Wisdom

From a talk given on the winter retreat, Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, January 1991,

This house is a place of refuge for us.

On a wild and stormy evening like this we are protected, we are safe here in this place, in this enclosure.

The teaching of the Buddha is, in the same way, always pointing us to that place which is comfortable, safe, secure; which is a protection from the storm; which is the still place, the centre of the cyclone; the place where everything rests: the place of enlightenment; the axis of the Dhamma-realm; this point of here and now. And it is directing us to take refuge in being awake.
Since Ajahn Kittasaro spoke so eloquently yesterday about compassion, I thought it would be suitable to talk about wisdom this evening. These two exist very much as the two wings of the Buddha’s teaching.

In Tibetan, so I have heard, the word Lama means ‘wisdom and compassion.’ I’m not sure which one is which though – La means, I think, wisdom and Ma means compassion. The two go together. One who practices the Truth, one who lives according to the Way, is one who embodies wisdom and compassion.

Where compassion is the spirit of including – reaching out to and identification with all beings, feeling the life, the joys and sorrows, the fears and hopes of all beings as our own – wisdom is the recognition that there are in truth no beings, that all of this is not self. This is not who and what we are.

There is a line in the Gatha of the third Zen Patriarch, which goes: “In this world of Such-ness there is neither self nor other than self.” This very beautifully illustrates the principle that, on the one hand, we have to entertain the reality that all beings are one; we are all of one nature. All things, all life, all existence is an intrinsically interconnected web of being. From the most dull matter to the highest, most sublime divine beings, and all states in between, this is one life, one substance. And on the other hand, “In this world of Suchness there is no self.” Within each entity, there is nothing here which is absolutely me or mine, which can be taken as a true individuality. This is what the wisdom teachings are always pointing us to: the trap of identification that we make with the experiential world.

We take the body, the world, our internal life of thoughts and feelings, the things around us, the people that we live with, the events in the world, and we invest in them an absolute importance. Because of that we suffer.

We feel alienation, separation, lack of wholeness, we feel incomplete because if there is ‘I’, then there is ‘you’ and we are apart, there is distinction and there is separation. If we see through this and we dissolve the belief in an absolute separate existence, then the sense of separation naturally dissolves because it has no basis. There is a recognition of wholeness.

The Anatta-lakkhana Sutta is the primary teaching on selflessness; you can see why this was the teaching that brought forth the first enlightened beings in this age. When teaching the Group of Five bhikkhus in the deer-park, there was this instruction on how to challenge and see through the identifications that we make with body and mind, and with the world. In challenging that sense of self, these people were able to penetrate, understand and break free of the bondage of habitual ways of seeing.

The principle of wisdom is something which is dynamic, it’s a momentary experience. As we have all heard many times over, but it is probably worth reiterating, when we talk about the wisdom of the Buddha this is not speaking of an accumulation of knowledge. This is not the ability to see into the past or the future, to be able to be aware of the goings on in people’s minds all around the world. It’s not omniscience.

When we talk about Buddha-wisdom it means the wisdom of the pure mind, which is the same as the quality of wisdom which each of us is capable of drawing upon. It’s the same wisdom. It can operate within a mind of Gotama Buddha, or all the enlightened sages, it can operate through the agency of your own body, your own thinking mind, your own senses. It is still the same wisdom, it’s still the same quality. In the same way that the air we breathe is the same air that the Buddha breathed and that it is the same earth that we all walk upon.

That quality of wisdom is a pure Knowing, which arises as an attribute of Truth it-self, of Dhamma. The primordial activity of Dhamma is that of Knowing. That which is the ultimate reality of all being, the sacca-dhamma, or the paramattha-dhamma, is not some kind of inert ethereal sub-stance but is dynamic, alive, totally awake Knowing. Knowing is its primary attribute. That’s why we say the Buddha arises from the Dhamma, is born of the Dhamma. That which knows arises from Suchness, the true Dhamma, which is the root of all being.

When we talk about Buddha-wisdom, we are talking about that Knowing quality which sees truly and clearly exactly how things are. This is not a memory of how things are, it’s not an idea about it, but it’s the way our mind can see, in this moment, how it is. What is. This is described in the phrase you hear over and over again in the scriptures: “When the eye of Dhamma opens,” when someone awakens and sees the Path, then it is said that they see: “All that is subject to arising is subject to cessation.” That is the basic liberating insight which is ennobling.
“All that arises passes away.” It is very simple, but it’s like a key for us. It’s the key to the door of our prison of selfhood. Once we apply that and keep remembering to put the key in the lock and turn it, once this has been seen and we apply it through every aspect of our experience, then we discover freedom. We can open the door, because there is nothing whatsoever, of the entire fabric of our life or that of the world, that does not come under this formula. Everything which arises, passes away.

From a minuscule feeling to a whole universe, from the footstep of an ant, a leaf falling off a tree, to worlds coming into existence, colliding, vanishing. Every single thing in the whole sensory world follows this same law. All that arises passes away.

This is the fundamental insight which changes us from being a deluded living being into a Buddha. When the mind does not see clearly, then we are a living being, we are a separate independent entity, in the midst of an external world. In the moment of wisdom and clear seeing we are a Buddha, a knower. There is Buddhahood. This is maybe a very difficult principle to swallow and might seem like a great exaggeration but it’s also very useful reflection to bear in mind. It helps to cut through our habitual negative opinions about ourselves as being somehow imperfect, or not of the same quality, capacity or potential as some great sage. We tend to feel that somehow their minds are intrinsically different, more powerful, more pure, more capable than our own.

The more that we learn to let go of our delusions about life – let go of identification with the body, with feelings, with perceptions, ideas – the more we allow wisdom to operate, then that be-comes our way of relating to life. As we develop the use of wisdom we begin to see that wisdom is not a cold, clinical, dissection of experience, as if we were defusing life. It’s not like draining the colour out of it and taking away its vigour or its substance. In fact it’s just the opposite, because the more wisdom that we apply, the more light we experience within our life, the more truly alive, awake and vivid our life becomes; this is because the true nature of our mind is bright, radiant. There is a beautiful expression that the Buddha used, the pabhassara citta – the radiant mind, the mind of clear light. He pointed out very clearly that the mind’s nature is inherently radiant. Its brightness is not something that we have to produce, rather it is the intrinsic nature of mind, the citta.

“Cittam pabhassaram agantukehi kilesehi.” “The nature of the mind is radiant, defilements are only visitors.” The more we bring forth the quality of wisdom, which is non-conceptual and non-dualistic, then the more we experience the mind of light.

At first – because wisdom is aligned more with intellect, whereas compassion is more aligned with emotion and the qualities of the heart – the use of wisdom in bringing forth the questioning and analytical aspect of mind can create a cold, negating tone. This is only because one gets into the habit of saying, “No, I don’t believe it,” to all the different thoughts and feelings and experiences that we have, so we can develop a callous streak towards our experience. It is like thinking: “Don’t touch it, don’t believe it – it’s just another pattern in your mind!”
When the clouds of ignorance start to dissipate and the sunlight of true wisdom starts to appear, then in the same way, we unconsciously shy away from, and become suspicious or negative towards the brightness of our own mind. We tend to shut that out, simply out of a habit of negating all things. When we don’t have a habit of negating experiences or conditions of mind, however, and we allow the mind to relax and to fully Know, what is there when a condition of mind ends? We feel more and more clearly the purity and intrinsic radiance of the mind.
This is why in meditation we talk about realizing emptiness. If our meditation is always about trying to get something, if it’s always tied up with achieving, purifying or developing some-thing, even thought what we’re trying to develop might be very wholesome and good, then we find that there is very often a strong sense of self and a lot of ‘doingness’: a lot of activity and no real quality of purity there. When we watch some thought or a feeling coming into existence, we feel its presence for a while and then we watch it fade. The tendency of the mind is then to immediately look for the next thing, or to want to do something – to create something wholesome or to get on to the next thing or to find another object and see its emptiness! Instead, if we are patient and we just allow the mind to watch, we notice that there is space there.

I felt at first that such space was a bit blank and empty, nondescript. I felt, “Come on, let’s go to something else, let’s do something. What’s next? Come on, let’s get going.” If you allow the mind to not follow that and to just rest in that space instead, then the veil which made the mind seemingly blank and nondescript dissolves. You see that very space broadening, lightening and be-coming warm, vast, peaceful. We realize that which is not becoming, that which has always been there, the unconditioned, the Mind Ground, pure, peaceful, timeless. That quality is something we don’t usually see, because of our constantly zipping our attention from one thing to another, to an-other, to another…. If we just take the trouble to look through the cracks, then we find the vast and beautiful space of our own true nature here, on the other side.

It is very helpful to recognize that the bringing forth of this quality is always something that we can do. It’s never beyond our reach. We are not trying to become wise; we are not trying to do something now to become wise in the future, to accumulate wisdom like some kind of commodity. It’s much more useful to see it in terms of the fact that there is an infinite resource of wisdom which is part of our own intrinsic nature, which we can dip into any time. We can dip into the well. At first it can seem as thought our store of wisdom is like a deep well stuffed with straw and husks and is completely bunged up and inaccessible to us. The mind can play up and gripe and feel insufficient and imperfect. So sometimes we need to arouse our energies like the Buddha’s udana, an ecstatic utterance, a gesture of determination to not be swayed by any kind of obstruction – for that which is blocking up, obscuring the wisdom of the mind to be just blasted out of the way by the power of faith and resolution. Then there is water everywhere!

We say that the Buddha is the archetype of wisdom and, both internally and externally, the Buddha is ‘The One Who Knows’. But still we are not trying to identify with a particular quality like that, because if we take a single quality and make that our goal, or emphasise that too much, then we become fixated upon that individual thing. The whole point of the spiritual path, using compassion and wisdom, or devotion or whatever, is that these are all designed to take us to the goal, to Nibbana. These are all skilful means that suit different people’s natures. Some people are faith types, other people are wisdom types, other people are energy types. There are many different methods and modes of liberation. One can be liberated through faith, concentration, energy or through wisdom, and some methods are quicker than others, some accord with our own characteristics more than others. The whole point of any form of approach or use of Buddhist principle is to take us to the Goal.

I remember, years ago I came across a very interesting little verse, it was in a biography of a Chinese monk, called Han Shan, who was told this verse by the Bodhisattva Maitreya in a visionary dream that he had. It was a very long and amazing dream; by the end of it, however, he was sitting at the feet of the Lord Maitreya. And what the Lord Maitreya said to him was:

“Discrimination is consciousness,
Non-discrimination is wisdom.
Clinging to consciousness causes defilement,
Wisdom ensures purity.
Defilement causes birth and death,
Whereas purity leads to where there are no Buddhas.”