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How can intention exist if anatta is true?
In the Pali canon, the Buddha very clearly says an individual owns their own karma and that an individual should skillfully use intentions and ethical behavior to free themselves from all pain and stress.
I understand that the Buddha spoke using conventional language, but how can intention exist alongside anatta? If all we are is conditioned phenomena, processes like a verb rather than a noun, then how is it the conditioned phenemona can exert control over itself via intention?
Even granting that anatta has to be understood via practice and not semantic abstraction... I sometimes worry Buddhism isn't very logically sound on this ground. A lot of people struggle with anatta and rebirth, but the idea of a conditioned process or karmic stream transforming doesn't seem absurd to me. There not being an intender behind the intentions at the heart of the Buddhist practice, however, seems somewhat absurd.
I am very, very close to being a Buddhist if not for questions like this one, so please take my post with that intention (see what I did there?).
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If all we are is conditioned phenomena, processes like a verb rather than a noun, then how is it the conditioned phenemona can exert control over itself via intention?
Because the nexus of delusion creates an ‘I’ that is capable of acting as an agent even though it is ultimately a fiction. The habit of I-making, fueled by ignorance and grasping, manifests a subjective point of reference that becomes the basis for the imputed self that then acts as an agent of action and intention. There is no actual self/agent though, just the appearance of one, a compelling appearance no doubt.
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Nāgasena also confronts the moral question. Asked by Milinda what, precisely, is reborn, he replies “name-and-form,” or mentality-materiality, that is, the five aggregates, and goes on to explain that although the name-and-form that is reborn is not the same as that which died, it is through previous karma that the new name-and-form arises. “But,” asks the king, “would not the new being be released from its evil karma?” “Yes,” says Nāgasena—but only in the case of an arhat; in the case of an unliberated person, the very fact that they have been reborn is a signal that they are not yet free from karma. To illustrate this point, Nāgasena provides several more illustrations, including that of a man arrested for stealing another man’s mango, who argues his innocence by claiming that the mango he stole was not the mango originally planted by the owner. Similar pleas of innocence are entered by a man who, in winter, lights a fire in a field for warmth and is arrested after the fire consumes the entire field; a man who lights a lamp atop a house so as to eat his meal and is arrested when the whole village eventually burns; and a man who is accused of adultery when he steals another man’s wife while her husband is on a journey. In every case, an appeal to the ontological difference between an earlier state of affairs and the later one will be unacceptable, for there is sufficient continuity between the planted mango and the stolen mango, the warming fire and the field-consuming fire, the dinner lamp and the fire that burns the village, and the woman ritually wed to her husband and the woman stolen by the adulterer. In each case, the king is asked in whose favor he would decide a legal case, and each time he supports the plaintiff. “Just so,” says Nāgasena, “it is one name-and-form that finds its end in death, and another that is reborn. But that other is the result of the first, and is therefore not entirely released from its evil deeds.” Through these analogies, then, the Milindapañhā establishes the plausibility—if not the certainty—that the no-self doctrine does not undermine either personal identity or morality.
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