Beginner’s Mind is a special project collecting insightful essays written by US college students who have attended experiential-learning courses related to Buddhism. Some of the authors identify as Buddhists, for others it is their first encounter with the Buddhadharma. All are sharing reflections and impressions on what they’ve learned, how it has impacted their lives, and how they might continue to engage with the teaching.

Wallace Browning wrote this essay for his spring 2026 Buddhish Economics class at the University of Southern California. Wallace is a senior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Religion. He will work as a software engineer post-graduation, and enjoys studying the intersection of technology and religion. 

An Economy Built Through Cetana and Care

In our society, we have a fundamentally inequitable economy. We live in an era of unparalleled material abundance, yet that abundance is massively skewed to benefit a select few. Even those who live lives of material abundance often lack the psychological stability or comfort that could be assumed to go hand in hand with it. We are all chasing one thing or another, constantly feeling like we are seeking something unattainable: true satisfaction and mental peace. 

Our economy rewards cutthroat choices; making money at the expense of someone else. This stands in fundamental contrast to what I believe to be the natural state of humanity: to live with compassion, wholesome care, and love for others. Our economy reflects, and forces us to adopt, a zero-sum mindset—my success is to come at the expense of others, and exploiting others will lead to my success. Our natural cetana of care, which is emergent from our sum interactions with each other, is disjoint from our economic system. In this essay, I argue that our economic system is unnatural and poorly reflective of our humanity, and that the Buddhist perspective on cetana (Skt. intention) should be used to build an economy that centers interdependence, care, and reducing precarity. This new economy will allocate resources to incentivize and encourage the conditions that underlie those values.

Central to Buddhist thought is the idea that intention is significant, but rather than isolated origination, it comes from a plurality of causes and conditions. In the Nibbedhikasutta the Buddha says, “Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, and intellect.” (AN 6.63) Ethics are therefore close to everyday life. Each choice you make is imbued with your intention. However, our intentions may not fully be a product of “ourselves” as is conventional wisdom in the West. 

The Buddha asks what causes kamma, and answers bluntly: “Contact is the cause of kamma.” (AN 6.63) Intention is important, but shaped and conditioned by what we encounter, what pressures or incentivizes us, and even the possibilities that seem possible to us. If this is to be taken seriously, then it becomes hard to look at today’s economy as a neutral arena in which people simply “choose” correctly or incorrectly. It becomes more like a huge engine of contact that is constantly shaping the kinds of intentions that are even likely to arise—through competition, insecurity, and the constant feeling that we are one setback away from falling behind.

This is where the idea of distributed and emergent intention starts to feel more apparent. In one short discourse, the Buddha ties intention to the way patterns continue and stabilize over time: “Bhikkhus, what one intends, and what one plans, and whatever one has a tendency towards: this becomes a basis for the maintenance of consciousness.” (SN 12.38) I read this less as a metaphysical claim I have to “believe” and more as a description of how human life actually works. We become what we repeatedly aim toward. This is the type of “self-apparent” truth that I mentioned in the most recent Perusall assignment to be so common in Buddhist texts. We become what we repeatedly rehearse. Those tendencies form inside a world that trains us through rankings, notifications, incentives, and fear.

An economic system becomes one of the biggest structures of contact in modern life. It decides what you are exposed to, what feels rewarding, and what risks feel forced. It also decides whether you have stable time and stable ground under you: housing, healthcare, predictable income, and the ability to plan beyond the next week. These factors shape the mental space in which intention forms. A care-centered economy builds that mental space on stability, rather than volatility, so that care is not a rare heroic choice but a realistic baseline.

This is where my argument about “harnessing collective intention” comes in. I do not mean reading people’s inner minds and allocating capital based on who seems morally pure, but if cetana emerges from conditions, then the system can track the conditions that reliably shape intention, and allocate resources to improve them. It can recognize where communities are resilient and where they are fragile. It can treat those patterns as information about where care is most likely to grow if the material ground is stable.

In my dream economy, capital distribution becomes cultivation. A reward system to perpetuate the conditions that underlie wholesome trajectories of action. This can look like stable housing guarantees, healthcare access that does not depend on luck, childcare support that gives families breathing room, and income supports that smooth out volatility. These are often described as economic policies, but they also operate as ethical infrastructure. They change what people can afford to intend and sustain. This fits with the logic of SN 12.38. If what people intend, plan, and tend toward becomes a basis for continuing patterns (SN 12.38), then an economy that wants care and interdependence has to make planning and tending toward those things feasible. “Feasible” is the key word for me here. People can want to be compassionate and still be trained into defensive decisions by unstable conditions. A care-centered economy recognizes this and prioritizes such feasibility.

AI fits into this picture because it shapes contact at scale. It shapes what information is amplified, what opportunities are surfaced, and what is treated as valuable attention. It also shows up inside economic life through screening, pricing, recommendations, and automated ranking. These systems influence how people spend their time and what paths they believe are open to them. In an economy built around care, AI becomes a tool for locating where instability is concentrated and where support has the biggest effect. AI also becomes part of what must be designed responsibly, because its incentives can either spread stability or spread volatility depending on what it is optimized for. In a Buddhist framing, that is simply another place where “contact” is being generated and directed. (AN 6.63)

Capital can reinforce cooperative structures (public goods, shared stability, long-term investments) and it can reinforce isolation (constant competition and status-based scarcity). A system that invests in shared stability creates more space for people to relate to each other with care, because care has time and energy behind it. 

This brings us back to the premise in my introduction: that people are chasing satisfaction and peace. That chase does not come only from inside people. It comes from the surrounding structures of incentives and pressures, as identified in Buddhist thought. These ideas place ethical weight on the conditions that shape intention, not just on the isolated moment of choice. A care-centered economy allocates resources to reduce precarity because reducing precarity reshapes the conditions in which care can actually arise and last. That is how an economy starts to match the interdependent, emergent nature of cetana that Buddhism points toward, and the optimist in my heart chooses to believe.

Reflection on AI use

I talked to ChatGPT to help me understand the prompt, but I came up with my own idea for a thesis and the ideas were my own. ChatGPT reflected back to me my indicated direction, which helped me to refine my own ideas, not change them by any means. I also made sure that it didn’t generate the essay for me—I wrote everything by myself. 

Some slippage in the ownership of my ideas may be present, considering I read the responses ChatGPT provided, which will never not influence me, even subconsciously, but I view this more as what might happen while researching the topic through more conventional means. My ideas are refined as I read more, not necessarily altered.

I think this goes to show that nothing I write is ever truly “my own”—my ideas and views are entirely dependent on the information I’ve consumed throughout my life. Just as I have no distinct self, I cannot claim distinct ownership over my ideas. When I write, it is the product of a multitude of influences, causes, and conditions.

References

Nibbedhika Sutta (Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63) (Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Trans.). SuttaCentral. Retrieved 27 February 2026, from https://suttacentral.net/an6.63/en/thanissaro

CetanāSutta(SaṁyuttaNikāya12.38)(Bhikkhu Bodhi, Trans.). SuttaCentral. Retrieved 27 February 2026, from https://suttacentral.net/sn12.38/en/bodhi

Related features from BDG

Society Cannot Be Built Solely on Friendship and Care
Cultivating Collective Cetanā through AI De-biasing

Related projects from BDG

Young Voices

More from Beginner’s Mind