Mapping "Buot": A Core Schema in Cebuano Folk-Psychology
This is part of the draft which I submitted to the editorial section of my university magazine. I attempted to develop it in the hopes of incorporating it to my planned thesis. As of present, this material is incomplete. But I hope that in presenting this draft you can get a sense of what material I am engaged with in my tenure as a graduate student.
Buot is a dense and complex word in Cebuano that has a deep presence in the social and moral life of the Visayan person. The pre-colonial origins of its meaning have been attenuated by the passage of time, but we have sufficient traces in the historical records to indicate that buot experienced a regular frequency of usage between the arrival of the Spanish, and the complete deposition of their colonial rule in the 19th century.
According to the collected documents that recorded its use, buot has two dominant uses: a noun-form presented in a strong attributive sense, that is, as a determinant of the plurality of cognitive and personalistic dimensions of Cebuano personhood (“Insakto ug buot”, Nag-lain ang buot”) and a verb-form, where it denotes a behavioral expression of will or decision-making (“Mag-buot man ka!”, “Ako ang mag-buot”).
To possess buot positively in the former, means to be in a configuration that is well regulated and attuned to the normative expectations of Cebuano relational propriety. If employed as a verb, it denotes a behavioral expression of will or decision-making, with an implication of enforcing one’s volition into a field of power and social consequence (see “buut ug gahum” as transliteration of “will to power,” Cleope, 2013; Mojares, 2006).
The most extensive and well-preserved of these Spanish-era entries come from the lexicographic works of Juan Felix Encarnacion O.R.S.A. (1885), Mateo Sánchez, S.J. (1711), and Fr. Alonso de Mentrida (1637), among others.
It is important to note that the degree by which they reflect the emic practices of colonial-era Visayan speakers is always suspect, given the conditions of their production. In his work, Reconstituting the Mental Life of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Philippines, Mojares (2006) intimates the concern “how one (can) begin to get inside "local knowledge" as expressed, for instance, in such categories as buot (‘selfhood’) and gahum (‘power’), particularly in so far as these operated in times now distant from ours, say, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?”
The double bind in the case of buot is that firstly, it is difficult to estimate the extent from which the indigenous dimensions of the terms emerged as a natural development of the pre-colonial Cebuano language, and secondly, there is no reliable measure by which we can trace the trajectory of buot as it developed in the context of the moral-didactic program of the Spanish evangelizing mission.
As we have observed in Tagalog doctrinal translations, like the Doctrina Christiana en Lengua y Letra Española y Tagala (1593) and Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (1613), the early catechetical vocabularies made use of local languages to transact with the Western concepts of will, conscience, moral agency, etc. (Fernández Rodríguez, 2013). The repeated fixation of buot in an attributive and personalistic register carries the burden of conceptual mediation, that is, between indigenous notions of moral agency and their Western analogues, which facilitated the translation of local ideas of conscience, intent, and virtue into the vocabulary of Christian moral economy. This strategy, conditionally syncretic, draws from the missionary catechism to develop a moral subjectivity that was distinctly Visayan, and hence accommodating of the Christian precondition of moral agency and culpability, for “the Spanish missionaries sought to capture not only native bodies but, more important[ly], native minds and souls.” (Rafael, 1987)
In the Bocabulario de la Lengua Bisaya-Hiligueyna y Haraya de la Isla de Panay, Fr. Mentrida (1637) provides one definiens of buot as:
Id. La voluntad;
And explicates this by suggesting the example that,
todas las locuciones que en latín y en romance décimos del corazón, en esta lengua se dicen de buut. V. g. “Amo a Dios de todo mi corazón”: nahigugma ako sa Dios sa akong tanang buut, con toda mi alma. “Tengo afligido el ánimo o el corazón”: masakit ang buut ko.
Or roughly in English,
Also: the will; all expressions that in Latin or Spanish are said “of the heart” are, in this language, said “of buut.” For example: “I love God with all my heart” — nahigugma ako sa Dios sa akong tanang buut — literally, with all my will or soul.
Through the work of these men, buot was able to function as a mediator between the pre-colonial moral imagination and the emerging colonial order. Its circulation in catechetical and confessional texts implies a process of moral domestication, where indigenous cognition was slowly but deliberately framed in terms of obedience and discernment. It is not difficult to deduce from these instances how missionary texts have the capacities to repurpose buot as “what you will” but also “what you should will.”
To stabilize the attempt at mapping the conceptual structure of the term, a diachronic analysis of its semantic neighborhoods must first be established. This involves identifying the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations that have historically shaped its use in both spoken and written Cebuano. By tracing how buot interacts with adjacent moral and cognitive lexemes, one can outline the relational field that determines its interpretive limits. Such a procedure allows for a disciplined reconstruction of buot as both a linguistic artifact and a site of evolving moral cognition.
Utilizing a list obtained from Rubrico (2019), we can construct a preliminary analysis of the scarce and littered corpora which contain the definiendum buot (including boot and all its variations). Surveying the lexical entries which contain the root and its derivations, we observe a pattern of a semantic clustering that suggests a broad semantic field, with the core and peripheral definiens centering about five superordinate categories, namely:
Immediately, we can see what unique position buot occupies in the Visayan conception of personhood. The way that buot is employed in ordinary language use presents a moral sensibility from which a folk theory of mind could be inferred. This extends to the formation of self-awareness, and traces a developmental line passing through the moral maturity of a child with the emergence of volition or capacity to be self-possessing.
The primalness of buot in the Visayan sense of self is pervasive, but there is no systematic study that approaches it through the frameworks of psychology. The extant literature tends to describe buot as a cultural or linguistic curiosity, which is a residual form within the moral discourse, rather than a latent operational psychological schema. Yet the everyday usage of the term indicates that it organizes moral behavior, regulates emotion, and conditions certain forms of social judgment that structure interpersonal relations and moral evaluation.
Take the sentence, “Wala man kay buot!” lit. “You have no buot!” It is easy to interpret this statement as a strong but not too uncommon condemnation. One may conjure the picture of a weary mother chastising her teenaged son for the unceasing ridicule of a younger family member. Assuming that teasing children is a locally invalid behavior, we find that the teenaged boy fails to maintain the obligation to have buot, that is, in exemplifying the state of being buotan. In another scenario, a dalagita overcooks rice that would have been consumed for the evening. Upon arrival, the father is heard proclaiming, “Asa man nang imuhang buot?” literally, “Where is your buot?”
As it stands, knowing this code entails a form of subscriptive participation in the Cebuano society’s rules of conduct. It may serve us to translate both uses of “buot” into the English as “manners.” In this way, both parents articulate a type of privation of a certain kind of moral-awareness.
But there is another usage of “buot” that cannot be readily transposed with this suggestion, i.e., one hears “Ayaw na siya ug hilabti kay nag-lain na iyahang buot.”
The context of buot awkwardly interprets the English word “manner,” because manner is a social habit that reflects outward conduct rather than a fleeting condition of one's character A more apt word would be “temper”: “Don’t meddle with him because he is in a bad temper,” which literally means that our subject is observed without his regular, cool disposition.
Manners, in Cebuano, roughly translate to “Batasan.” The reason why we could not substitute batasan in the previous example is because batasan is a socially codified habit of behavior, compared to buot, which is homogenously agreed to speak about the interior motions of thought and feeling. A series of these predicative statements shows interesting peculiarities with the usage of buot in the ordinary sense of the term.
For example, we are at liberty to say “Lain siya ug batasan” (He is ill-mannered) and “Lain siya ug buot” (He has an ill-disposition) at the same time. Both of these are evaluative, showing a deficient adjustment of a person to the moral or social order of the community, but only the prior example is explicitly condemnatory. Being in a state of “Lain ug buot” does not signify a corruption of character; rather, it indicates a condition where sentiment and will are in a temporary state of psychological disequilibrium.
Observe also when we say that “Lain siya ug kinaiya” (He has a bad character). Clearly, both of these expressions make sense, despite referring to different depths of a person’s psychological constitution. At first instance, when we speak about his batasan as “lain,” we are referring to a kind of comportment that is socially off, rude, or outright unpleasant. Someone being in an ill-disposition, however, implies that the condition is a temporary affliction of the affective type, which disturbs the stability of conduct. When we say that someone has a “lain ug kinaiya,” however, we are condemning the negative stature of a temperament that is somehow permanent or enduring. From this, it is possible to deduce a usage of buot as an internal faculty subject to disturbances, and disequilibriums.
Additionally, buot seems to be the only term that has a very explicit developmental dimension. We can speak of someone being “Wala pa’y buot” (not yet having or attained buot), but we cannot say the same for someone as “Wala pa’y batasan” or “Wala pa’y kinaiya.” It is not uncommon for someone to approximate the semantic form of this phrase, which is a transposition that takes the sense of “Wala pa na siya nakat-on ug insaktong batasan” or “Wala pa na siya nakat-on ug insaktong kinaiya” for kinaiya. Curiously, it appears semantically strained to say that “Wala pa na siya nakat-on ug insaktong buot.” To retain the developmental forms of the usage of the words “batasan” and “kinaiya,” we have to use the derived or nominalized type that appears in the construction of “pamuot,” so it becomes, “Wala pa na siya nakat-on ug insaktong pamuot.” If we follow this thread, we find that the batasan/pamatasan pair is not as semantically productive as the buot/pamuot pair, and this asymmetry originates from the conceptual status of buot as a cognitive-moral faculty which predominantly organizes the developmental discourse of moral and emotional maturity.
The most remarkable of these distinctions lies in the fact that buot seems to name a capacity that must be acquired through maturation or a dawning of consciousness; the awakening of a buot necessitates some primitive apprehension of intention and the ability to measure affective sensibilities. Batasan and kinaiya, on the other hand, are merely observed as givens of personality or habit, which obtain from the repetition of behavior to its crystallized performances in the social environment. If brought into relation with the structure of moral cognition, buot appears to be the threshold faculty through which the self first becomes aware of its own capacity to will, discern, and be answerable for its actions, that is,
2.) buot is a developmental and pre-moral substrate of the moral self
When we speak about someone being “Lisod sabton ang batasan” or “Lisod sabton ang kinaiya,” we are perfectly coherent with the sense that we are describing the constancy or complexity of the person’s habitual character. However, we cannot easily say the same case for buot. “Lisod sabton iyahang buot,” although perfectly correct grammar-wise, carries a hesitation that unsettles the ordinary assumption of the speaker that buot names a stable trait. The difficulty in understanding buot is not about decoding a pattern of behavior which is outwardly legible and from which obtains the predictability of the person, but in discerning the turn of someone’s feeling or will at a given moment, within the indeterminacy of intention.
In the same vein, we are licensed to say “Dili na na ma-usob iyahang batasan” and “Dili na na ma-usob iyahang kinaiya,” because these predicates fix the trait within the structure of the person, and we are not mistaken in taking that stability as a mark of identity according to the dispositional theory of character proposed by John Doris (2002). Both *batasan* and *kinaiya* are apprehended and validated through a social lens because they are qualities exposed to others in the social transactions which environ the recognition of personhood.
Saying that “Dili na na ma-usob iyahang buot,” however, sounds peculiar, since buot is never conceived as a stable essence but as a mutable disposition. It is a register of interior movement, inseparable from the person’s momentary social awareness—the felt negotiation between self and others that governs tact, restraint, or irritation.
Another peculiarity is that buot is spatially and quantitatively mapped, while batasan and kinaiya are not. The chart shows that we can describe buot with spatial dimensions but none of these apply to the rest. In a detailed analysis by Mojares (1999) about the Cebuano cultural history of space, he says that “The Cebuano is ego-oriented in organizing space. The perceptual axis is the buot.”
To digress in a more philosophical direction: the Cebuano world seems to conceive the world as an interior landscape, measurable and locatable, an inner topography of capacity and control. To possess buot is to have an inner field where thought, will, and emotion converge into agency. Space becomes the metaphor for consciousness itself, suggesting that the Cebuano person does not simply have thought but inhabits it. The buot is both the interior site of intention and the limit of perception; it contains the coordinates of moral and emotional existence. In this sense, buot defines a person’s range of interiority, the measurable dimension of what it means to act, to decide, to feel within the Cebuano frame of being.
In continuity with the prior discussion about interiority and the mapping of self, we have good reason to infer that buot is conceptualized as a quantifiable internal resource or capacity, one that can exist in greater or lesser amounts. It has a “level,” an intensity that can rise or wane depending on cultivation or depletion. In contrast, batasan and kinaiya represent qualitative patterns or moral textures. They are descriptive rather than measurable; one speaks of their form, not their volume. A person’s batasan might be bati or maayo, and their kinaiya might be lisod sabton, but neither can be expressed in degrees or discontinuous extents. This difference reflects a deeper understanding of the Cebuano self: that buot belongs to the interior mechanism of will and discernment, while batasan and kinaiya emerge as its outward crystallizations in conduct and disposition. As an inner faculty that can grow, it would be consistent to think that buot is dynamic, responsive to time, experience, and moral education, a reservoir that both conditions and is conditioned by one’s way of being in the world.
Curiously, buot appears morally neutral in its primitive state. While batasan and kinaiya are immediately subject to moral judgment, buot exists first as potential rather than value. It is the ground upon which morality is later constructed, the raw material of intention before it is oriented toward good or evil. This neutrality is morally and socially significant because it suggests that the Cebuano view of personhood begins with an undetermined will, one that acquires moral shape only through social learning and ethical participation. The self is not born with virtue or vice but with buot—a faculty of awareness and control that can be refined or corrupted. This makes moral life an act of cultivation rather than revelation. To possess buot is to be capable of choice; to act with batasan and kinaiya is to make that choice visible. The Cebuano moral universe thus begins from neutrality and moves toward value, from capacity to character, from the measurable interior to the expressive exterior.
However, describing buot as "bati" is not typical. If employed accidentally, it would be a profound and unusual statement, implying a fundamentally corrupted will or conscience, not just a bad habit. Bati and lain are terms used to condemn someone's observable character. Buot, however, is the foundational capacity behind that character. It can be strong or weak, developed or undeveloped, but its primary state is not "good" or "bad", it is the faculty itself, or rather, the condition from which we attribute a condemnatory judgment. A weak buot ("mubo ug buot") may lead to bad batasan, but the buot itself isn't described as "bati." There is room to explore this peculiarity, which places buot in a more existential consideration, but this will not be pursued in this paper.
3) buot is an Internal Faculty, while Batasan and Kinaiya are Externalized Manifestations.
This is subtly different from the point about stability. The chart shows that batasan and kinaiya are what is "understood" ("sabton") by others. "Lisod sabton iyang batasan/kinaiya." This makes perfect sense because these are the patterns of behavior that are expressed and observed. They are the "text" that others try to "read" and interpret.
The awkwardness of "Lisod sabton iyang buot" points to the fact that buot is not an external pattern to be decoded. It is the internal source of agency and feeling. You don't "understand" someone's buot; you discern it, you respect it, or you find it difficult to predict. Buot is the will and intention before it becomes action.
4) buot Implies a Unique Kind of Agency and Possession.
The construction "Wala pa siyay buot" (He/She does not yet have buot) is profoundly telling. It frames buot as not just a capacity, but as a form of self-possession. You cannot say "Wala pa siyay batasan" because even a child has some habits. You cannot say "Wala pa siyay kinaiya" because even a child has a disposition. To "have" buot is to be in command of one's own internal world—to have a will, intention, and a degree of self-control. To lack it ("wala pa") is to be in a pre-agential state, governed by impulse or external direction. This frames buot as the cornerstone of personhood and individual autonomy. The other terms describe what kind of person you are; buot describes that you are a person in the full, agential sense.
