREEDOM IN THE SĀMAÑÑAPHALASUTTA

In the Scripture on the Benefits of Renunciation (Sāmaññaphalasutta [SPS]), King Ajatasattu asks the Buddha whether there is any benefit to becoming a renunciant—a homeless, wandering seeker—that is evident in this life.8 The question shows us that the king is somewhat cynical and spiritually deficient. He is not interested in any future or potentially invisible benefits; he is concerned about this world, and he is not ready to trust any teachers until they can provide evidence that the life of a renunciant is worthwhile. But it is also a pragmatic question about the lifestyle that the Buddha advocates. Carpentry and soldiering make something of a man, help him gain wealth and respect, raise a family. What does renunciation do for him?

The Buddha’s response is to speak of freedom. He asks the king how he would treat a slave in his keeping who decided to become a renunciant. Would the king recapture the new monk and order him to be a slave once more? No, the king admits. In such a case, the king would bow down before the former slave and present him with gifts. Well, the Buddha says, there’s a benefit you can see in this life. Then he asks the king how he would treat a taxpayer in his realm who decided to become a renunciant. Would the king order the new monk to go back to work and resume paying taxes? No, the king admits again. The renunciant is free from the burden of taxation.

Freedom from slavery and taxation are political liberties. These are examples in a language the king can understand, and they get the king’s attention. He asks for more examples, and the Buddha shifts from speaking of political freedoms to what we might consider psychological freedoms—freedoms from cares and concerns, and freedom from guilt. He speaks of a householder who, after encountering the Buddha, says to himself that whereas “household life is close and dusty, the homeless life is free as air. It is not easy, living the household life, to live the fully perfected holy life, purified and polished like a conch shell.” So the householder leaves home and joins the monastic community. Then, eventually, as the Buddha says, “he dwells restrained by the restraint of the rules, persisting in right behavior, seeing danger in the slightest faults, observing the commitments he has taken on regarding body, deed, and word, devoted to the skilled and purified life, perfected in morality, with the sense-doors guarded, skilled in mindful awareness and content.”⁹

Now Ajatasattu has killed his own father, meaning he’s a regicide, and he needs a good lesson on morality. The Buddha goes into quite some detail about what it means for the mendicant to be “perfected in morality.” At the end of it, he summarizes the this-worldly benefit of virtuous behavior quite pointedly for the king:

Just as a duly anointed Khattiya king, having conquered his enemies, by that very fact sees no danger from any side, so the monk, on account of his morality, sees no danger anywhere. He experiences in himself the blameless bliss that comes from maintaining this Ariyan morality. In this way, sire, he is perfected in morality.10

Earlier in the Sutta, Ajatasattu had discussed both his restlessness and his fear of his enemies—so it is clear that the king is tormented both by his own political instability and by his lack of virtue, and should understand very well the appeal of the psychological freedom expressed as the “blameless bliss.” This is a very deep psychological freedom that comes from confidence in one’s own moral rectitude.

The Buddha then explains the other points too—guarding the doors of the senses, mindfulness and clear awareness, and finally, contentedness:

And how is a monk contented? Here a monk is satisfied with a robe to protect his body, with alms to satisfy his stomach, and having accepted sufficient, he goes on his way. Just as a bird with wings flies hither and thither, burdened by nothing but its wings, so he is satisfied.¹¹

It is difficult to think of a more apt analogy for freedom than that of being free as a bird, but the former householder’s path of increasing liberation is still only beginning. As his meditative skills advance he is able to conquer the five hindrances, attain various blissful meditative states and supranormal powers, and eventually reach the ultimate freedom: nirvāṇa.

The Buddha uses some remarkable analogies to explain the experience of being freed from the five hindrances. He says that (1) conquering worldly desires is like being freed from a debt; (2) conquering ill will and hatred is like being freed from a long sickness; (3) conquering sloth and torpor is like being freed from prison; (4) conquering restlessness and anxiety is like being freed from slavery; and (5) conquering uncertainty and doubt is like being freed from the anxiety that comes during a journey through a desolate and dangerous wasteland. Each of these analogies deserves more attention than I can give here, but I list them to emphasize once more the theme of freedom, in this case freedom from the various burdens of our ordinary mental life. For the Buddha, on the far side of that liberation, our ordinary mind seems, by comparison, imprisoned, enslaved, sick, deep in debt, and in constant anxiety.

My purpose here is to show how we may read the Buddhist path to nirvāṇa not simply as a path to freedom, but as a path of increasing freedoms, where each new form of liberation paves the way for higher attainments. Ever-increasing attainments of virtue, knowledge, power, and bliss are themselves understood as new freedoms that may be exercised toward attaining still further liberating transformations. Many of the higher powers attributed to Buddhas and near-Buddhas, such as the abilities to create multiple bodies, to fly, and to swim in land or walk on water, express freedom as well: freedom from the physical limitations of embodiment.

The SPS thus affirms the value of freedom at every level, including ordinary political and psychological freedoms, as well as the self-mastery and moral control that are characteristic of Platonic and Augustinian views of free will.12 Its main affirmations, however, go well beyond these traditional freedoms to assert the possibility, and the benefits, of pursuing freedom from essentially all mental and physical limitations. This is the positive, optimistic side of Buddhist teachings. The Buddhist path is one of limitless liberation.¹³

After King Ajatasattu retires from the Buddha’s presence at the end of the SPS, however, the Buddha tells the assembled monks that were the king not a regicide, a murderer of his own father, he would have attained the “dhamma eye” that very night while listening to the Buddha’s teachings. That is, the king would have had a significant realization of the meaning of the Buddha’s teachings, which would have put him firmly on the path to liberation. But since the king was “damaged,” as the Buddha says, that was simply not possible.¹⁴ Because of his previous deeds, because of his accumulated negative karma, the path of liberation was apparently not yet open to him. Even a Buddha could not liberate him.

We are left, then, with two sides of a coin. Extraordinary freedoms are possible. Yet ordinary beings are subject to karmic conditioning that prevents them from seeing things clearly and that clouds their judgments with intense emotions such as desire and rage. This is especially true of those who are morally compromised. Even a Buddha cannot open their “dhamma eyes.” Ignorance leads to bad choices with negative consequences that reinforce the ignorance. Cycles of suffering, rebirth, and redeath are thereby perpetuated without our knowledge and with hardly anyone having any truly effective ways out. It appears that what we take to be ordinary freedoms are misleading, if not simply unreal. The Buddha described this cycle of rebirths in causal terms—his theory of dependent origination—that have the ring of inevitability and causal determination. Sentient beings go wherever the winds of their karma blow them. It seems very much like, at least for the most part, living beings are not free.

And yet, as I will argue, the Buddhist theory of dependent origination is not metaphysical determinism. On the contrary, while Buddhists believe that freedom for ordinary beings is quite restricted, and that we are generally deluded about the meaning of our own lives and actions, freedom and meaning are never entirely lost in the viciously circular causality of saṃsāra. The Buddhist view of karma is, rather, premised on the idea that every mental event—every moment in our mind—is invested with the potential to initiate a line of transformation. As we will see, this sense of possibility is explicitly woven into Vasubandhu’s philosophy of mind as he describes it in the AKBh. The freedom it grants is minute and momentary, and appears to leave very little room for what we take to be an ordinary meaningful life. Yet it is the wedge that can open up the mind to a universe of literally infinite freedom.

In line with the ideas discussed in previous chapters, we will see that the most quintessential, decisive “freedom” is the freedom from false views. Our narration of the story of Ajatasattu above began with the Buddha’s instruction on the benefits of renunciation. But the story includes a preface. Before meeting the Buddha, Ajatasattu had asked the same question of numerous other renunciant masters, none of whom gave him a satisfying answer. He says of each that it was “just as if on being asked about a mango he were to describe a breadfruit-tree, or on being asked about a breadfruit-tree he were to describe a mango.”15 The English expression is “apples and oranges,” but the point is clear; the other teachers failed to address the king’s question. Remember, the king’s question was a practical one: what is the benefit of this practice? What all the other teachers provided were abstract, doctrinal statements, and the result was that none of the other teachers engaged the king, who left each previous teacher disappointed.

Only the Buddha provided direct, practical answers to the king’s question, rude though it was. The Buddha, then, is not able to open the king’s “dhamma eye,” because of his karmic defilements. But he is able, uniquely, to move the king forward. King Ajatasattu is unable to see the truth. But he is agitated by the world as it is, and he is interested in results. This practical standpoint seems to have provided him with a special protection against (egregiously) false views, and the ability to see the superiority of the Buddha’s teachings. What propels him to find the Buddha, initially, is his dissatisfaction with his own mental state, and his unwillingness to accept things as they are presented to him. In this way, in his imperfection, he is a model for us ordinary beings, who—until our dhamma eye is opened—must rely upon our wits to reject false constructions wherever they arise. Only such skepticism, even cynicism, is capable of putting us on the path from false views to freedom. All the cynic lacks is the ability to see his own false views, and apply his method to his own mind.

BUDDHISM AND DETERMINISM

Modern discussions of freedom of the will and the capacity for moral responsibility are persistently centered around the problem of universal causal determinism. One standard way of posing the question is to ask whether I can be held responsible for an event today that, given the state of the universe one hundred years ago and the lawful progression of natural causes, was determined to happen. If everything is fully determined by natural laws, how can I be granted any agency, or causal power?16 The nature of free will therefore depends upon the still larger question of the nature of causality. Agreement is difficult to find on either topic. Most philosophers today are compatibilists, believing that free will is compatible with determinism, but many have been, and remain, incompatibilists, believing either that we are not free, or that the universe is not deterministic.

It is a widely shared assumption among modern philosophers that libertarian views of free will must attribute freedom to some kind of causally independent agent or self—and this would appear to be exactly what the no-self doctrine denies.¹⁷ When we see the Buddha not only denying the self but also affirming a doctrine of universal causality (everything in saṃsāra is the result of causes and conditions), we can understand why some modern interpreters believe he is advocating causal determinism. Mark Siderits, for instance, argues that Abhidharma philosophy denies the self at the level of ultimate reality by reducing it to a causal account of non-self parts. Yet Siderits emphasizes that at the level of conventional reality the self still plays an important role in explaining our ordinary experience and knowledge. At the level of conventional truth, then, there is a self that acts freely. This, for Siderits, amounts to a Buddhist reductionist version of compatibilism.¹⁸

Furthermore, Charles Goodman has argued that Buddhists should be (and often are) unrepentant determinists. In one passage, Goodman argues against the libertarian interpretation of Buddhism advocated by Paul Griffiths, who argued that, for Vasubandhu, karmic causality provides important conditions, but not a deterministic causal account of action.19 Goodman writes in response that, in fact, there is no nondeterminist reading of Vasubandhu. To state the argument very briefly, he says that the cause of an act for Vasubandhu can be only “one of three things”: (1) the parameters generated by karma actually cause the act (which is determinism); (2) nothing causes the act (which is randomness); or (3) something else causes the act, which must be either (3a) a self (which is denied) or (3b) not a self (in which case, Goodman says, go back to [1] or [2]).

For a number of reasons, I am reticent to call the Abhidharma account a determinist one. First of all, I believe that Vasubandhu provides another option not mentioned by Goodman, and it is one that allows us to envision an alternative, quasi-libertarian event of willing that is enacted without an enduring self. That is, there is a (3b) option that is neither determined nor random. In the Abhidharma, mental events are determined to be “volitional” by nature. For Abhidharma philosophers, one omnipresent characteristic of all citta (mind) is cetanā (“volition” or, to preserve the verbal sense of the term, “intending”).²⁰ So, I will argue, it is a mistake to say that, once we eliminate the self, we must choose between determinism and randomness. Mental events, in this schema, are by nature actions.²¹ Goodman’s argument neglects the possibility of a momentary, causally efficacious yet in a sense free, individual cetanā. This is, of course, not really a live option within contemporary philosophical circles, so it is hardly surprising that Goodman neglects it. Furthermore, we might well doubt that Buddhists themselves held to such a thing, were it not the case that cetanā so evidently plays the role of a causally efficacious element (dharma) in which the Abhidharma tradition locates both goal-directed intentionality and responsibility (though not the responsibility of an independent agent). And finally, even once convinced that Buddhists believe(d) in such a thing, we might simply dismiss it as an absurd and useless holdover of an ancient scholasticism. However, although I do not intend to defend it here at great length, it is my belief that cetanā represents a sensible, distinct option.

Perhaps the most insightful and comprehensive treatment of cetanā and its application to a reading of the problem of free will in Buddhism has been put forward by Karin Meyers. Meyers argues, quite sensibly—against an embarrassingly long history of mistaken interpreters—that the notion of cetanā, since it is conditioned, momentary, not-self, and, especially, sometimes operating subconsciously, is entirely insufficient to support an ordinary conception of free will.22 My contention is not that cetanā supports an ordinary conception of free will. Rather, I will argue that cetanā provides the only kind of will to which Vasubandhu can acquiesce, which is a subtle thread, meditationally available, and effective only through accumulation.

One way that I see Vasubandhu’s view as differing from the still helpful constructions of Siderits and Goodman is that he recognizes severe limitations on our psychological freedoms, but never entirely closes in on metaphysical determinism. It seems to me that Vasubandhu simply did not have the concept that would deny freedom as a metaphysical possibility.²³ Impersonal, metaphysical, causal determinism, according to which all of our actions and experiences are caused, mechanically, by nonsentient forces outside of our will—even down to the degree of attention and effort we dedicate to each given experience—may be a modern invention.²⁴ I say this in full awareness of the Buddha’s definition of Dependent Origination—“When this exists, that arises” (satīdaṃ bhavati)—discussed in chapters 3 and 4, and Vasubandhu’s adoption of this formula as the basis for knowledge.

I have shown that Vasubandhu believes that anything we wish to say exists must be subject to this kind of analytical, causal analysis. But as I have argued in chapter 4, causality is itself always determined through a conceptually constructed frame, which means that no causal frame is final. From an ultimate perspective, there is literally nothing to be said. The question, then, is whether the causal frame in which Dependent Origination is articulated—the Twelve Links—is a deterministic frame. As we will see, there are actions in this list that are responses to ideas—which we know, for Vasubandhu, are conceptual constructions themselves. Therefore, there can be no “ultimate” causal layer articulated in the Twelve Links. If there were causal determinism in the Twelve Links, there would be no possibility of freedom. Yet, as we will see, the actions that take place on the Twelve Links are described as ordinary choices—they are not described as determined.

An interesting comparison here with our apparent Buddhist determinism is the Sāṃkhya system, in which philosophers posit an elaborate psychophysical causal series (prakṛti) with which the soul (puruṣa) mistakenly identifies. Prakṛti is an inevitable outpouring of mind and matter—as we have seen, the Sāṃkhya philosophers even advocate the idea that the result resides in the cause, so causality is simply an unfolding of destiny. The body and mind of each person is only a thoroughly embedded part of the larger flow of prakṛti. Yet at the same time, the puruṣa may be liberated from its entanglement with prakṛti through its clearly free development in self-awareness and knowledge. This is why, in the Bhagavad Gīta’s presentation of this set of ideas, Krishna explains to Arjuna that living beings reel, mechanically, like puppets on a string. In the same breath, however, he urges Arjuna to accept his role.25 Where’s the sense in that? If the causality that will bring about Arjuna’s acceptance is predetermined, why bother with the urging? It would seem to be at least a pragmatic contradiction. The answer is, evidently, that when Krishna suggests that all of existence is inevitable, he does not mean to include the intentions of living beings.²⁶ The key to Krishna’s famous karma-yoga method is the directive to disentangle one’s intention from one’s action, and thereby act without regard for the result. The historical flow of the world is inevitable, but intentions are still free.

I would submit that the Buddhist Abhidharma element (dharma) that accounts for intention (cetanā) preserves this assumption of metaphysical freedom, and I will explain some consequences of looking at things this way. The result is a reframing of the question of free will in Buddhism from a conversation about metaphysics into a larger discussion of the causes and conditions of one’s mental life. The purpose of talking about the causes of the mind is not to convince us to ignore these minute, momentary events and shift our attention to the conventional level.²⁷ Rather, the purpose is, precisely, to choose to act where we can really have an effect. The Buddha’s doctrine does, intentionally, call attention to the problem for our apparent freedom that arises with the awareness that our bodies and minds are causally conditioned—with disturbing effect, as Cioran intimates. For the causal story of our mental life, as told in the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination, and as elaborated in Abhidharma, shows that much of our worldview is, indeed, deluded and beyond our control. Consequently, we cannot simply change our perspectives directly—we are not acting freely in a traditional sense. But we may act in a way that slowly, incrementally, and indirectly conditions new future possibilities. This takes advantage of the unique place that our actions—minute as they may be—have in shaping our mental life. The moral lesson of Buddhist metaphysics is not that we are not ultimately responsible, but on the contrary that we can, and should, hold ourselves responsible for shaping our mental streams, and how our mental streams in turn affect the world.

ACTION (KARMA) AND VOLITION (CETANĀ) IN THE AKBH

Cetanā is a tremendously productive concept in Abhidharma philosophy. The word itself is derived from the common verbal root √cit, which means “perceive, know, appear.”28 The same root is also credited with producing the very common noun citta, a central term for mental events in Buddhist philosophy generally translated “mind” or “consciousness.” As an adjective, cetana is occasionally used to mean “aware, conscious.”²⁹ As a verbal noun, though, it is a technical term, and if we must translate it literally, inelegantly, we might say it means “being aware,” “being conscious,” or even “mentalizing.”

But calling cetanā “mentalizing” certainly does not tell us much beyond its being likely to play a central role in the concept of mind. Within the AKBh’s system, it is in fact the second of ten concepts categorized as universal “mental aspects” (caitta), that is, aspects of every mental event.³⁰ The other nine are crucial as well for a full understanding of the nature of mind in Abhidharma, but life is short, and I hope to make it clear why cetanā is particularly relevant to our discussion. Vasubandhu defines cetanā as “mental action that shapes the mind.”³¹ It is both what a mental event does (“mental action”) and the cause for a mind taking on a particular shape or aspect (“that shapes the mind”). To understand cetanā properly, we will need to examine both aspects of this definition, but especially understand how they are conjoined in a single concept.

First, then, is cetanā’s definition as “mental action,” which points to its crucial role in the explanation of karma. The hint that it was a kind of karma was there even in our noticing the verbal, active quality of the term cetanā; karma, after all, means “action.” Cetanā as mental action is called the quintessence—the svarūpa—of karma.³² As the modern Tibetan teacher Geshe Rabten puts it, it is “karma itself.”³³ Vasubandhu defines karma as being “cetanā and that which arises from it.”³⁴ This in fact includes three kinds of karma: actions of mind, of speech, and of body. Actions of body and speech are actions that arise from mental actions.

It is this connection between cetanā and other actions of body and speech that explains the common translation of cetanā as “volition.” It is mental action, and it is capable of bringing about physical and vocal actions. This seems very much like an intention or will, in the sense of a purposeful and effective controlling aspect of mind. As Karin Meyers puts it, explaining her fine translation of cetanā as “intending,” “most would agree that intention is a kind of pro-attitude directed towards an action or goal.”35 I will keep it to “volition,” to prevent our confusing it with āśaya, which is explicitly articulated as a linguistically formulated intention.³⁶ Cetanā is an action, which can be a speech act, but to shape the wish to act in language is not the same as to perform the act.

In the context of his treatment of action and volition, Vasubandhu engages in some debate about whether bodily actions may persist through time, and this is resolved eventually by his argument that in fact all things are momentary. This entails the conclusion that all things disappear in the very moment of their birth. Apparent continuity is a false conceptual projection, like the appearance of the temporal unity of a flame that is in fact made up of countless minute explosions. We have seen this discussion already in chapter 4, but we did not note there that this argument sits right in the thick of the discussion of actions, and it allows Vasubandhu to conclude that what appear to be fluid bodily movements are actually just successive momentary events, better described individually as the “shape of the body just as it is under the force of mind.”³⁷ Here I only bring this up to point out that Vasubandhu says that the body in a certain position must be so “under the force of mind” because without the mental impetus, the body would be “lifeless” (jaḍa) and therefore would not qualify as “action” (even granting that there is no motion in a momentary body).³⁸ This “force of mind” is surely the cetanā, the cause of bodily action.

What is important to note here, then, is that (at least for Vasubandhu) the momentariness of the action—the fact that it is only a particular shape of the body—does nothing to detract from its being called “action” or its being determined as caused by the mind. Nor is there any worry about “whose” cetanā is doing the causing, or the intending. The attribution of responsibility for these mental actions is entirely unambiguous: the cetanā is the action, and it does the causing. Agency and volition, then, are attributed to a momentary event. That fact in itself, I believe, allows our study of Vasubandhu to provide a new contribution to the known history of the philosophy of action. It will take some work, though, to decide how something momentary can be an action, let alone a morally significant action. Does it even make conceptual sense to call the cetanā “free”? There are reasons to doubt it.

First of all, the fact of momentariness also helps us understand an interesting characteristic of Vasubandhu’s definition of cetanā, namely that the two parts of the definition use two different, but often interchangeable (as is declared at the opening of the Viṃś), terms for “mind”—manas and citta—to represent the agent mind of “mental action” and the patient mind of “shapes the mind,” respectively. Under a general theory that everything is momentary, it makes sense that Vasubandhu would be reluctant to imply an equation of these two minds by using the same term for both. He is not saying that the mind shapes itself. Rather, he is saying that the mental action of cetanā at time t₁ shapes another mental event at some later time t₂. But if the mind is shaped by prior mental events, how can it be acting in any sense freely? How can it be “acting” at all?

This question brings us from the notion of “karma” as an activity enacted for a purpose to the more widely known notion of Buddhist karma as the mental impressions that bring about the positive or negative “karmic” results of morally significant actions. “Karma” as “action” is also karmic conditioning, or saṃskāra, which is the cause of a particular kind of rebirth. Here once again the concept of cetanā plays a central, defining role.

The Buddhist causal account of karmic conditioning—how it is that beings are unendingly trapped in birth after rebirth—is of course most famously encapsulated in the Twelve Links in the Chain of Dependent Origination. “Conditioning” (saṃskāra) is the second of the twelve—it is caused by the first link in the chain, “ignorance,” and, in turn, it is the cause of the third link, “consciousness.” The idea is that, out of ignorance, we are constantly acting foolishly in such a way that we generate karmic impressions on our mental stream, which in turn leads to our taking on the particular form of consciousness of our next rebirth. For example, if I kill someone out of vengeance, thinking that I have really taken care of things, that ignorant act can generate a karmic impression that causes me to be reborn as a hell being—and so after my death I may take on the specific consciousness of a hell being and be reborn in hell. In a general sense, though, “conditioning” (saṃskāra) may be said to sit in for all twelve of the Twelve Links. Everything in saṃsāra is impermanent and subject to the flux of causes and conditions. Only space and nirvāṇa and “cessations” are unconditioned (and, for Vasubandhu as a commentator, none of these count as real entities, since they have no recognizable causal capacities).

Vasubandhu explains the Twelve Links from several different angles in the AKBh (only one of which was accepted by the Vaibhāṣikas),39 and in one explanation, he shows how the twelve links may be understood to represent activities over the course of three separate lives—the first two in a past life, the next seven in the current life, and the final three in a future life.⁴⁰ In that explanation, he says that when saṃskāra is understood to exist in a previous life, it should be understood as all the karma of that life. Thus one’s karmic conditioning (saṃskāra) is the combined karmic result of one’s previous actions.⁴¹ This brings to mind the final argument of the AKBh, which we discussed at the conclusion to chapter 2. In that argument, Vasubandhu says that the specific, next rebirth results from whatever karma predominates amongst all of a living being’s previous actions; here, he gives this accumulation the name saṃskāra.

In another explanation, Vasubandhu says how the links may be understood as, all twelve together, always real in every single moment. There, “conditioning” (saṃskāra) is described simply as cetanā. Clearly, then, cetanā is fundamental to saṃskāra. It is cetanā that is caused by ignorance (avidya) and, in turn, causes consciousness (vijñāna) to take on a particular form. It is cetanā, volition, that enacts the conditioning of conditioned existence.

In a third analysis of the twelve links, illustrated in table 6.1, Vasubandhu divides them into three separate categories: “defilements” (kleśa), “actions” (karma), and “things” (vastu).⁴²

Here Vasubandhu classifies saṃskāra, of course, as an “action” (karma), which once again underlines its identification with cetanā. I find this characterization particularly useful, because to call a causal source an “action” as opposed to a “defilement” or a “thing” suggests, of course, agency. Recall, in this context, the difference between the “shape” produced by the body, which was not to be called an “action” since without a mental cause it was deemed “lifeless” (jaḍa). This would be true even of a moving body, since the issue is not whether a body moves (because in a universe of momentary events nothing truly moves), but whether it is a particular kind of momentary entity called an action.

TABLE 6.1   AKBh III.26 on the Three Classifications of the Twelve Links

DEFILEMENT (KLEŚA)	ACTION (KARMA)	THING (FOUNDATION) (VASTU)
ignorance (avidya)	saṃskāra	consciousness (vijñāna)
thirst (tṛṣṇā)	being (bhava)	name and form (nāmarūpa)
attachment (upādāna)		six sense organs (āyatana)
		contact (sparśa)
		sensation (vedanā)
		birth (jāti)
		old age and death (jarāmaraṇa)

As an extension of this third analysis of the twelve links, Vasubandhu lists how the causal flow from each link may be understood under the classes of defilements, actions, and things. Here what makes something an action is helpfully clarified by noting the categories through which actions operate. I have summarized this classification here:

AKBh III.27 ON CAUSAL RELATIONS AMONG DEFILEMENTS, ACTIONS, AND THINGS:

DEFILEMENTS THAT CAUSE DEFILEMENTS

thirst → attachment

DEFILEMENTS THAT CAUSE ACTIONS

attachment → being43

ignorance → saṃskāra

ACTIONS THAT CAUSE THINGS

saṃskāra → consciousness

being → birth

THINGS THAT CAUSE THINGS

consciousness → name and form

name and form → six sensory organs

[should be here: six sensory organs → contact]

contact → sensation

birth → old age and death

THINGS THAT CAUSE DEFILEMENTS

sensation → thirst

Implication: old age and death → ignorance

Notice that both of the elements that are said to cause actions are “defilements”—that is, negative mental qualities. This represents the standard story that we act out of desire and ignorance. In all, defilements cause both (subsequent) defilements and actions, actions cause only things, and things cause both (subsequent) things and defilements.

Note that defilements do not cause things; things do not cause actions; and actions cause neither (subsequent) actions nor defilements. I do not want to overstate the significance of this revelation, but it seems to express a view of causality among elements that preserves our traditional intuitions about which aspects of our experience are willful, and which are not. If the twelve links expressed a deterministic inevitability—if we were robotically impelled by their causal impetus—then actions might just as well be caused by “things” as “defilements”—but they are not. In the categories supplied, it is only once a “thing” generates a “defilement”—a cognitive and emotional distortion—that it becomes capable of conditioning an action. I do not think it is too much of a stretch to say that this interpretive structure affirms that our actions, even at the level of momentary mental events, are “caused” by responses to cognitive content.44 This is not be taken as a declaration of libertarian free will, but it certainly foregrounds the decision-making power of mental action. To me, this suggests that actions are causally conditioned by knowledge (or lack thereof). Our actions are our (willful?) responses to how we feel and what we know.

The fact that the content that conditions our actions is called a “defilement” supports a reading of “actions” as causal events with this peculiar structure. For it is false conceptualizations that condition actions. Yet here we see the window for conventionally “free” action closing even further. If it is our cognitive content that conditions our actions, our actions are always deluded responses to mistaken self-constructions. In fact, this may be not so much a closing of the window as an explanation of why Buddhists feel the window is already so nearly closed. The false view of self conditions our choices, and the ubiquity of this false view—the fundamental fact that, in saṃsāra, our every “contentful” thought is deluded—explains why we remain trapped. The only properly free “volition” in such a case would be one that is unfettered by “content”—that avoids acting on such a false view. With all content under suspicion, it is difficult to imagine any proper action, before enlightenment, except perhaps a choice to refrain from action. Only such a negative “volition” would seem capable of stopping the cycle. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the vows taken by Buddhist monks and lay followers are primarily lists of actions not to be taken. The vow-taker replaces his or her ordinary response to a cognitive or emotional defilement—an action—with a nonaction enjoined in the wise rulings of the Buddha.

The Three Natures view has a similarly “negative” perspective on the content of our awareness—the fabricated nature—and perhaps the equanimity we are instructed to cultivate, in order to see beyond the bias of views, is another expression of the principle already at work here, in the definition of cetanā as conditioning action: the best attitude to cultivate toward one’s own views is detachment.

Central to our delusion is that we tend to overestimate the degree of “intentional” control we exercise over our actions when we perform them (the illusion of the self as controller), while we underestimate the degree to which we can cultivate ourselves and change our capacities to perform actions in the future (the illusion of the self as unchanging). Given our cognitive and affective weaknesses, we would expect that to correct for our delusions we should not be told to engage in world-changing acts of heroism, but rather to engage repeatedly in acts that condition our future possibilities. That is, we would expect that instead of being taught to calculate and enact as best we can whatever action will have the greatest positive result, we should be taught, once again, to take vows.

Vows may be thought of as preventing negative actions by intervening in the causal stream of dependent origination between defilements and actions; but they do so through a peculiar conditioning structure, whereby a physical and verbal act is taken to condition a future mental stream. When you take a vow, you are not performing any obviously beneficial act at that moment, but you are transforming your mental continuum so that when the occasion for a moral act arises, you are “conditioned” to act properly. And it is not the good action itself but the taking of the vow, of course, which is the key Buddhist moral act—the act that the Buddha enjoined for his followers more than any other act, including generosity and meditation.45 Similarly, the central moral distinction in Buddhist life, between those who are on the path and those who are still, definitively trapped in saṃsāra, is that between those who have taken monastic vows and those who have not.

Paradigmatic as they may be, however, vows are only one of many practical methods prescribed by the Buddha to help his disciples advance toward liberation in spite of their (our) ignorance and self-destructive tendencies. Surely all of the Buddha’s teachings can be taken this way, especially when they are understood from the Mahāyāna perspective as “skillful means,” as the appropriate teachings for given disciples—appropriate although false, because those disciples are not really capable of understanding the ultimate truth. And no disciples are capable of understanding the ultimate truth; it is by its nature inconceivable. The Buddha’s doctrines are, therefore, “right view” in the sense that when they are properly internalized, they counter false tendencies. In the language of the previous chapter, we could say that they are false from the intentional perspective, but causally beneficial because, like vows, they appear in the mental stream of the person to whom they are directed in such a way that at the appropriate time that person’s mental stream, under their influence, leads to good actions.

To return to our opening point, we can see that the Ābhidharmika account of mental action—as a momentary, apparently willful event that has future consequences—preserves the moral responsibility we ascribe to free choices without calling the agent a person or a self. It is only actions (karma) that have moral recompense; birth leads inevitably to death, but such a causal result is in no way morally charged. Of course, the tragedy and pathos of life within the cycle of saṃsāra are captured here in the reduction of our perceived freedom of choice to momentary responses to limited, almost completely distorted, impressions. It acknowledges the extreme lack of freedom that results from our cognitive and emotional limitations. For the most part, since we do not understand how karma really works, we act blindly, and because we do not understand the big picture, we place inordinate value on relatively meaningless things. Yet our whole karmic situation—in fact, all of conditioned existence—is brought about by nothing but the combined conditioning (saṃskāra) that just is this willful activity (cetanā). The appropriate response, therefore, is not to throw up one’s hands and declare all decisions meaningless or unfree, but to seek to take charge of the situation by moving onto the path to liberation.

Notice that this kind of advice would be an entirely irrelevant and useless response to a recognition of ultimate meaninglessness or a metaphysical lack of freedom, in the same way that it would be entirely inappropriate to say to Arjuna that he should accept his inevitable role, were the acceptance just as inevitable as the role. But as I read both traditions, small acts of volition are available options, and their consequences accumulate, massively, over time. My view is, therefore, that the question of metaphysical necessity—so crucial to modern discussions of free will—plays no part in Vasubandhu’s work. Admittedly, it is tempting to say that Vasubandhu’s is a new form of compatibilism—one that recognizes free agency within momentary thought-events, and therefore accepts the possibility, at least in principle, that meaningful freedom needs no changes, options, or temporal extension. But what makes this compatibilism and not simply a rejection of the question—or a failure to ask it?

Modern compatibilism generally reinvigorates our commonsense views of agency against a backdrop of metaphysical determinism. What Vasubandhu does, on the contrary, denies commonsense agency (as stymied by ignorance), but leaves open a small window in order to allow for the justness of karmic recompense and the gradual, cumulative effectiveness of the path. Thus Vasubandhu would reject modern compatibilism both for its retention of commonsense agency and for its affirmation of metaphysical determinism (probably). Yet there is no argument here in favor of incompatibilism, either—denying the possibility of meaningful freedom in a deterministic world—except to the extent that Vasubandhu, with all Buddhists, rejects fatalism.46 Premodern Buddhist thought simply does not engage with the problem of free will in this sense. Our bondage is the conditioned ignorance and attachment that make us act in ways that, if we saw things more clearly, we would not act.

CUMULATIVE KARMA AND THE LINE OF ANTS

Rather than worrying further about the superimposed question of free will and determinism, then, a more fruitful direction here is available in Vasubandhu’s discussion of the moral significance of action in his argument against the notion of an “agent” (kartṛ), which we discussed at the end of chapter 2. In that passage, which I called the “end point” of the AKBh, Vasubandhu explained that the action that “shines forth at death” and so quite literally makes you who you are (in your next rebirth) is just whichever karma (read cetanā) is “weightier, or proximate, or reinforced by practice.” Thus, since every result is conditioned by many causes, each cetanā, which conditions the mental stream, is always only one action among many. In order for a cetanā to gain its status as “cause” of a proper result, it is necessary for it to be conjoined in causal potency with other cetanās. Unless you do something very dramatic just before you die, it is the accumulation of numerous actions throughout your life that will shape your consciousness at death, and therefore the specific kind of body you take on in your next rebirth. Let us call this Vasubandhu’s theory of cumulative karmic causality.

In chapter 2 I discussed the significance of this fact for Buddhist religious practice: if every act had its own individual, inevitable result, it would be impossible to alter karma’s results through repentance and prayer. Here I would like to apply the same point to the wider question of moral agency—what shape moral agency takes under this reductionist view—and tie it back to what I take to be Vasubandhu’s most evocative metaphor for the apparent, but unreal, combination: the line of ants.

The theme of Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra writings is the careful distinction between the way things appear, which is shot through with a false reification of the self, and the way things are truly caused. As emphasized in the last chapter, the Three Natures doctrine distinguishes two causal stories—the apparent causal story (how an elephant is born, caught, and brought to the stage; or, the person is born), and the true causal story (how a magician produces the trick; or, the mental seeds in the karmic storehouse bring about an illusory appearance). Since I have claimed that this distinction harkens back to the distinction between false conceptual constructions and real causes in Abhidharma, it ought to be possible to think through this distinction using not just the metaphor of the magical elephant, but the line of ants as well.

When Vasubandhu brings forward the analogy, he says that just as where ants make up a line, but in fact there is no “line,” only a group of ants, so too all ordinarily apparent entities that have some “shape” are only structured in this way due to a mental construction, an idea (saṃjñā); in truth, they are made up of distinct parts that, when considered closely, cause the “shape” to dissolve. Other examples similar to the line of ants are elephants or armies arranged in a mass, which can appear to have some distinct shape, but in fact are just the individuals. There is no “whole” there, except as a mental construction.47 We adduced in chapter 3 the further example of the Pointilist paintings of Seurat and Signac, which act as proofs of the mental construction of shape, depth, and color. As I indicated there, this argument about apparent wholes is internally connected to Vasubandhu’s argument about the apparent wholeness and continuity of the self. The issue of personal identity, for Buddhists, is at stake in their claims that wholes do not exist over and above their parts, for otherwise there could be no denying that people are real entities, at least as defined as the wholes resulting from the combination of the skandhas.

It is entirely sensible to accept the appearance of the self, though, without accepting that there is any basis to the unity of the many parts that are taken together in that whole. In this context the unity of the self across time is no different from its apparent unity across distinct physical and mental parts. The analogy of the whirling firebrand, which makes a circle, or the flame seeming to move across a field, makes this point clear: we can have motion, and change, and the appearance of a singular identity across that change, while acknowledging that the entities that underlie the apparent unity are distinct, even if they are causally related. It is, as Vasubandhu says, only cause and effect.

Where the question for this chapter—the question of moral agency—comes into play, then, is in the relation between cetanā, which is a momentary, real mental cause, and the higher-level, false constructions of conscious will and human agency. If I normally think that I act freely, in the conventional sense of choosing everything about how I live, and how I react to situations presented to me, then I am deluded. Ordinary free will is clearly a false projection: the agent self that sees itself as acting is a false projection; the cognitive activities that we ordinarily take to make up a choice—reviewing options and selecting among them, for instance—are complex and therefore reducible to numerous parts, out of which no “whole” may be reconstructed; and, as we have discussed above, most of my choices, if not all of my choices, “free” though they may seem, are limited to the narrow range of possibilities that my human mind, with its particular tendencies and training, is capable to enact. Attached and deluded, my thoughts are constrained to the range of their conceptual contents. I see the world and react, always, within the field of my own capacities, interests, and biases. Thus, if the Buddha is right, what I take to be a “free” decision is a false appearance, and the actions that I undertake based upon such decisions are conditioned by countless factors beyond anything like “control,” at least in that moment.

The question at issue, then, is: if those concepts are delusory, what are the real entities that make them up? What are the true conditioning causes? If my biases and my agency are the “line of ants,” what are the ants? For Yogācārins, the causes of the world are mental events—seeds in the storehouse consciousness ripen into appearances; but what causes those seeds? Well, of course, karma. Actions that shape the mind: karma, saṃskāra, cetanā.

What does it mean, then, to take each momentary cetanā in this way, as one ant in an apparent line of ants? If we agree that the quintessential Buddhist cetanā is the vow, then perhaps the ideal colony is the monastic saṃgha. This suggests to me a compelling theory that Buddhist vows and Vinaya literature should be read primarily as tools for the effective organization of society, given the nature of the human minds out of which that society is inevitably constituted. Yet to elaborate this in detail would take us too far afield. In any case, before we can understand the workings of the collective of individuals, we must understand the collective that is the “individual.” For the time being, therefore, my intent is to use the ant colony as an analogy for the individual, the collective activity of the many moments of cetanā that make up what we perceive as a person’s intentional activities.

In addition to ants appearing visually as a whole mass from a distance, ants also appear to share a crucial behavioral similarity with masses of cetanās, which is that they are very clever, taken together, though individually, they are fools. It is only out of their collective behavior that the apparent intelligence of the colony appears. This apparent arising of complex intelligence out of the collective behavior of apparently simple ants is probably not what Vasubandhu was after in his analogy of the “line of ants” appearing as a “line” when there is no line, only ants. But it is possible, and the mere possibility points the way to a fruitful investigation of the analogy. The discussion from here to the end of the chapter is rooted in my own, anecdotal experience, and it should be taken as only speculative in its application to Vasubandhu’s texts. I am shifting, thus, from a primarily interpretive analysis of Vasubandhu’s views to one that is more constructive, and suggestive. My hope from here to the end of the chapter is to illuminate the potential, if as yet unrealized, ethical significance of views that Vasubandhu did clearly hold.

I submit the following story as suggestive of how we might read the analogy of the line of ants. I once spent a week in a turquoise-painted hotel room overlooking the Indian Ocean on the island of Lamu off the east coast of Kenya (nice place, I recommend it). One morning, I awoke to the smell of rain and saw, to my great surprise, that someone had painted a dark red stripe from one window, up the wall to the ceiling, over the ceiling, to the other window. Not only did this design choice seem alien, it seemed incredible that I had somehow not noticed it before. Did I come in late last night and fall asleep without even looking around the room? Why would the hotel have done this? They clearly took a lot of time, making the line straight, and the angles just so. As I was wondering this, staring at the line, my eyes refocused and the line dissolved into masses of moving ants. I realized with a shock that I was staring at an ant colony on the move to a new location after a rainstorm had flooded its previous home. Its path just happened to pass through my hotel room. Now I began to marvel anew at the precise shape created by this line of ants—precision that I had only moments before attributed to the attentive workmanship of the hotel’s painter. This is a true story, and it proves that a line of ants can generate the appearance not only of a “shape,” but of an intention as well.

We know (thanks to E. O. Wilson) that ants communicate with one another by scent. The reason the trail across my hotel room was so seemingly solid was that all of the ants were following scent trails left by previous ants. No individual ant ever intends to send a signal to other ants—each ant’s limited genetic programming issues in mechanical behaviors that are well below anything resembling an “intention.” Yet together it is difficult to deny the appeal of the term. A classic example is the ants’ method of efficiently transporting food back to the nest, once it is found. Ants foraging for food lay pheromone trails, and they like to follow pheromone trails, the stronger the better. If they go back and forth on a trail, that doubles the strength of the trail, and makes it a preferred trail over one that’s only been traveled once. Whatever path, among the many pheromone paths made by many foraging ants, happens to be the shortest path to the food, will have ants going back and forth more quickly than the others. More trips means a stronger pheromone path, which attracts more ants, and the process builds. The result is that eventually most of the ants are following the shortest path to the food. The simple behavior of each ant, replicated many times, explains in its entirety their behavior, without the need for any “intention” to bring the food home as efficiently as possible along a shared path. Thus, using Occam’s razor, we can discount the possibility of an “intention” as a cause. There is no “intention” behind ant behavior.

If it is thought that there is no intention in the individual ant, but the ant’s DNA (or body) contains the intention, this must be countered by an awareness that ant DNA came about through natural selection. It may seem inconceivable that ants could have settled upon this complex behavior (though it is simpler than it looks at first) without an intention. But this is the crux of what Daniel Dennett calls “Darwin’s dangerous idea”: we can explain apparent teleology via blind causes, over time.48

Ants then provide a wonderful example of action without an agent—it is only cause and effect. I would propose that in the “line of ants” analogy, where the apparent agency is only cause and effect—as each “ant” is analogized to a mental event—the cetanā is the activity of the ant laying down pheromones. It is cetanā that conditions the future tendencies, the shape of the next thought(s). Cetanā is the mental quality that connects the three times, that provides the link in the chain. In Abhidharma, it is cetanā that is the mental grasping that affirms, or does not, the self-identification with the mind’s present activity. It either says “yes” or “no” or nothing to whatever the mind is doing; it either grasps the present thought as one’s own identity, or it does not. That, for a Buddhist (as for a Sāṃkhya), is what it means to engage in karma. To lay metaphor on metaphor, we might say that what cetanā does is throw up its tag on the present thought, labeling the present experience with an identity marker. The next thought will follow, see the tag, and be attracted to it, as “my” identity. In this way, cetanā is not exactly “free” in any traditional sense, since it does nothing but enact a kind of “grasping” of the content of the present thought; it does not frame or choose the content, and it is conditioned by the previous tendencies of previous thoughts to place a mark on the way.

Central to Buddhist training is the ability to free oneself from one’s previous identity-constructing patterns, which must mean being able to gradually transform the patterns laid by countless previous cetanās. It seems to me possible that, with training, one could learn to disassociate from particular mental events, to realize that one is no longer the person who committed a given act in the past, and one will no longer be this mental event in the future. Such a transformation might eventually allow one to refrain from “volition” entirely, and stop generating karma.

DEEP TIME ON THE BODHISATTVA PATH

It is remarkable what can be accomplished in a single human life (for impressive examples, see the obituary section in today’s New York Times). Yet Buddhists speak of the countless rebirths in our past, as well as our present lives, as for the most part having been wasted, each good deed cancelled out by bad, each new skill and acquisition erased by death. The larger perspective drains meaning, as we cycle from rebirth to redeath. For Buddhists, the world does not preserve our accomplishments. But if they can be lined up, as in the Buddha’s Jātaka stories, so that achievement builds upon achievement, our unending lives provide us the possibility of truly remarkable development, even if it must be built one mental moment at a time. This broadening of the frame provides for Mahāyāna—the path to Buddhahood—its distinctive vision.

Although it is not a strongly emphasized aspect of the Mahāyāna path, one meaning of the “Great Way’s” greatness is its duration—that is, how long it takes to reach the goal of Buddhahood. The time it takes to complete the bodhisattva path is phenomenally longer than the path of the hearer. Jan Nattier, in A Few Good Men, emphasizes the machismo of the bodhisattva path expressed in the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛā), which sets the Mahāyāna practitioner apart from his contemporaries.49 The longer path is for those of great will, endurance, and aspiration. Yet paired with the greatness of sheer gumption that accompanies the Mahāyāna path is the greatness of the intended accomplishment. It is an obvious truism that a longer path provides more opportunities, but it is seldom noted just what is implied in changing the path from an immediate, meditative accomplishment to a practice that is intended to last, quite literally, countless lifetimes.⁵⁰

Surely the best-known meditator in pre-tantric Mahāyāna was Asaṅga. The famous story of his meditative practices, which appears in his brother Vasubandhu’s biography, is a wonderful exemplification of the virtue of endurance characteristic of the Mahāyāna path. Asaṅga is said to have spent twelve years meditating in a cave, but every three years he would give up. Each time, after meditating for a period of three years, he came down from his mountain retreat discouraged at having failed to receive a vision of Maitreya. Each time, he encountered someone who exemplified endurance, and so would return to his cave convinced that he should go on. The first vision was of a rock that had been worn away around a bird’s nest just by the passing of the birds’ wings; feather on rock, again and again, wore away the stone. The second vision was of drops of water, one at a time, wearing away stone. The third vision was of a man polishing pieces of iron into needles using just a cotton cloth. In each case, Asaṅga would return to his cave with renewed perseverance. These analogies exemplify the power of cumulative causality, of great results accrued from repeated, purposeful application in countless individual mental moments.

The sheer length of the path, as newly defined in Mahāyāna, provides an entirely different horizon of possibilities for personal transformation. Whatever possibilities are presented to a monk attempting to do his best to attain liberation in one life, his time is limited by the human lifespan. Once a practitioner accepts that the current lifetime is likely only one of many lifetimes (past, present, and future) spent gathering accomplishments toward liberation, there dawns a new possibility for openness and confidence about future achievement. If nirvāṇa is conceivably within your grasp in this lifetime, then ten or twenty lives more may well be enough, assuming your opportunities and your discipline hold out.

Along with this new confidence in accomplishment may come, as well, a new perspective on just what it is possible to attain. For if nirvāṇa is in your grasp, why stop there? This is, perhaps, the logic that led to acceptance of the path to Buddhahood and the expansive, visionary, bodhisattva attainments imaged in Mahāyāna literature. As the goal is expanded to include the total transformation of endless universes, the path of practice comes to be envisioned in a Buddhist version of what geologists call “deep time.”

In his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould writes about the discovery of “deep time” in geology, and how that discovery opened up, for Darwin, the possibility of the slow mechanism of evolution by natural selection. As a scientific discovery, “deep time” is merely a fact about the age of the earth: that it is more than four billion years old. Yet it is one thing to know this fact, and another to see its importance for understanding the workings of nature. Gould’s book is a study of the difficulty and the promise of this earth-shattering temporal concept. Above all, the concept allows for the cumulative effects of extremely slow, but steady, causal processes. This is what deep time meant for Darwin: immense, transformative results can come from minute effects, massively repeated. The idea that breeding practices—selection—can change the appearance and behavior of animals only opens up into the idea of the differentiation of species if the small, visible transformations from one generation to the next can be imaginatively transposed into the massive differences between species. The transformation from ape to human that seems inconceivable when imagined as having taken place across one or ten generations and strains credulity in a hundred generations, becomes entirely believable, even comprehensible, given two hundred fifty thousand generations. The shift in scale opens up new vistas of transformation.

We can see Buddhist practitioners thinking in terms of cumulative causality in deep time as the target of meditative practice shifts toward a distant, rather than a near, future. Once framed by distant goals, our present actions take on a different cast. Our immediate actions are to be intended not only to allow us to reach those goals but, crucially, to condition ourselves to continue on the path toward them. The goal today is no longer simply to try to act like a perfect being (“What would Buddha do … ?”), but rather to try to become one. In the framework of deep time, this is not a presumptuous or unrealistic goal—it is, in fact, far more pragmatic and realistic, given its assumptions, than the idea of attempting, from where you are now, to emulate greatness. Am I capable of meditating with enough diligence, for enough time, in the proper way, to achieve enlightenment? Not likely. Am I capable of taking a step on the path, and trying to build a pattern of fruitful practice into my behavior? Unquestionably. And, in the context of deep time’s message of cumulative causality, whatever I do to advance myself on the path, assuming I stay on the path, becomes a definite, pragmatic step toward even the most distant goal—it is, in fact, the only kind of step there is. Each mental event paves the way for the next, and together, over limitless eons, they pave the Great Way.

In this context, we can see the moral significance of Vasubandhu’s insistence that the present is the only reality. Let us say that cetanā is best understood as a momentary measure of “pro-attitude” about what is occurring in the present mental moment.51 It is not the action itself; it is not its content; it is only a part. It gains potential significance, however, from its being linked, causally, to future mental moments. Thus, ironically, whereas the momentary event is itself not only minute but meaningless, its momentariness and its causal potency are what make it substantial. Given this reading of the causal potential of the cetanā, the crucial moral question becomes how one is “taking” or “grasping” (grahaṇa) one’s own present experience—secondarily how one interprets it conceptually, but primarily how, in each moment, one engages with (or disengages from) one’s own mental representations. Cetanā—here the quintessence of karma—is limited to the present moment, but by the same token, it is always fully available. And the path it provides is slow and gradual, but extends from the restrictive cage of one’s own attachments to the inconceivable liberation of a Buddha—with countless intermediate improvements along the way.

CONCLUSION: IDENTITY-CONSTRUCTION, CONTINGENCY, AND THE GOALS OF BUDDHIST ETHICS

My daughter Etta wants to play basketball today. Why? Well, it is a nice day, and she loves basketball. When we say, “She loves basketball,” we are explaining her choice by appealing to a kind of stable state of affairs, which makes it clear she’s going to want to play when she can. It is her disposition. I could say, by way of further explanation, that she plays after school every day with a regular group of playmates. I could say that basketball is her thing, and she’s unstoppable. She brings her own basketball to school. But all of this is just a way to characterize a patterned set of desires.

Philosophers traditionally say that these are the “reasons” or the “justifications” for her choice to play basketball, but from the perspective of this chapter, reasons are only a shorthand—a construction—that makes useful, digestible sense of an extremely complex and intricate causal story.52 Clearly the “nice day” is outside her control, and so cannot be seen as her own enactment. But what is under her control? For instance, why does she have her own basketball in the first place? Why does she have a group of playmates that she can rely on to have some kind of pick-up game every day after school? And most importantly, why does she love to play basketball? Considered from a causal perspective, a present disposition to play basketball is not something Etta enacts; it is not even a thing.

If we attempt to explain Etta’s wanting to play basketball as an abstract fact, we are lost. There is a “brute fact” quality to the dispositional state of a person’s mind that refuses explanation and, for some, satisfies the needs of explanation in itself.⁵³ At the same time, it is not only possible, but quite useful and instructive, to break down and describe the conditions out of which the love of basketball is constituted—even though they are multiple, perhaps endless. Our various modern academic disciplines—biology, psychology, sociology, history—have equipped us to begin to elucidate the causes.

First off, we have the body itself. Etta is healthy, and it is just part of a healthy ten-year-old human body-and-mind to love running around and trying stuff out—playing. So a significant set of conditions are those that keep the body up and running in this way and thus support the desire to play: regular exercise, nutrition, freedom from debilitating diseases and accidents, a good night’s sleep.

These conditions are, of course, themselves conditioned. As a parent I can take some of the credit, for having provided food and insisting on sleep. I also bought the basketball. I might like to take credit also for my daughter’s genetic heritage, though of course I “didn’t build that.”⁵⁴ Etta’s health certainly relies upon genes from her mother and me. Her health is also indebted to the modern American medical practice of universal vaccination against common childhood diseases, and her terrific pediatrician has kept her occasional minor ailments from becoming a real pain and a real drain on her resources. She’s never had a serious illness, but she did have an itchy foot problem one summer that I can imagine might have, in a previous generation, with lesser medical treatment and less comfortable shoes, diminished her love of running and jumping. So some credit for her desire to play has to go to the designers of athletic equipment, too. Each of these conditions rests on still others. My daughter has also had clean water, plentiful food, and safe streets. For these larger blessings I credit relatively good governance, together with a large slice of having-been-born-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time.

The psychological conditions are also endless. In order to feel like playing today, Etta needs to be in the mood for it. Kids get tired, depressed, upset about this or that, or they just feel like doing something else. My daughter (these days) happens to be always in the mood to play pick-up basketball. So she’s not (these days) susceptible to depression or the social concerns of other girls. Of course, in order to love the game Etta needs to be free of mental illness. But the fact that a girl of ten years old today can feel as free and comfortable as she does to play basketball in the playground with mostly boys is not something to take for granted; it is the result of more than a century of feminist struggle. It has deep, deep history, and on a planetary scale it is preciously rare. This brings us from psychological to social and historical conditions.

The fullness of Etta’s enjoyment of basketball would probably not be possible without the psychological comfort that comes from social approval—approval from her peers, from her teachers, and from her family. In previous generations, it was far more difficult for women who enjoyed being athletes. Etta’s great-grandmother—my grandmother—was a lover of basketball who wanted to be a gym teacher. Yet she was “diagnosed” with an overly large heart, and kept on bed rest for a time, though she suffered no symptoms. Her enormous heart did nothing to prevent her living past one hundred, but as a child her family required that she give up on her athletic dreams. Today, I cannot think of anyone who disapproves of my daughter playing basketball. But, truth be told, she is the only girl in her class who plays with this freedom from ambivalence; she is the only girl who dresses in basketball shorts and t-shirts. She complains that the other girls double-dribble and travel and do not see the big deal. This is not a sign of their lack of athletic ability (many play soccer quite well on the weekends); it is a sign of their lack of commitment on the play yard. A possible explanation is that they are hampered socially (or, they choose to appear so). They may care that they are perceived as girls. Etta is just a bit younger than they are—she is the youngest in her class—so that may contribute as a causal factor as well, if they are on their way to being preteens, and she is further behind them in this.

This is all, of course, thoroughly unscientific in its assessment. What are the real conditions for Etta’s atypical unselfconsciousness? A Buddha would see all of these causes and conditions directly; I can only gesture and approximate. The point I am making is that our social sciences—especially psychology and sociology—provide us with tools to tell causal stories that the Buddha summarized as karma. They do not need to be exactly accurate to suggest that there are some conditions in operation of this kind.

In addition, we have the long history of the game of basketball, not just as a professional sport (important to its continued, broad acceptance), but particularly as a game among children. It is just fun to play. It is fun to bounce the ball, throw it in the hoop, try to steal the ball from another player, and so on. Just fun. But it did not arise out of nowhere. Children have played the game for more than a hundred years. The development of the ball, the selection of the proper height for the basket, the net so you can see when the ball’s gone through, the rules against traveling and double-dribbling, and so on—all of this makes it more fun to play, so that by the time Etta was exposed to the game on the play yard she was, as an energetic, healthy kid, likely to enjoy it. Genes come in here too. Not just my grandmother, but my wife loved basketball. But that’s just in the last couple of generations. If we are talking about the fun of throwing a ball, of play, of competition, it is difficult to disentangle the history of the game from the history of the human species as a whole, even from primates, or mammals. But basketball itself has a very recent, local history, having been invented by a late-nineteenth-century gym teacher as a game that rewards agility rather than strength. Etta is not tall or strong, but she is fast.

When we say that it is a disposition of Etta’s that she wants to play basketball, then, we understand that this disposition is dependent upon, and in a sense constituted by, many additional qualities that we can safely attribute to Etta (she lives after the twentieth century, her parents approve, she is relatively healthy, she likes the experience of a game that doesn’t require more strength than agility, there are welcoming pick-up games at her play yard, etc.), and that these are also dependent facts. And yet we have no trouble affirming that love of basketball is a part of who Etta is, what she is like. In this sense, she is who she is, and at the same time her identity is dependent upon contingencies: some just luck, some deeply embedded in the history of the world, in the nature of the cosmos—but all contingent, mostly good fortune.

We could imagine a world arising with Etta, but no basketball; she could find another sport. But how many of those contingencies could we hypothetically eliminate before we began to doubt we were still imagining Etta? Is it still Etta if we imagine her as a male soldier in Sparta in 500 BCE? The Buddhist view is that the contingencies that make up her identity are the results of her actions—her karma. And the world in which she finds herself, Vasubandhu tells us, is the collective result of the actions of the living beings born here.55 Etta’s specific karma, then, is to have all of the previous intentions of living beings lined up such that she is able to tag her own identity to the game of basketball.

The Buddhist notion that a person is constituted out of eighty-four thousand parts, each conditioned by morally significant acts performed in the past, understates the number. That means that much of who we are has been decided long ago, and one or two changes made today will not change everything. Yet once we are aware that our identities are shaped by causal stories in “deep time,” we can shift our attention from what we cannot control to a skillful manipulation of what we can control.

In Buddhist practice, it is most often the simple awareness of the causal story that is emphasized because it motivates us to cultivate the ability to accept what we cannot control. This is an immediate psychological benefit of understanding dependent origination and impermanence. For instance, it is possible that, although Etta would be very upset if she were no longer living near a play yard with basketball hoops, she might be less upset if she saw the possibility of other activities that would build productively upon her basketball experience. She might be able to adopt a different identity-construction once she recognizes that who she takes herself to be is contingent upon many random, ever-changing factors.⁵⁶ And, whereas a ten-year-old’s disappointment at having to switch sports is relatively inconsequential, the same structure applies, mutatis mutandis, to identities that are constructed based on choosing a career, falling in love, serving in the armed forces, feeling a patriotic connection to a state, and so on. In this view, nearly everything of moral importance to humans can be described, in similar terms, as contingently constructed out of vaguely biological and sociolinguistic patterns (“culture”), which have no essential nature in themselves (they are only causal patterns) but do appear as real—real enough to be affirmed as “me” by countless cetanā-events in the minds of sentient beings.

The difference between acknowledging, or not acknowledging, the causal contingency of the story that generates one’s mental events and one’s identity can be extremely significant. I have sometimes noticed my son being unusually possessive about a toy—refusing to share fairly, say—and then, after wondering why he was acting this way, realized that he had not yet had breakfast. As a parent, part of my job is, of course, to teach my children to play fairly. But another crucial job is to make sure my children are properly fed. My son’s possessiveness about his toys is causally conditioned by the irritability that he feels due to being hungry. Once he is properly fed, the sense of injustice that he has about his rights to this particular toy dissipate; he is able to share.

The Buddhist tradition says that ordinary beings are like children, unable to see the causes and conditions of their desires and conceptual constructions. The essence of the Buddhist path is the cultivation of the ability to eliminate the conditions that bring about negative states of mind, in oneself and in others. It is to intervene at the causal level, rather than keeping one’s attention on the abstract construction. To apply the teaching to the present example, we might say that even more important, for my son, than learning in the abstract how to share, would be to learn how to keep himself properly fed, and more broadly, to learn how to notice, and counter, the causes and conditions that bring about feelings of possessiveness.

To apply this example to the political realm, historians and social scientists who seek to explain the forces leading to nationalism may be aware of the contingent, “deep” historical nature of the construction of nationalist identities, but nationalists themselves are not. To affirm that nationalisms arise under certain kinds of historical circumstances (joblessness, hopelessness, humiliation, unacknowledged injustice, anxiety about the imminent demise of the social group, etc.) is to deny the “ultimate” legitimacy of all nationalisms. It is to say that there is no such thing as the nationalist identity itself that has a causal effect; the true causes are social, historical forces (which are, in principle, reducible to individual psychological responses to social conditions). To express this in the language of the Three Natures, we could say that since the appearance of nationalism is caused by means other than the way it appears, it is real only as an appearance and thus is ultimately empty of reality. Beings who imagine that they choose to act based upon nationalism are deluded not just about the nature of their nationalisms, but about their own motives. To intervene in nationalist disputes, then, one must address the causes and conditions that bring about these particular kinds of self-constructions. It is conceivable, for instance, that if one could intervene to undermine the conditions that produce joblessness, hopelessness, anxiety, etc., the nationalism itself would no longer arise. It is thus a Buddhist way of putting things to say that a person with a sense of security, hope for the future, a stable job, and confidence in the rule of law is not a nationalist.

If this seems condescending and disrespectful, well, remember that Milarepa would appeal to the same reasoning to criticize my selfish love for my children. The Buddhist perspective asks that we all admit that we are deluded, and work from there to solve problems pragmatically. Rather than negotiate among ideological principles, a Buddhist approach would seek to intervene to alter the causes and conditions of the problem. But we do not ordinarily consider all of our ideals “ideologies,” and all of our views “problems.” Does the Buddhist view that we are all deluded undermine all moral action? As I have suggested, I think it comes close to doing so. I admire the modern attempt to shape the Buddhist path into a foundation for political ethics, but I believe that a great deal of constructive work has yet to be done before this can be accomplished. If it is to be done, though, I think it would require a robust deployment of the historical and social sciences, as I have already begun to suggest, but in a way that these disciplines are hardly equipped to meet as of yet.

The Three Natures ideal focuses us on the unreality of everything but what can be discerned via measurable causes. This, I take it, is a deep motivation behind Buddhism’s famous failure, in ethics, to account for “justice.” Justice is an abstraction. Right action is not morally just action, it is action free from negative motives, which brings about greater freedom. Yet it seems to me that it is sensible to attempt to expand the range of responsible action by expanding our knowledge of cause-and-result patterns. After all, the Buddha recommends specific actions based in his awareness of the freedoms that they will produce for his listeners. Thus, perhaps the social sciences could be used as the “handmaiden” to Buddhist ethics, where they would be used to determine not the justice but the likely results of certain kinds of individual, social, or political actions. It is conceivable, at least in principle, to justify particular social interventions with this kind of Buddhist consequentialist reasoning. To generalize, then, Buddhist ethics should be expected always to counter ideological dogmatism, and to emphasize restraint from immediate, known, harmful “means” for distant ends, except where an action’s pragmatic efficacy is well understood.

The modern advocacy of nonviolence seems to me a rare example of action based upon the kind of motivational structure I am proposing. One of the standard arguments for nonviolence, which goes back to the Buddha, is that violence comes about in dependence upon stinginess and selfishness, and without these mental poisons we would have no call for violence and war. Understanding the causes of violence helps to prevent violence from coming about:

“And so, Ānanda, feeling conditions craving, craving conditions seeking, seeking conditions acquisition, acquisition conditions decision-making, decision-making conditions lustful desire, lustful desire conditions attachment, attachment conditions appropriation, appropriation conditions avarice, avarice conditions guarding of possessions, and because of the guarding of possessions there arise the taking up of stick and sword, quarrels, disputes, arguments, strife, abuse, lying, and other evil unskilled states.

“I have said: ‘All these evil unskilled states arise because of the guarding of possessions.’ For if there were absolutely no guarding of possessions … would there be the taking up of stick or sword … ?”

“No, Lord.”57

Framed thus as a causal result of heedless selfishness, violence loses its justification. The Buddha’s question—“If there were absolutely no guarding of possessions … would there be the taking up of stick or sword?”—suggests that a proper explanation of the causes of violence includes the state of mind called “guarding of possessions” or “defensiveness” (ārakkha),⁵⁸ but does not include “injustice”—or “justice,” from that perspective. That is, the real causes of violence are always selfish, deluded emotional states. Since, as we have discussed at great length, mental objects have no causes except to the degree that they appear within mental events, and are taken as motivations for action, the causes of violence are always ignorant, emotional attachments to images and ideas, not the ideas themselves.

The advocacy of nonviolence, then, may be justified by a psychology of violence that claims that violent action is always motivated falsely. The history of the doctrine of nonviolence in political ethics reflects this kind of causal reasoning, deploying psychological and social scientific evidence in exactly this way. I will put off a full discussion of this topic, but a number of modern authors may be seen to argue in this way. The most famous of nonviolence advocates—Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.—familiarly advocated nonviolence based on appeals to the humanity of the adversary, on the view that one cannot act violently without dehumanizing the other and thus blinding oneself to the truth.

It should not be surprising, then, if Buddhist ethics finds itself in concert with the social sciences that seek to uncover the causes and conditions of human decisions. One of the goals of Buddhist meditative practice is to turn this examination inward, to develop awareness of the grooves, the patterns of thought, through which one’s own mind has grown accustomed to flow. One cetanā at a time, the meditator cultivates the ability not to lay down additional pheromones, so that not every future mind will stumble down the same paths. The social scientist, too, seeks to illuminate patterns of events in their historical and social contexts, perhaps with something like the implicit hope that as humans, by looking, we can learn to refrain from repeating these patterns. The rapid changes in societies in modernity, and the growth of the social sciences, have thus provided new ways of understanding the causes of human identities, and this, I believe, has contributed to the appeal of Buddhist causal approaches to life and meaning. In the next chapter, our conclusion, we will formalize this approach, and ask what benefit Vasubandhu’s insights might provide to this developing way of viewing the world.