Abstract
This chapter engages the relations between affective and cognitive causal factors in killing evident in Abhidhamma and Abhidharma commentarial Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda literature. In particular it seeks to establish the degree to which the latter factors can be understood as psychologically determinative in intentional killing, alongside the dominant affective cause in aversion (dosa). Affect is seen to be grounded in the intentional nature of consciousness, which in the lethal case perceives and conceives its object in globally unwholesome (akusala) modes of awareness, constitutively inflected with delusion (moha), thus producing habitually distortive affective-cognitive constructions of others vis-à-vis the affected subject. Answering to the question concerning cognitive causal factors, the epistemic category of wrong view (micchā diṭṭhi), especially in the Abhidharma context, similarly functions as a precedent if not proximal causal factor. Deliberation and decision, manifest in reflective thought, entails rational cognition, and aversion is always associated with the hatred-rooted consciousness which itself depends on the specifically cognitive impetus for the akusala-cetanā intentionally giving rise to lethal acts.
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Notes
- 1.
As they entail more inaccessibly unconscious, as well as biochemical and neurological, causes they are comparatively less transparent cases of cognitively-mediated killing, but there may be some overlap between the two. If the Buddhist root-cause of delusion (moha), mediated by hatred and its cognitive effects, applies to the former cases their analyses would demand a different kind of (usually neuropsychiatric or genetic) episteme. With regard to the biochemical processes that in part explain psychosis, Buddhist terminology and theory can only describe a phenomenology of conscious (and potential senses of unconscious) mentation plausibly associated with them.
- 2.
Reiterated in the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha of the Theravādin Ācariya Anuruddha (see Bodhi 2012, 39. All refs. to Abhidh-s. are to this edition).
- 3.
See Coseru (2012, 9), Tillemans (2020), Dunne (2004) for discussion. Of relevance to the tension between realist and idealist construals of Pramāṇavāda thought, Tillemans notes that “Dharmakīrti’s metaphysics […] is largely unaffected by the choice of [Sautrāntikan] external realism or idealism. […] he goes to great length[s] to show that the Yogācāra idealist can use the same arguments for other minds […] as the Sautrāntika realist, and just as the realist can avoid solipsism so the idealist supposedly can too.” (5)
- 4.
- 5.
In an optionally expanded sequence there are 121 (see Bodhi 2012, 28–29).
- 6.
The 18 rootless cittas and 24 sense-sphere beautiful cittas complete the set of 54 sense-sphere cittas, but will only be referenced where relevant, insofar as the discussion is largely concerned with the hatred- and delusion- rooted unwholesome cittas.
- 7.
Collins writes that “Although for some purposes the terms viññāṇa, consciousness, and citta, mind are differentiated in Buddhist thought [here] they amount to the same thing. Indeed, they are explicitly said to be synonyms: that which is called ‘mind’, ‘thought’ [manas], ‘consciousness’” (1982, 214, citing SN II 94). Vasubandhu frequently conflates all three (see AKBh II 34: cittaṃ mano tha vijñānam ekārtha). There are some analyses of mind (for example of unconscious or dream states) where functional distinctions should be drawn between consciousness and mind.
- 8.
These are ultimately real because according to the Abhidhamma they are dhammas (even where they are conditioned, or dependently-arisen). According to philosophers in the Mahāyāna tradition, such language is ultimately false, if all dhammas are empty of intrinsic (or ultimately real) existence. What consciousness, mental factors, form and nibbāna do have is the kind of existence that serves as a nominal foundation for Buddhist analyses of that which is causally or mereologically dependent on, or conceptually constructed from, them.
- 9.
Of the four, the first three are all conditioned ultimate realities; nibbāna is unconditioned.
- 10.
This qualification of wisdom would relate to the degrees of wholesome consciousness, but especially volition, informing an instance of being-conscious. As a universal ‘ethically-variable’ mental factor, cetanā is likened to a chief pupil who recites his own lessons and also makes the other pupils (cetasikas) recite theirs as well, as a ringleader who sets the agenda for all. Bodhi writes that “it is the most significant mental factor in generating kamma, since it is volition that determines the ethical quality of an action.” (2012, 80)
- 11.
Abhidh-s V 23.
- 12.
Dhs. 413, 421; Asl. 257–258.
- 13.
See Dhs. 431, 443, 455, 469, 484, 556, 562, 564.
- 14.
Dhs. 566, 574, 568.
- 15.
See Vism. XIV 101; Asl. 293.
- 16.
Abhidh-s. 42–43; Vism. XIV 96–98.
- 17.
The contrary possibility already noted, of killing committed by ārya-being such as arhats and bodhisattvas, presents intriguing tasks of psychological justification (as opposed to the affective or epistemic grounds considered earlier). According to the Abhidhamma, “when certain mental states (compassion) are in the mind it is simply impossible that one could act in certain ways (intentionally kill).” (Gethin 2004a, 190) However, we’ve seen that a bodhisattva by definition acts only and always from a mind of altruistic compassion (bodhicitta), including a resort to killing. Gethin goes on to suggest that the Abhidhamma-psychological account leaves theoretic room for such a possibility. For present purposes we can assume that the Mahāyāna claim is not justified by Abhidhamma psychology but would require additional psychological grounds, possibly inaccessible to mundane analysis. Cf. Keown (2016) who claims that Mahāyāna antinomianism around killing derives directly, and misguidedly, from Abhidhamma action theory and its doctrine of moral evaluation by motivational root (mūla) rather than intention (cetanā).
- 18.
Abhidh-s. 36–37. Cf. Sv. 1050; MN-a. I 202; Spk. II 148; Paṭis-a. I 223; Asl. 102.
- 19.
Vism. XIV 92; Abhidh-s. 36–37.
- 20.
Bodhi (2012, 39). Cf. Dhs. 413, 421; Vism. XIV 92. AKBh 70a-b (647–648).
- 21.
Bodhi 34–35.
- 22.
Independent of any Buddhist context, Hobbes in Leviathan notably draws attention to greed as a causal factor in killing.
- 23.
AKBh IV 10 (576); 68d (645). See also Gethin (2004a, 188).
- 24.
Sv. 1050; Ps I 202; Spk. II 148; Paṭis-a. I 223; Asl. 102.
- 25.
This would accord with Keown’s conclusion (in 2016, 77–78) concerning “everyday counterexamples such as euthanasia and other homicidal scenarios where there is no reason to assume that hatred plays any part.”
- 26.
“Usually delusion leads to the arising of greed or hatred as well. But though delusion is always present as a root in cittas accompanied by greed and hate, its function there is subordinate.” (Bodhi 38, my italics)
- 27.
“Although wrong view can motivate acts of hatred, according to the Abhidhamma the wrong view does not arise simultaneously with hate, in the same citta, but at an earlier time, in a different type of citta.” (Bodhi 36–37)
- 28.
However, this model shifts emphasis, and as Coseru (2017b, 3.5) notes, “Abhidharma traditions […] operate with the assumption that all cognitions are inherently intentional. Indeed, for the Vaibhāṣika all types of consciousness are intentional: they are about an object that must necessarily exist. However, a detailed account of intentionality is only found in later philosophical developments associated with the Buddhist logico-epistemological school of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti.”
- 29.
Paraphrasing the phenomenological account of vedanā in Asl. 109–110, Bodhi writes that “whereas the other mental factors experience the object only derivatively, feeling experiences it directly and fully. In this respect, the other factors are compared to a cook who prepares a dish for a king and only samples the food while preparing it, while feeling is compared to the king who enjoys the meal as much as he likes.” (2012, 80)
- 30.
See Chapter 3, Sect. 2.
- 31.
Fear (or bhaya) is perhaps surprisingly not thematized as a mental factor in Abhidhammic psychology, though obviously occurs as a sensation in others that are, such as feeling, worry (kukkucca) and the fear of wrong-doing (ottappa). See Giustarini (2012) for discussion of its Pāli canonical presentation.
- 32.
Any Buddhist theory of action is problematized by the metaphysics upon which it should rely. We’ve seen an example of this in Vasubandhu and Nāgārjuna’s differing reasons for their questioning of the deep sense of the first precept: for the former warranted by the ultimate momentariness and dravyasat of dharmas, while for the latter those dharmas have no irreducible ontological-temporal status, and it is just the emptiness of persons and skandhas that casts doubt on the ultimate validity of the precept. It follows that any number of metaphysical positions on different questions will variously entail a differently-argued action theory (of which Vasubandhu’s Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa is a prime example). We will, however, develop inter alia those premises that are accepted in all Buddhist accounts: of no-self, dependent-arising and the emptiness of all conceptual constructions (paññatti/prajñapti); this has the virtue of encompassing the fundamental metaphysical concerns of any normative would-be Buddhist theory.
- 33.
See Zopa Rinpoche (1977/2021). The Samantapāsādikā treats the example of offending bedbug eggs for a similar purpose (Sp. 864–865). Cf. Cozort (1995) for a Tibetan Gelug contextualisation of the training on anger; see also Chap. 10 in the context of retributive punishment.
- 34.
The Theravāda Abhidhamma and Vaibhāṣika Abhidharma contextualisations and construals of diṭṭhi/dṛṣṭi are importantly different, particularly with regard to associated categories of paññā/prajñā and moha/avidya. Some of these are highlighted later in the chapter, which otherwise focuses on the Theravāda context. See Gethin (2004b) and Fuller (2005) for discussion.
- 35.
Dhs. 365, 399, 403, 409.
- 36.
Fuller notes that “The term ‘accompanied by corruptions’ (sāsavā) I take to imply anything with the potential to become an attachment. All kusala, akusala and avyākata dhammas are sāsavā in the Abhidhamma. Something can be wholesome, a kusala dhamma, but still be an object of attachment.” (2005, 56)
- 37.
See Gethin (2004a) and Keown’s (2016) reply for exegetical debate. Gethin’s interpretation is here taken as authoritative with regard to the Abhidhamma analysis of the affective bases for killing. Further discussion in Chap. 10 considers the affectivity of lethal punishment, and Chap. 12 the psychological conditions for ostensibly dispassionate genocidal killing.
- 38.
The locus classicus for a collective case of the same is, arguably, the Nazi genocide of European Jewry executed with an industrial efficiency that minimized personal affect—the very affectlessness of which prompted Arendt (with reference to Adolf Eichmann) famously to characterize it in terms of the ‘banality of evil’. Of course, the real case was more multi-dimensioned than this well-worn characterisation suggests; it seems plausible though that its functionaries (such as Eichmann) acted indifferently if knowingly, while its homicidal agents were motivated by some degree of hatred.
- 39.
Cases of atypical murder triggered in psychosis (or as a rare but apparent side-effect of anti-psychotic medications), are psychologically interesting as examples of apparently unmotivated killing, but lie (as does the general category of the psychiatric) beyond this analytic purview. From a Buddhist-theoretical perspective, psychotic causal conditions lie at an extreme of the unconscious aetiology of killing, which itself lies at an extreme of consciously volitional (often rationally-mediated) cases, and it is towards these latter cases that (it appears) the Abhidhamma psychological account is directed. Indeed, as noted above, cases of lethal pathology are legally and ethically, as discussed in Chap. 3, marginalised from its moral-psychological purview.
- 40.
This seems borne out by the empirical record. Genocidal Nazism, for example, obviously didn’t enact an arbitrary selection of the Jewish people as its victims; rather, it was the culmination of a centuries-long historical scapegoating of the Jew-as-other whereby collective aversion was socioculturally bred in the heart of the entire phenomenon. Not only was aversion a contributing motivation and thus (at the least) an implicit cause, but so was the delusion, and wrong view, that essentialised Jewishness (including Jewish self-essentialisation) as another background condition, both of which conclusions again confirm DCR and WV, above, in this real case and theoretical others.
- 41.
This is not the case for the Theravāda, where far less than being a universal cetasika of all mental events, paññā is in the sense-sphere consciousnesses limited to the four types of skilful consciousness associated with knowledge, and their corresponding resultant and functional consciousnesses.
- 42.
See again the exegetical dispute between Gethin (2004a) and Keown (2016), which in large part revolves around the question of whether intentional killing in the Buddhist-scholastic context can ever be considered as motivated by any affect other than aversive ones. Despite their differing conclusions, the explanandum of both arguments is limited to the affective domain. Yet Keown’s conclusion that hatred need not be exclusively constitutive of killing seems to require cognitive causes for its substantiation, if the affective bases which supplant hatred are in fact justified (see 2016, 61).
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Kovan, M. (2022). Affect and Cognition: Unwholesome Consciousness, Hatred, Wrong View, and Delusion. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_6
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