Here’s a kinda weird question for Mahāyāna Abhidharma people: how wrong/right is it to say that manasikāra and cetanā are both forms of attention, which work by bending the stream of mental events in a particular direction. (1/2)
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Manasikara does so passively, on the basis of habituated forms of directedness. Cetanā does so actively, trying to nudge the flow in a particular direction on the basis of goals/values/assumptions/etc. (2/2)
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara
I like the distinction between habituated orienting and motivated directional nudging, but I'm not sure "passive" vs "active" works here
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Replying to @evantthompson
This is what I’m sticking on. Sthiramati kinda comes close to suggesting this in his commentary on Vasubandhu’s Pañcaskandhaprakaraṇa, but the passive/active bit is not quite as clear as I’d like, and in a sense, nothing is ever passive (which is probably part of your worry)
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara
Yes, exactly. The active/passive distinction would seem to require a notion of agency that is analyzed away in the Abhidharma; there's just habitual and motivated event causality
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Replying to @evantthompson @NeuroYogacara
This is tough. They do and do not talk as if there is an active / passive distinction to be made. I think it might help to see at least two different concepts of action being used here, one of them forensic and the other not. On the former, cetana is action...
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...And manasikara is not. And on the other the “Kara” suffix is a kind of activity which renders manasikara and cetana more continuous. They can also draw distinctions based on grammatical use (so that participles indicate that something is passive)...
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For Xuanzang, manaskāra (作意) is characterized by arousing the mind and functions to direct the mind to its objective bases (縁境; ālambana) while cetanā (思) is characterized by making the mind work (令心造作) and functions to bend the mind toward good (etc.) (from 成唯識論).
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Both descriptions invoke 作, in the very translation used for manaskāra (作意, where 作 is the equivalent of kāra) and in the description of cetanā as making the mind work (令心造作), but manaskāra leans perceptual while cetanā leans behavioral.
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Oh that’s a wicked interesting way to put the distinction...will marinate on that
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