Maria Heim, “The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention and Agency” (Oxford UP, 2013)
New Books in Buddhist Studies
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The History of Intention
The Vinaya is a kind of legalistic realm of thinking. It's trying to get at really complicated questions, sometimes of consent, of intention, of motivation in ways that are pretty layered and thoughtful. Even naming what goes on in an action is already constructed by the narrative setting in which it happens. The past bears down in the interpretability of actions and the sources in a really strong way. And then I try to talk about how people are deeply embedded with an entangled with others so that what is an action? It's usually a reaction to something that somebody else has done to make us deliberately seem to make it hard to put our finger on why we're doing things.
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