Will Work, Won’t Work? Getting Things Done in Buddhist Thailand

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines how volition and desire are connected to tangible outcomes for a group of Theravāda Buddhists in rural Chiang Mai, Thailand. Understanding the ways that actions are related to goals in this community is particularly fruitful for the study of the will, because for many people in Thailand it is considered relatively futile to ‘want’ something. Instead of only willing change to occur, there is also a shared social and religious attention to impermanence and uncertainty that informs attitudes, suggesting a kind of non-willing work. Rather than this ‘un-willing’ resulting in a lack of control over one’s surroundings, or an inability to get things done, people see their non-will to be an agentic mechanism that creates desired effects. Parsing out how this cultivation of non-will serves personal and social ends allows for a re-centring of scholarly attention to moral worlds within cultures of volition.