Maria Heim: The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on mind, intention, and agency

Philosophers interested inwhatBuddhist ethics has to offer contemporary debates have largely focused on finding distinctively Buddhist reasons to choose to act ethically. But this may be to miss the point. Maria Heim’s recent study illustrates vividly how a very different conception of intention, agency, and ethics emerges from the canonical Pāli texts and the extensive commentaries on these attributed to the fifth-century author Buddhaghosa. She finds in this textual tradition a sophisticated moral anthropology and moral phenomenology, one that focuses not on providing reasons against acting in ways we should not, but instead on providing tools for constructing ourselves such that the question of whether to act in an unwholesome way simply would not occur to us. In the first chapter, Heim engages with the approach to intention and agency found in the Suttas, by bringing in the complex distinctions and textual connections that Buddhaghosa adds to these discussions. To note just one high point among many, Heim offers a compelling account of the positive “presence of absence”—for instance, the beautiful states that arise in one who has nothing to be remorseful for—as a distinctive theoretical contribution of these Buddhist sources (p. 79). The second chapter examines Buddhaghosa’s nuanced approach to the canonical Abhidhamma texts. Whereas many modern scholars have taken the Abhidhamma texts as little more than dry lists of mental and physical factors, Heim notes how Buddhaghosa adds narrative context in many places (pp. 90–91) and also takes these not as closed lists but rather as open invitations to explore lived experience, a “moral phenomenology” (p. 91). In this way, Heim aims to bring out for modern readers a model of mental experience at “a level of detail distinctive in the history of human thought” (p. 83). Whereas the