After a GLORIOUS two week hiatus (seriously, glorious and completely wild and disconnected for 10 days), I’m back and ready to tilt at more windmills, tie up some lose ends, and finish our review of the paramitas for the OR. So, here were are at Paramita #6, wisdom or transcendent knowledge.
If you review our other 5 paramitas, you find that wisdom contains each of them. Practice of wisdom requires us to use all of the other paramitas; each of them provides a necessary but not independently sufficient foundation for wisdom.
Ouch. That’s hard.
Here’s the even trickier part: prajna paramita is based upon knowing that is beyond subject and object, and is definitely beyond ego. This wisdom has at its core, the idea of omniscience- a way of knowing that transcends all knowing.
That’s very meta, right?
So what’s a surgeon to do with this squishy concept that even those well-versed in Buddhism can’t readily explain (I was so grateful when Susan Piver mentioned that in a dharma talk- it wasn’t just me!)?
Quite simply, leave it alone.
According to Tilopa, the approach to wisdom requires only a few things:
Don’t recall.
Don’t imagine.
Don’t think.
Don’t examine.
Don’t control.
Rest.
Apparently in Tibetan merely 6 words cover that list.
Or, as Rinpoche has advised us, the way in is just to be with things as they are.
It seems to me that wisdom is Paramita #6 because it is incredibly challenging both conceptually and practically. My goal is simply to make you aware of approaches to wisdom because I am absolutely not qualified to make suggestions about achieving it.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t try to get there…