Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice.
In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is what he calls kamma. What matters morally is not the outward act but the volition behind it. And in the Abhidhamma analysis, every volition arises together with roots: wholesome ones (non-greed, non-hatred, non-delusion) or unwholesome ones (greed, hatred, delusion).
On this picture, knowing that anger is harmful is one mental event, and the arising of anger is another, with its own conditions. Beneath both lie what the texts call the latent tendencies, anusaya: dispositions toward sensual desire, aversion, conceit and the rest, which are not active most of the time and flare up when conditions arise.
The tradition is quite precise that understanding does not uproot these all at once. Even the first stage of awakening, stream-entry, removes the view that there is a permanent self, doubt, and clinging to rites, but leaves sensual desire and ill will to be weakened and removed at later stages. So someone with real insight into not-self can still be irritable for years. That is not hypocrisy; it is the expected order of the path.
This seems to me neither internalism nor externalism. Knowledge does move you, but only to the depth it has reached, and the depth is cultivated. I would be curious how this sits with Wang Yangming, whom people here seem to love, and with modern psychology.