Dana as Skilful Means

This talk was given in 2000

Skilful means is skilful means of communicating the Dharma, communicating the Truth. Skilful means are the best possible means, the means that are most effective. Skilful means could also be interpreted as the most effective or best means of discovering the Truth. Dana means giving, generosity. So we are concerned with generosity as a means of discovering the Truth, generosity as means of experiencing the Truth even, and also generosity as a means of communicating the Truth or Dharma.

Skilful means is a question of motivation. Eventually generosity is motivated by Wisdom and Compassion that is when it is truly skilful means. However in the earlier stages of spiritual life we will have many different motivations. We may, for instance, be motivated to be generous out of a need for approval. We may feel, consciously or unconsciously, that if we are generous then people will like us, we will be approved of. This is obviously not a pure motivation, but we shouldn't be too hasty to condemn it, because it has the seeds of wisdom in it. It is true that if we are generous, we will create a more pleasant immediate world for ourselves to live in and that we are more likely to have friends. The trouble is that if our giving is too much a matter of wanting to be loved, it may not be generosity at all and in that case it could have the opposite effect. People may try to avoid someone who demands to be loved, demands friends, demands to be liked and uses their own acts of giving as a kind of bargaining counter, to induce guilt. Someone who says things like “How can you be so unkind to me after all I've given you?”, “I feel betrayed”. This kind of attitude makes people run a mile. I think it is okay to give, to be generous in the hope that people will like us and treat us well as a result but it is counterproductive to demand to be loved or demand friendship. Love can be given but love cannot be taken. If we give we can be sure that it will have beneficial consequences, so we don't really need to demand anything in return. Demanding that people like us only sets up another set of consequences that are less beneficial.

Another possible motivation for being generous is that we take it on as a practice, a sort of training or discipline to help us to transcend selfishness. In this instance we are motivated by a desire to change and we are following the advice of tradition and of those more experienced to bring about positive change in ourselves. Our generosity resulting from this kind of motivation might feel uncomfortable, a bit stilted and awkward. And we might not be wise in our giving, but since it is a practice, a training, it doesn't matter that we get it wrong from time to time. The main thing is to do it, to be generous and by being generous to learn about ourselves and transform ourselves. This is a good motivation for generosity and again it has in it the seeds of Wisdom. It is wise to follow in the footsteps of the wise.

Or we may be motivated to be generous by feelings of guilt. This is an emotion that is sometimes played upon by the advertising agencies for some of the bigger charities. Although I believe it is good to give whatever the motive, in this case I would say that the whole benefit of giving is seriously undermined, In the first place there will be little spiritual benefit unless the guilt is overcome and secondly it is questionable whether the sort of people who use such emotional manipulation are good custodians of donations, since if they are willing to be devious in acquiring funds, they may also be devious and manipulative in their distribution. To allow ourselves to be manipulated is to encourage those who are manipulative. However in the case of large agencies it is to be hoped that there are sufficient checks and balances in place to make sure that the eventual recipients do benefit, at least materially. But I think we need to be very wary of guilt as a motivation and try to move beyond it to some more positive motivation. On the other hand we shouldn't use the fact that we may feel a bit guilty to prevent us from giving at all. What we need to do is carry on giving but work on overcoming the guilt. Guilt of this type is a species of self-hatred and self-hatred can breed all sorts of other hatreds and resentments that from a larger perspective will tend to create the very problems, the problems of war and conflict, that our generosity is trying to alleviate.

Another possible motivation is that we may simply be motivated by seeing a need. We see that someone needs something, or needs attention or affection and we just quite naturally give. It just seems the right thing to do, the natural thing to do. This is probably the result of positive conditioning and a natural empathy with others and is a very beautiful state of consciousness. If we are like this, naturally generous, we can build on it and stretch ourselves beyond being generous in response to a need to being generous without any such stimulus, so that generosity becomes what we are rather than just what we do.

And then our generosity may be motivated by a desire to bring meaning into people's lives and a desire to help people see and experience their interconnectedness with others. This is the motivation of skilful means. This is not a calculating or manipulative motivation. Rather it grows out of a happy spontaneous generosity that is then channelled by a growing wisdom. That wisdom or awareness can see beyond the surface of life to what is really needed for the well-being of humankind. What is really needed is for more and more people to embody the truth of human connectedness.

There are many different motivations for being generous, some of which I've mentioned. They range from a negative guilt, through approval seeking, wanting to change, responding to needs, to a spontaneous integrated generosity that is eventually channelled by awareness and wisdom into creating spiritual community (Sangha), so that people can have the conditions in which to experience a deeper meaning or higher truth in their lives.

For most of us most of the time our motivations are mixed. We experience a whole cocktail of motivations simultaneously and if we were to spend our time worrying about getting it right we might not act at all. I think we need to trust that if we are meditating and trying to be more ethical then gradually our motivations will clarify and purify. We don't need to dissect our motivations every time we are generous or kind. That could be undermining and inhibiting of our positive actions and what we need is encouragement. We need to encourage our generosity and kindness and encourage generosity and kindness in others. We need to praise and rejoice in generosity wherever we see it, so that we encourage that flow of positivity. If we do that then our motivations will gradually be purified through the positive beneficial consequences of our actions. Actions proceed from the mind and are affected by our mental states, but actions also have an effect on our minds and can encourage the growth of positive mental states. This is why generosity is encouraged as a practice regardless of motivation. The act of giving gives a generous shape or a generous flavour to our mind and that begins to mould a new consciousness that is more expansive and more naturally generous. Generosity is a skilful means of giving a transcendent flavour to our consciousness. Generosity transcends egotism.

There are many different ways to give and they all lead us to the truth and enable is to lead others to the truth too. I'll just briefly go through some of the traditional ways to give. We can, for instance, give our experience of spiritual practice. We can share the benefits of our practice with others. This doesn't necessarily mean teaching meditation to others. That would not be appropriate until you were well established in practice and able to follow through any questions that arose. In the early stages of our spiritual life giving of our experience may mean simply helping out in such a way as to enable more experienced people to teach and spend time with people.

Another form of giving is giving confidence. You give confidence to others by being confident. Confidence is undermined by fear of failure and by a bad conscience. The only way to deal with fear is to act in the face of it and by acting we gain confidence. If we make an effort to develop loving kindness and to practice the precepts we will have a clear conscience and therefore be able to be confident that no one can reproach us. We give confidence by not allowing ourselves to be held back by fears, by being ethical and by encouraging others. Then there is giving of education and culture. This is sharing our knowledge, talents and enthusiasm with others.

Then there is what is traditionally known as giving life and limb. This means being willing to die for the sake of Truth. Under present circumstances in this country we are unlikely to be called upon to sacrifice our lives for the Dharma. That is not always the case everywhere in the world. For instance in Afghanistan the Taliban government has destroyed some 2000-year-old Buddhist statues and I imagine they wouldn't be too friendly to Buddhists either. But I think for us this giving of life and limb simply means being willing to be inconvenienced. Being willing to engage wholeheartedly, not just mentally, but also physically and do what needs to be done to create and maintain the conditions that enable ourselves and others to have a spiritual practice. This could mean simply helping out around the Buddhist Centre, doing a bit of cleaning or painting or it might mean cooking for a festival day or helping someone who is ill by doing their shopping, and so on. This willingness to be inconvenienced is something that goes against the grain of our comfort culture and something we need to consciously work at.

Then there is the giving of time and energy and the giving of material things and money. I want to go into these at some length because this is where many of us will be able to practice generosity most and also where many of us will experience the greatest resistance to being generous: time, energy, money, possessions. All these are connected with each other; time, energy, money, material things. We often sell our time and energy in order to acquire money with which we can buy goods. The things we have in our room or flat or house represent a certain amount of time and energy. They cost time and energy.

Time is very precious. “Our little life is rounded with a sleep” as Shakespeare's Prospero says. Our life is quite little or short from an historical or cosmic perspective. If we are fortunate we can expect to live about seventy five or eighty years. Of these the first twenty or so are spent growing up and the last five or ten are likely to be less active. So we may have about forty five or fifty active years and of course if we sleep for about eight hours a day that is a third of our lives that we spend asleep, leaving us with thirty to thirty five years of active adult life, which is not that much. So time is precious. Any major purchase we make such as buying a house costs us several years of our life. Our goods, our material possessions cost us a certain amount of time of which we do not have an unlimited supply. During that time we use energy, physical, emotional and mental energy. We sell our time and energy for money which we then convert into goods and services.

Because time and energy are so precious it becomes necessary to use them well. We need to be as creative or as intelligent as possible with our time and energy. When we come to see and understand the importance and necessity of the spiritual dimension of life we will naturally want to give more of our time and energy to our spiritual aspirations. And we may eventually want to give most of our time and energy to the spiritual dimension of life for our own sake and for the sake of others. We may even want to give our time and energy to creating the conditions for spiritual practice for future generations. We may come to feel that here is nothing more worthwhile to spend our time and energy on. As that happens we will be more and more generous with our time and energy; seeing each day as an opportunity for encouraging spiritual growth in ourselves and others. This might still mean selling our time and energy to acquire money, but the money would be substantially used in the service of the Dharma.

Generosity as skilful means is generosity that enables us to progress spiritually, enables us to encourage others to progress spiritually and brings about harmony and goodwill between all those who are trying to practice the Dharma. And that is what we will start to use our time and energy for as generosity becomes a more spontaneous quality of who we are.

Often we can expect to experience resistance in ourselves to giving time and energy. Because of the way society is ordered and the current ethos of selling one's life in order to consume, we may tend to make a sharp division between work and leisure, time that doesn't belong to us and time that belongs to us. And of course we can then be very possessive or precious about “my time”, “time for myself”, and through habit and convention we may often proceed to waste it by doing nothing or going shopping. A good use of “my time” or the time and energy that we are not selling is to give it wholeheartedly to what is most meaningful to us. Engagement and wholeheartedness also strangely enough increases our time. Time is a function of consciousness. Time is created by consciousness and a consciousness that is more aware and engaged creates more time. Emotional resistance uses up a lot of energy and leaves us feeling impoverished.

We need to be aware of any tendency to try to hoard our time and energy. It is self-defeating and emotionally impoverishing. We may think that we are being kind to ourselves. We may rationalise our emotional resistance to giving time and energy as not being hard on ourselves. But if we go along with our emotional resistances and poverty mind we will be condemning ourselves to dullness of mind and lack of vitality. Hoarding of time and energy is wasteful, it is better to give our time and energy to that which is meaningful.

I'd like to move on to say a few things about money and possessions. I find money fascinating. What it is, how it moves around, it's potential for good and evil, its associations with happiness and security; it's a very interesting thing, money. And as a topic it is is still somewhat taboo, which makes it even more fascinating. It is not quite socially acceptable to ask someone how much money they earn, how much savings they have, what they spend their money on or what they expect to inherit, and yet these things are so interesting. It is also fascinating to consider attitudes to money and conditioning around money. This is an area where many of us are quite unconscious.

It is very interesting to ask ourselves about our early conditioning around money. What is your earliest memory of money? What was your parents attitude to money? How much has your life been influenced by your early conditioning around money? Are you someone who saves money or never saves, someone who borrows or never borrows. What does this tell you about yourself? Do you part with money easily or are you very reluctant to part with money? Do you assume that your own way of handling money is the best? Do you find the topic of money exciting or depressing, or irritating or scary? If so why? There are so many questions we can ask ourselves about our attitudes to money and there is so much to learn about ourselves by looking into this area of our lives. I would recommend this as an exercise to anyone wanting to develop self-knowledge. I'm not even suggesting that you should change your attitude to money just that you become aware of it.

Money is conventionally defined as a medium of exchange. It replaced barter as a more flexible way to do business. And money is very flexible. It can become almost anything. We tend to think of money as a substance, as something material, because we associate it with notes and coins, but of course money is not notes and coins. That is just a way of representing money or indicating money. Money itself is something else. Most money is represented by numbers on paper or numbers on computer files. And these numbers are constantly changing, moving, flowing. It is best not to think of money as something concrete, it is best to think of it as something fluid. Money is a flow of energy. Money is pure potential. Money is a medium by which consciousness acts in the world. Because we are egotistic creatures and therefore spend much time and effort defending and consolidating our ego identity, we tend to channel money to this purpose too. Therefore we tend to give money the qualities of security and stability and substance. This is just an extension of the delusion that gives stability and substance to our own ego identity. But just as we are in reality a constantly changing process mentally, emotionally and physically, so too is everything else in the Universe including money.

In this regard it is interesting to consider the idea of savings, saving money. Is it possible to save money? It certainly seems to be possible. But how can you save something that is essentially a process, a flow of energy. Traditionally you put your notes and coins in a metal box and put that in a safe place. Of course this is not really saving money because in time it loses value and you could end up with so much relatively worthless paper and metal. What most people do is give their money to a bank, probably with the vague notion that the bank looks after it for them. What a bank does with any money deposited with it is that it promptly gives it to someone else or, more precisely, it sells your money to someone else. When you save money what you are doing is selling it to the bank for a certain period of time and the bank promptly sells it on to someone else, at a profit of course. But what is it that you sell to the banks and what does the bank sell on to someone else? This is a question worth pondering.

Well if your money is really the result of an expenditure of time and energy then it is time and energy that is deposited with the bank and it is time and energy that the bank sells. It could be said that it is more creative to and imaginative to borrow money than to save money. The bank buys or rents money from people who are not able to do anything creative or imaginative with it and sells or rents money out to people who can use it creatively and imaginatively. Of course when you put your money in a bank, this money which represents hours and days and years of your life energy, when you put it in the bank, you have no idea where it goes next or what use it's put to. It could be constructive or destructive, it could be positive or harmful, you just don't know. This is why we often recommend Triodos bank to people because Triodos Bank is a bank run by followers of the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, (Anthroposophy). It operates a policy of transparency, so you can know exactly who your money is being lent to. And the projects they lend to are all life enhancing in one way or another. To use their own words, they lend to projects which “create social and environmental value”.

Because money is fluid and flows on incessantly it is not quite as simple as I've been saying. It is not just you, your bank and whoever your bank lends to. The money didn't begin with you and it doesn't end with the borrower. It is just an invisible cord that connects you to all these people whose hands it passes through. As with everything else, the money we come into contact with is part of a vast chain or cycle of events and we only have the opportunity to send it on its way as positively as possible. As Glen Saunders, a manager at Triodos bank, says “There is no such thing as clean money. Money passes from hand to hand and you can never be quite sure where it has been, nor in its longer life where it will go. It's very “social” in this way, linking you with people you might wish to avoid. We think you can never ask for clean money, only that when it comes into your hands, you transform it by what you do with it.”

(Triodos News Spring 2001 p3)

This is the crucial ethical question in relation to money; what you do with it. And the first thing to consider with regard to what we do with money is are we aware of what we do with our money. Do we know what we spend our money on or do we just have a vague notion about it. As an exercise in developing awareness it is worth writing down what we spend our money on and noting how much goes where. Then we will be in the position to ask ourselves whether that is what we want to spend our money on. Again to quote Glen Saunders “Much ethical investment is defined by a list of things to avoid. But it's much more interesting to look at what is embraced and supported. Thus, for Triodos Bank, our “ethical” is about finding people taking initiative who need capital in order to add social, environmental and cultural value to society.” (ibid)

It seems to me that this is a very good ethical approach. Not concentrating on what to avoid, although of course there are many things to avoid, but concentrating our energy and money on what adds value to humanity; what enhances life and encourages awareness and compassion. This is the ethical dimension to spending money. Channelling the time and energy represented by money as positively as we can. To do this we need to make some effort to be aware of what our money is likely to become when it leaves our custody. What will our money cause to happen. What will it bring into being. If you buy a bar of chocolate or a packet of coffee or a jar of honey you are becoming part of a particular chain or cycle of events. Do you know what sort of chain of events that is? Is it something you want to encourage or support? When you buy clothing or toiletries or a car you are involving yourself in a whole chain of activity. Is it something you want to encourage and support? When you buy a book or pay for a retreat you are involving yourself in a particular chain of events. Is it something you want your time and energy invested in? This is the sort of question we need to ask ourselves often if we are to be ethical in our use of money which represents the resources of time and energy. We also need to ask ourselves what it is that we do want to encourage and support. What are our priorities? What do we believe will enhance life? We cannot be skilful in our use of resources unless we are more aware of what direction we want to move in and what direction we need to encourage the rest of society to move in.

In terms of skilful means, what is being encouraged and supported is communication and harmony between people based on spiritual values. The values of non-violence, generosity, contentment, truthfulness and awareness. To promote, encourage and support these values is skilful means. It is a means of creating and unifying the Sangha or spiritual community. The best possible use of money is to channel it in a direction which encourages and supports these spiritual values. These spiritual values are the foundation for a more sane, ecologically aware and compassionate world. And it is just sensible to give our time and energy,whether in the form of money or otherwise, to creating a sane, ecologically aware and compassionate world. This is what Dana as skilful means is about . And if we want to enter into this sort of chain of activity, this stream of beneficial activity, then we need to take a radical look at our lives and especially at our attitude to money and our use of money. By doing this we will begin to transform ourselves and we will also start to help transform the world.

I said earlier that we tend to see money as something stable, secure and substantial and because of our basic self-view we seek security and stability through money. If we practice Dana as skilful means we are trusting to communication and human connections and friendship for our security and stability. Dana as skilful means is the practice of generosity to bring about harmony and connection and friendship between people. This connection and harmony based on common spiritual values and aspirations is what makes human life meaningful and what makes the prospect of death bearable. When I think of death I envisage my friends rejoicing and celebrating my life. Wealth is produced as a result of the human need for security and as we evolve beyond the material into the spiritual dimension we come to see and understand that real security and real wealth lies in friendship, harmony, trust and interconnection and this is what leads us to practice Dana as skilful means.

The Perfection of Wisdom

This is the sixth in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

“Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect and of faith!

Remove the obstructing defilements and clear away all your taints!

Listen to the Perfect Wisdom of the gentle Buddhas,

Taught for the weal of the world, for heroic spirits intended!”

(The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines,trans. E. Conze, p.9)

This is how the teaching of the Ratnagunasamchayagatha begins. The Ratnagunasamchayagatha is one of about thirty five Perfection of Wisdom texts. This verse is important because it tells us how we should approach the whole topic of Perfect Wisdom, in fact, how we should approach the Dharma.

It asks us to cultivate receptivity and to purify ourselves. This applies when we are engaging in study, reading, discussion or listening to talks. “Call forth as much as you can of love, of respect and of faith!” The love, respect and faith are already there, you just need to contact them and bring them to bear in the situation. You already love the Dharma, you already respect its profundity, and you already have faith in its effectiveness. That is why you are practising, that is why you are reading this. You need to contact “as much as you can” of that love, respect and faith. This is what constitutes your receptivity. When you are receptive you can gain much more than when you are in a state of doubt or cynicism. So, the first thing is to be as receptive as possible. Open your heart to the Dharma. What you are really calling forth is positive emotion. You don’t need to be a scholar, you don’t need to have a master’s degree, you don’t need to be highly intelligent, you don’t even need to be literate. But you do need to have sufficient positive emotion to listen to the Dharma. Your heart needs to be open enough to allow the Dharma to enter. For this to happen, you need to purify yourself of unskilful mental states. If you are in a state of ill will or anger or neurotic craving, you need to at least be aware of it and if possible put it to one side while engaging with the Dharma teaching. Even better is to prepare yourself before study or listening to a talk or reading a text by meditating and endeavouring to transform any negative emotions.

When you are prepared, then you can “listen to the Perfect Wisdom of the gentle Buddhas”. You can really listen, that is not just with your ears but also with your heart. This is the advice of the “gentle Buddhas”, the Compassionate Buddhas who want to help you to overcome all suffering. They teach the Dharma, “for the weal of the world”. And finally, the verse says this Perfect Wisdom is “for heroic spirits intended”.

The Dharma changes people, it affects every aspect of your life, no corner is left untouched. This can be a frightening prospect, it can make us feel insecure. Is there not something we can hold on to? Something that can stay unchanged? No, there isn’t. And that’s why we need courage to really listen to and engage with the Dharma. We have to be prepared for anything to happen. We have to be prepared to make unpalatable discoveries about ourselves, we have to be prepared to have our most cherished views and opinions challenged and shattered, we have to be prepared to live by values that the world may ridicule, we have to be prepared to upset people by not living our lives as they want us to, we have to be prepared for radical change in every area of our lives, we have to be prepared for the ego destroying explosion of Perfect Wisdom. This is why the Dharma is “for heroic spirits intended”.

What is the Perfection of Wisdom? Well, on one level it is a whole body of literature comprising, as I said, about thirty five texts. Perhaps the most well known Prajnaparamita texts are the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. There is also the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, which is rendered into verse as the Ratnagunasamcayagatha from which I quoted at the beginning. There are other texts ranging from the Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines to the Perfection of Wisdom in one letter. This Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom literature has all been translated into English due to the efforts of one man, the great scholar Dr. Edward Conze.

The main characteristic of the Prajnaparamita literature is that is totally non-rational. It consists of paradox after paradox and is most frustrating to the rational mind. And this is its intention. It is an all-out attack on literalism. It sets out to destroy all conceptualisation and to thwart the rational mind at every turn. The rational mind will get angry with the Perfection of Wisdom or dismiss it as rubbish. This is another reason why we need to “call forth as much as we can of love, of respect and of faith”. The Diamond Sutra was the first ever printed book, printed in China. It seems fitting that the first text put into print should be the highest teaching known to mankind. It was on hearing the Diamond Sutra being recited in the market place that Hui Neng gained Enlightenment. Hui Neng became the sixth patriarch of the Zen or Chan tradition. He was an illiterate young man at the time but the Diamond Sutra awakened him to the nature of Reality. And it was the Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui Neng which Sangharakshita read at the age of sixteen. And he too experienced an awakening. He says,

“…..when I read the Diamond Sutra I knew that I was a Buddhist. Though this book epitomizes teaching of such rarefied sublimity that even Arahants are said to become confused and afraid when they hear it for the first time, I at once joyfully embraced it with an unqualified acceptance and assent. To me the Diamond Sutra was not new. I had known it and believed it and realized it ages before and the reading of the Sutra as it were awoke me to the existence of something I had forgotten.”

(Sangharakshita, Complete Works, vol.20, p.85)

So, we in the Triratna Buddhist Order and Community can be very grateful to the Perfection of Wisdom and especially to the Diamond Sutra. Our whole Order and Movement is a part of the unfolding of that realisation Sangharakshita had at the age of sixteen. We are spiritual children of the Perfection of Wisdom.

The Heart Sutra contains the essence of the Prajnaparamita teachings. That is why it’s called the ‘Heart’ Sutra, it is the heart of the Prajnaparamita. The Heart Sutra is a teaching on Shunyata, it expresses an Insight into Shunyata. That is in fact what the whole Prajnaparamita literature is about. It is all about Shunyata. Sangharakshita, in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, has said that the Sutra consists essentially of six statements. So we will look at these briefly. The Heart Sutra is the dialogue between the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and Sariputra. Avalokitesvara is, of course, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, so we might wonder why he turns up here to deliver the heart of the Perfection of Wisdom teachings. And that is an opportunity for us to reflect yet again on the essential unity of Wisdom and Compassion. Sariputra was one of the chief disciples of the historical Buddha. He was noted for his wisdom. In the later sutras, the Mahayana sutras, Sariputra is often made to represent the degeneration and rigidity of scholastic Buddhism. So here he represents a lesser kind of wisdom, intellectual wisdom or literalistic wisdom and Avalokitesvara represents the Wisdom of the Enlightened mind, the Wisdom of direct experience of Reality. In this conversation, Sariputra, the lesser wisdom, does not say anything. In the face of the Wisdom of the Awakened mind, all lower wisdom is rendered mute. In the Heart Sutra, Avalokitesvara makes six statements.

The first statement is that the five skandhas are empty. The five skandhas are the basic constituents of all existence, whether things or people, and this statement is saying that there is nothing else behind or beyond them, no soul or self. Everything is included in the five skandhas, material form, feelings, perceptions, volitions and consciousness. There is nothing else in the universe apart from these, nothing independent of them and hey are empty of any ‘self’ or ‘soul’. The second statement is that all Dharmas are empty. This needs some explanation. The Abhidharma tradition of Buddhism, which is the more intellectual, analytic tradition, compiled a huge and complex classification of all existence, breaking everything down into ever smaller units and eventually they arrived at what they thought of as the basic units of existence, the irreducible elements, that couldn’t be broken down any further. These units or elements they called dharmas. So when Avalokitesvara says all dharmas are empty, he is dismissing this whole vast compilation, as a delusion; a very subtle delusion but a delusion nevertheless. Basically, he is saying it is not possible to give a systematic philosophic or scientific account of Reality. Reality is beyond and above any ideas about Reality. In our poetic version of the Heart Sutra, this statement is rendered as “All things are by nature void”.

The third statement of Avalokitesvara is that in Shunyata no dharmas exist. This reiterates what has already been said in a slightly different form. It is saying that Reality is devoid of concepts and ideas. Reality is something other than anything we say or think about it. The fourth statement in the Sutra takes various categories of Buddhist thought, various lists and so on and says there is nothing ultimately valid about them. This is again similar to the last two statements. It is saying that all ideas, even Buddhist ideas are not Reality. They are not ends in themselves. The Dharma is a raft to cross to the other shore or a finger pointing at the moon. What the other shore is or what the moon is, is another matter and cannot be squeezed into any categories or lists. The fifth statement says that one becomes a Buddha by relying on Perfect Wisdom, in other words, by having a direct experience of ultimate Reality. The sixth and last statement makes this same point even more strongly by saying that all Buddhas, past, present and future gain Enlightenment through the development of Perfect Wisdom. And the Sutra ends with the Perfection of Wisdom mantra –gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. This mantra is related to the four levels of Shunyata. The mantra is translated by Dr. Conze as meaning, “Gone, Gone, Gone beyond, Gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all hail”.

Let us look at the four levels of Shunyata. The first ‘gate’ refers to the first level of Shunyata, which is called samskrta sunyata. Samskrta means ‘compounded’ or ‘confected’ or simply ‘put together’. Samskrta sunyata means the emptiness of the compounded. Compounded existence is unenlightened existence, also known as Samsara. This level of sunyata is saying that unenlightened existence is empty of the characteristics of Enlightened existence. The characteristics of Enlightened existence are happiness, permanence and ultimate Reality. Compounded or unenlightened existence is empty of these. It is unsatisfactory, impermanent and insubstantial. This level of sunyata says that Samsara is empty of Nirvana and we cannot find in unenlightened existence what only Enlightenment can give us. The second level of sunyata is called asamskrta sunyata. This is the emptiness of the Uncompounded. This is the emptiness of Enlightened existence or of Nirvana. Basically, this is the same as the previous point except from the other side so to speak. It is saying that Nirvana is empty of Samsara, Enlightened existence is empty of the characteristics of unenlightened existence. There is no suffering, no impermanence and no unreality in Enlightened existence.

The third level of sunyata is maha sunyata or ‘great emptiness’. This is the emptiness of any distinction between unenlightened existence and Enlightened existence. It is saying there is just one Reality, not two realities. This means that all dualities between Enlightened and unenlightened, Samsara and Nirvana are provisional and pragmatic but not ultimate.

The fourth level of sunyata is sunyata sunyata, the emptiness of emptiness. This is saying that emptiness itself is only a concept. Sunyata is a concept, a word that is pointing to something, is hinting at something, but it is not the experience itself. The experience cannot be described, it is beyond the reach of language. All that is left is silence, perhaps even a ‘thunderous silence’ like that of Vimalakirti in the Vimalakirti Nirdesa. As Sangharakshita puts it in What is the Dharma, “One may be as eloquent and insightful as one likes, but shunyata will always remain ultimately a mystery, even the greatest of all mysteries, so far as the Buddha’s teaching is concerned. It cannot be explained or even described”. After all the words we have silence. After all the talk of Shunyata, shunyata disappears like a bubble.

The Perfection of Wisdom literature is all about sunyata and it is full of paradox. Prajnaparamita cannot be packaged up in words and concepts and perhaps that’s why Prajnaparamita developed into a goddess, a Bodhisattva in female form.

But before we can go on to talk about the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita, let us just draw a few lessons from the different levels of sunyata. The first two levels of sunyata make a clear distinction between Samsara and Nirvana, unenlightened existence and Enlightened existence. And this is very necessary. We need to make this distinction, we need to think in this way for practical reasons. If unenlightened existence is here and Enlightenment is over there, then we have to get from one to the other. And to get from one to the other we need to take certain steps, we need to do certain things. We need to progress from here to there, from Samsara to Nirvana. This is quite pragmatic and quite necessary, at least until such time as we have more direct insight into Reality. The danger with this is that we may become overly goal orientated and begin to think of Nirvana as something to get to without actually changing ourselves. The pursuit of Nirvana or spiritual bliss could become a substitute for real spiritual practice. Real spiritual practice involves greater and greater awareness of ourselves and the rest of existence. We need to become deeply aware of our motivations, even our motivation for spiritual practice. We need to become deeply aware of the subtleties and nuances of our responses to other people and our responses to events. We need to become deeply aware of the effect we have on the world and the effect the world has on us. We need to constantly probe deeper and develop more and more awareness. In doing this we are actually approaching nearer to Reality but we are not chasing after Reality as if it were something completely external to our life. This is what the third level of sunyata is telling us. Nirvana is to be found in Samsara. Unenlightened existence and Enlightened existence inhabit the same Reality. As the Song of Meditation says, “apart from water, no ice, outside living beings, no Buddhas.”

The fourth level of sunyata is warning us against the dangers of literalism. The tendency of our rational minds is to grasp concepts and fix them. And the Perfection of Wisdom literature is, as it were, on a crusade against literalism. So we arrive at the emptiness of emptiness and silence.

But when the words run out an image arises. It is the image of a mature woman, golden yellow in colour, wearing a tiara with jewels of five colours. She is seated in full lotus posture on a white moon mat, in the centre of a blue lotus. Her hands are in the mudra of teaching. She holds the stem of a lotus in each hand and the lotuses open into blossoms, one at each shoulder. Resting on each lotus is a volume of the Perfection of Wisdom. This is the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita. There are other forms of Prajnaparamita. Sometimes she is white and sometimes she has four or six or even eleven arms. She may also have a vajra, a sword, a mala and a begging bowl. The mantra associated with Prajnaparamita, as described above is different from the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra, although that mantra is also sometimes associated with the visualised figure. This mantra is ‘om ah dhih hum svaha’ and it cannot be translated into any conceptual form. It is simply a sound symbol of the Perfection of Wisdom.

This is what Vessantara says about meditation on the Bodhisattva Prajnaparamita, whom he refers to as a goddess.

“Regularly performing a sadhana of Prajnaparamita produces an ever deepening involvement with the Wisdom goddess. To start with the goddess becomes a focus for devotion. For men her practice can often absorb the romantic and other feelings that might be evoked by meeting a beautiful, mature woman. For women she is often a figure with which to identify, the most positive of all role models. Thus for both sexes energy can easily be engaged by the meditation, and hence poured into the contemplation of Wisdom.

If this process continues, the practice enters the realm of the archetypal. In Jungian terms, a man may project the highest aspect of his anima, whilst a woman may encounter the Magna Mater. She becomes for the meditator the archetypal Wisdom goddess – found in many traditions. For the Gnostics she was Sophia, for the Greeks Athena. She is found in the Tarot as the High Priestess, wearing a headdress of the crescent moon, and holding a scroll – corresponding to the book of Prajnaparamita.

Prajnaparamita is the Wisdom goddess of India – once described as staggeringly beautiful to the point of being scorching. Her meditation can become a way of experiencing the archetypal beauty of the refined levels of one’s mind. Finally, with faithful practice, she can become far more than that. She can become the experience of transcendental wisdom itself – the transcendence of the world of subject and object.” (Vessantara, Meeting the Buddhas, p 227)

Before we finish I want to repeat two points which have come up many times. Firstly, Perfect Wisdom or Enlightenment is not a rational experience. It is not a matter of gaining knowledge or getting our ideas right. It is something else altogether. It is a direct face-to-face experience with Prajnaparamita and awareness is the key to unlock the mysteries of this experience.

Secondly, Wisdom and Compassion are not different. When Perfect Wisdom acts the activity is Compassionate. When Perfect Wisdom speaks the words are Compassionate. It cannot be otherwise

However, to come back to the level of day to day practice, I think there are two things we can usefully do in order to develop Wisdom and Compassion. The first thing is not to identify with our moods. Our moods are passing things and to develop Insight into the self as a process of change we need to let go of identifying with moods and not take our ups and downs too seriously – not take our centrality in the universe too seriously. In this way we can gradually develop wisdom. The second thing we can do is to practise generosity. This is the most basic spiritual practice and it is the beginnings of Compassion. We need to practise generosity in the small things in order to cultivate the mind of compassion, which is concerned with the spiritual welfare of all.

We have now come to the end of this exploration of Wisdom. We began by looking at Wrong View, Right View and Perfect Vision. Then we went on to explore different ways of attaining Insight. We looked at the stages of the Eightfold Path and the three levels of Wisdom. We took in different perspectives on Realisation, including Stream Entry, Turning about in the Deepest Seat of Consciousness, the Arising of the Bodhicitta and Real Going For Refuge. Then we widened our horizons to take in a view of the four Viparyasas or topsy-turvy views, the three marks of unenlightened existence, the three liberations and the Bodhisattvas known as the family Protectors. We explored the five wisdoms associated with the Mandala of the five Buddhas and now we have just been looking at the Perfection of Wisdom, the Heart Sutra, the four levels of Shunyata and the Bodhisattva goddess Prajnaparamita. We have covered a lot of ground and some of it very quickly indeed. I hope we have gained something from the journey, if only a desire to revisit some of the sights.

The Five Wisdoms

This is the fifth in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

The Buddha can be experienced or perceived in different ways depending on our level of consciousness. The Buddha may be experienced as an historical human figure, subject to the same laws of time, space and conditionality as we are. This is when we operate mainly on the level of the senses. If we are able to enter into higher states of consciousness, states of meditative absorption, we will experience the Buddha more vividly as a spiritual being, resplendent with his Transcendental qualities. This is more like visionary experience. And, if we have a direct realisation of Reality, we become the Buddha and our experience is one of there being no distinction. This is a direct, unmediated experience of the Buddha.

The Buddha that we perceive from the lower, sense-based level of consciousness is known as the Nirmanakaya, the ‘created body’ or ‘body of transformation’. The Buddha that is perceived from the level of meditative absorption is known as the Sambhogakaya, the ‘glorious body’ or ‘body of mutual delight’. And the Buddha that is experienced directly with the eye of Transcendental Wisdom is known as the Dharmakaya, the ‘body of Truth’. This is the Trikaya or three bodies doctrine of Buddhism. In this talk we are particularly concerned with the Buddha as seen with the inner eye of meditative concentration.

A very early example of this in the Buddhist scriptures is the case of Pingiya. Pingiya was a disciple of the Buddha who was too old and infirm to go to visit the Buddha but he told the other monks that he was never apart from the Buddha. He said, “I see him with my mind as if with my eye … I pass the night revering him. Pingiya’s level of awareness was such that he didn’t need to see the Buddha in the flesh so to speak, he could see Him with his heart and mind.

And ever since the death of the Buddha, meditators down the centuries have seen the Buddha with this inner eye. They have seen the ‘glorious body’, the Sambhogakaya. And not everyone has seen exactly the same form. The devotion and temperament and visionary capacities of different meditators have meant that a proliferation of forms of the ‘glorious body’ has been experienced. These come down to us through the tradition as the great assembly of archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The Mandala of the five Jinas is part of this great assembly, a very important and central part, which helps us to see the whole assembly more clearly. Each of the five Buddhas is the head of a family of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. This gives a pattern to this great proliferation of visionary forms. And this pattern is the pattern of the human psyche on its deepest level. The Mandala of the five Buddhas is a Mandala of our mind, when our mind is free from delusion. This is the great archetypal pattern and by contemplating the five Buddhas, meditating and reflecting on them, we can come to gain a deeper knowledge of ourselves and of the workings of consciousness.

Each Buddha represents or emphasises an aspect of Enlightened awareness. Each has a rich symbolism involving colour, sound, gesture, emblems and animals. Each Buddha is accompanied by a female consort, who symbolises the Wisdom or Prajna of that particular Buddha. And each has an attendant family of of Bodhisattvas. This whole Mandala is a profusion of fascinating, beautiful, rich symbolism which can draw us up to a higher level of consciousness when we engage with it. A mandala has been defined by Snellgrove as: “a circle of symbolic forms … one symbol at the centre, which represents absolute truth itself and other symbols arranged at the various points of the compass, which represent manifested aspects of this same truth". ( Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, ed. E. Conze, p. 246/248) At the centre of the Mandala of the five Jinas is Vairocana, the white Buddha and arranged around him at the points of the compass are Akshobya in the East, Ratnasambhava in the South, Amitabha in the West and Amoghasiddhi in the North. The Mandala is traditionally entered from the East, which is depicted at the bottom in a two-dimensional representation.

The first Buddha we encounter then is Akshobya, the Buddha of the Eastern quarter. The Wisdom of Akshobya is known as the Mirror-like Wisdom. A mirror reflects everything just as it is. Pleasant objects don’t stick to the mirror nor are unpleasant objects repulsed by it. A mirror is completely objective, it reflects what is there. The Enlightened mind is like this too in that it does not respond with clinging or aversion to anything. The Enlightened mind is aware of the insubstantial, impermanent nature of all things and, therefore, responds with complete equanimity and imperturbability to everything. Akshobya’s name means ‘the Imperturbable’. The Enlightened mind is objective in that it relates to what is really there without adding any ideas or concepts. We tend to have so many ideas, preconceptions, assumptions and emotional biases that we rarely relate to the objective situation. We are more likely to be relating to a creation of our own deluded minds. So this Mirror-like Wisdom of Akshobya reminds us of the importance of objectivity. We need to try to be objective about ourselves, about other people and about events. Often these days we are so affected by the norms in the world about us that we have a very one sided view of ourselves, a distorted view. For instance, many people think of themselves as a problem. I was recently reading something by the American psychotherapist and mystic, Suzanne Segal, which illustrated this from her experience. She writes, “…. the negative is usually taken to be the truth. After all, the negative is so compelling and seems so deep. The positive is regarded as superficial and temporary, but, ah, the negative! When it arises, we believe we’re really in the presence of truth.

Connecting with others in our Western therapeutic culture is often based on a sharing of problems. When someone refuses to reveal what is most difficult in their lives, they are said to be ‘withholding or ‘cut-off’ or ‘untrustworthy’. When their problems are known, however, they are thought to be revealing the truth about themselves.

This overvaluing of the negative is rampant in our culture. Just about every person who sits across from me in my office and speaks to me about their lives believes that what is negative about them is most true. They are convinced that they carry something rotten at their core, that they are bad deep down, and that they will always return to the negative, which is the real bottom line.” (Suzanne Segal,Collision With the Infinite, p. 153)

Objectivity sees things clearly, sees thoughts as thoughts, feelings as feelings and so on, without any need for interpretations, assumptions or labelling.

Akshobya’s mudra or gesture is known as the bhumisparsa mudra or earth-touching gesture. This hearkens back to an incident in the symbolic account of the Buddha’s life when, on the verge of Enlightenment, he is tempted and taunted by Mara. Mara represents all the forces of the psyche that resist Reality. Mara is first of all aggressive trying to arouse fear in the Buddha. When this is unsuccessful, Mara tries to tempt the Buddha into sensual pleasure. When that fails, he tries to engender doubt in the Buddha. He says, “who are you to sit here on the Vajrasana, the throne of the Enlightened ones, what right have you to sit here?” In effect he’s saying, “who do you think you are?” The Buddha’s response is to touch the earth and call forth the Earth Goddess, Vasundhara, as a witness that he has been a Bodhisattva for lifetimes and it is, therefore, fitting that he should be there. In the more prosaic accounts of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, it simply says that he remembered all his previous lifetimes. The significance of this in terms of Akshobya is that it is another aspect of being objective. There is no boasting or false modesty, just recognition of the situation as it is.

We can learn from this and, especially where we experience doubts about the benefits of Dharma practice or lack of confidence in ourselves, we can touch the earth of our own experience and endeavour to be objective about what is actually happening and what has actually happened. We can recall how we have changed, we can reflect on our abilities and qualities and put the Mara of doubt to flight with an objective appraisal of the real state of affairs.

The emblem of Akshobya is the vajra and he is the head of the Vajra family of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The vajra is the diamond thunderbolt of a mind that is not bewildered by subjective biases and clouded by delusion. The vajra goes straight to the heart of things, straight to the objective truth, you could say. The Wisdom of Akshobya, the Mirror-like Wisdom is the objective, unbiased, imperturbable Wisdom and, as we contemplate Akshobya, we can feel the longing for this Wisdom to arise in our own hearts. And, as we practice ethics and meditation inspired by Akshobya’s symbolism, we can become clearer and more objective and begin to experience the calm of equanimity.

Moving around the Mandala in a clockwise direction we come next to Ratnasambhava, the Buddha of the South. Ratnasambhava’s Wisdom is the Wisdom of Equality or Sameness (Samatajnana). This is the Wisdom that sees the same Reality in all beings and has the same attitude to all, the same love and Compassion for all. This serves to remind us that Wisdom and Compassion are not really to be distinguished at this level. The Wisdom of Equality rains down Compassion equally on all beings, just as in the White Lotus Sutra the Dharma is seen as raining down on all equally. The Wisdom of Equality does not relate to people on the basis of any limited identity. It does not relate to people on the basis of nationality, ethnic background, skin colour, sexual preference, gender, size, shape, looks, likes or dislikes. The Wisdom of Equality relates on the basis of common humanity and even more primarily, on the basis of the common Reality of all – the common impermanence and insubstantiality and the common potential for spiritual Insight.

The Mudra or gesture of Ratnasambhava is the varada or giving mudra of the open hand. Ratnasambhava gives unstintingly because the Enlightened mind is abundant and rich, overflowing with a wealth of creativity. The emblem is a jewel, symbol of richness. Ratnasambhava symbolises the Three Jewels which are an inexhaustible treasure of spiritual riches. Ratnasambhava is associated with the human realm and with the transformation of pride into the Wisdom of Sameness. Pride or making comparisons is the big failing of the human realm and the Wisdom which sees the common Reality and common humanity of all overcomes this tendency. Also, the activity of giving replaces the tendency to make comparisons with a more genuine awareness of others and their needs.

Ratnasambhava is yellow in colour. This is a very bright, alive colour that expresses something of the exuberance and energy that is released by the Wisdom of Equality. Ratnasambhava sees the whole universe as one great dance of joy that we are invited to join. All we have to lose is our limitations, our fears and our egotistic madness. We are invited to be expansive, outgoing, giving, joyful, alive, and vibrant with no holding back.

If we come under the influence of Ratnasambhava we will be encouraged to let go of all tightness, whether mentally, emotionally, verbally or even financially and we will be urged to give and give and give.

When the Wisdom of Equality starts to have an effect on us, we are moved away from any tendency to have a poverty mentality and we begin to experience the wealth mentality, which has no fears and is able to give, without even having any sense of giving. Giving becomes so natural, so ordinary, that it is no more thought of as something special than breathing or eating. According to Vessantara, the Wisdom of Sameness “is a strong, positive identification with all life”. From this perspective, to live is to give.

Moving on around the Mandala, we come to Amitabha, the Buddha of the West. Amitabha’s Wisdom is the All-Distinguishing Wisdom. This Wisdom means that the Enlightened mind sees the uniqueness of things, sees the differences. This balances the Wisdom of Sameness. The Enlightened mind is aware of the sameness and differences of beings simultaneously. To refer again to the parable of the rain cloud from the White Lotus Sutra, the rain of the Dharma falls equally on all beings, but all grow according to their own nature. Temperament or personality changes but is unique at the same time. Even Enlightened ones retain their personality differences. A well known example in the Pali Canon is the good friends Sariputra and Maudgalyayana. You are all no doubt familiar with the story of the yaksha who hit Sariputra over the head while he was meditating. Maudgalyayana was looking on and couldn’t believe that Sariputra could just carry on meditating after such a blow. Later he asked Sariputra if he felt anything and Sariputra complained of a slight headache. He, in his turn, was astonished that Maudgalyayana could actually see a yaksha. He couldn’t even see a mud-sprite himself. So, these two Awakened ones were very different, each unique in his qualities and abilities. In the chapter two we looked at the three types of individual, the faith-follower, the dharma-follower and the Body Witness and this classification also gives us an intimation of how individuals develop according to their own unique temperament. Another example of very different Enlightened masters from the Tibetan tradition are Milarepa, who could be said to be a faith follower, and Tsong Khupa, who was more like a Dharma follower. So, this All-Distinguishing Wisdom reminds us of our uniqueness and the uniqueness of all beings.

We could say that to have a real appreciation of our uniqueness is self-metta. This is different from feeling special in an egotistic way, which is probably just an over-compensation for a sense of hollowness or inferiority. A real appreciation of our uniqueness is more objective, like the earth-touching of Akshobya. Many people feel unloved or unlovable and this can lead to a sort of insatiable craving out of desperation to find some security and satisfaction. This is the state of the beings in the realm of hungry ghosts (pretas). These are depicted in the Wheel of Life as having large bellies and small mouths so that they are never fully nourished, never satisfied. Amitabha is associated with this realm. The Compassion of Amitabha, which is conjoined with the All-Distinguishing Wisdom, loves all beings for themselves, for their uniqueness. This can serve to help them appreciate their uniqueness more and so get a sense of being lovable and loved.

Amitabha is red, which is the colour of love and compassion. His mudra is the Dhyana or meditation mudra. Meditation helps us to become more and more aware so that we can see ourselves and others more clearly, so that we can begin to grasp our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others and simultaneously see the common Reality and potential for Insight that is the common human heritage. When we come under the influence of Amitabha, our hearts open in love and compassion and we affectionately appreciate the details and subtleties of difference that are everywhere in life and especially in all the individuals we meet.

Moving on now, we come to Amoghasiddhi, the Buddha of the North. His name means “unobstructed success” and his Wisdom is the All-Performing Wisdom. This is the aspect of the Enlightened mind which acts spontaneously for the benefit of all beings. Every means are used to help beings to progress spiritually. The All-Performing Wisdom represents a fearless outpouring of Compassionate activity, whenever and wherever a need is seen. It is a total and immediate response to the present situation with all the tremendous energy at the disposal of a fully integrated and Awake mind.

Amoghasiddhi’s emblem is the double vajra representing the transcendence of all opposites, all polarities, and total psychic integration. His gesture is the Abhaya mudra, the gesture of fearlessness. The spiritual life demands courage, there are many obstacles to face and we are bound to encounter disappointment, doubt and discomfort. We can’t afford to allow ourselves to be weak and frightened. We have to develop fearlessness, the ability to take risks. One way to do this is to be honest about our weaknesses and resolve to work on them. If we only develop our strengths we will be one sided and we will be fearful about betraying our weaknesses. We cannot always see ourselves clearly, we may see our strengths as weaknesses and our weaknesses as strengths. That’s why we need other people, especially those a little more experienced on the Path, to point out to us what we should be working on. The initial step on the path of fearlessness could be to invite criticism from our good friends and resolve to work to develop our total being, we become integrated and strong. We become confident and courageous. We are then able to mobilise our energy and act for the benefit of others. We become successful at communicating the Dharma to others and because of our strength of character and fearlessness, they sit up and take notice. Amoghasiddhi is concerned with the realm of the Titans, the realm of fierce competitiveness, filled with powerful, aggressive beings. But the All-Performing Wisdom is more powerful still. It cannot be defeated and even the Titans have to take notice, however grudgingly.

When we contemplate the mysterious dark green figure of Amoghasiddhi, with his double vajra and powerful gesture of fearlessness, we can be inspired to take courage and face our fears. Fear is debilitating and a real hindrance to spiritual progress. And, as far as I know from my own experience, the only way to overcome fear is to face it. When we come out on the other side of fear we will experience a great release of energy and the joy of relief and freedom. This is what the figure of the Dakini, the naked female sky-dancer of Tantric Buddhism, represents. The energy released when we overcome fear is more energy for the practice and communication of the Dharma and it is another step on the way to the unobstructed success of the All-Performing Wisdom. The All-Performing Wisdom of Amoghasiddhi, with its emphasis on activity for the benefit of all, tells us yet again that Wisdom is Compassion, Compassion is Wisdom.

Now we come to the Centre of the Mandala and the figure of Vairocana. Vairocana’s Wisdom is called the Dhamadhatu Wisdom. It is the Wisdom of the sphere or realm of Reality. This is the ultimate Wisdom of which all others are aspects. This is the Enlightened mind in its full blaze of glory, like the sun. Vairocana means ‘illuminator’, the one who lights up or illuminates everything. In Japan, Vairocana is known as the Sun Buddha, he is the spiritual sun or illuminator of the universe. The Enlightened mind experiences the universe as fully pervaded by Reality. There is a direct experience of Reality and the cosmos being the same. The cosmos is Reality, Reality is the cosmos.

Vairocana’s mudra is the Dharmachakra pravartana mudra, the mudra of the turning of the wheel of the Dharma, or the teaching mudra. Buddhism began when the Buddha successfully communicated his experience of Enlightenment to others. This is known as the turning of the Wheel of the Dharma. The Wheel of the Dharma was set in motion and has been rolling on ever since. This mudra represents something that is central to the Dharma – it can be communicated. But more than that, it must be communicated. Inherent in the experience of Awakening is the urge to communicate the Truth to others. Compassion is the activity of the Enlightened mind. The animals associated with Vairocana are lions and these also symbolise the proclaiming of the Truth. The Buddha’s teaching is often referred to as the Singhanada, the lion’s roar.

So the Wisdom of Vairocana, the Dhamadhatu Wisdom, reminds us that everything is teaching the Dharma, Reality is all around us and within us. The sound of the Dharma is everywhere. The Truth is in everything. It also reminds us that communication or sharing is innate to the experience of Insight. From this we can gather that sharing what we have learned or understood is something we can practice from early on in our spiritual journey. In our initial enthusiasm about the Dharma we may want to tell everyone the good news whether they want to hear it or not. This is not really appropriate. But it is appropriate to share our understanding with those who genuinely are interested and point them in the direction of those with greater understanding. I say those who are genuinely interested because there are also those who are only interested in a very superficial way, who may want to undermine your idealism with cynicism. We need to be willing to share and communicate what we have learnt but, at the same time, we need to be intelligent about when, where and to whom we communicate such a precious gift. This sharing or communication is what Vairocana is inspiring us to do. As Vessantara puts it, “The gift Vairocana gives us is the responsibility of sharing what we have learnt with others. The final message of the Mandala is that no experience has been complete until it has been communicated”. (Vessantara, Meeting the Buddhas, p 126)

We have come to the end of the Mandala of the five Jinas and looked at the five Wisdoms. We have learnt that each Buddha and each wisdom has many messages for us and, in particular, we have highlighted the practices of objectivity, generosity, appreciating uniqueness, facing fear and sharing our experience.

The more objective we can be, the more we will experience equanimity, as we are not pulled this way and that by our subjective reaction. Generosity helps us to transcend self-centredness and, in particular, is an antidote to pride or the tendency to make comparisons with others. Appreciating our uniqueness and the uniqueness of others gives rise to Metta and helps to counteract any feelings of being unlovable or unloved and the neurotic cravings those feelings give rise to. Facing our fears frees up our energy so that we can act for the benefit of ourselves and others. And sharing our experience of the Dharma makes us more conscious of that experience and can be an inspiration to others.

There is much more to the Mandala of the five Buddhas than I have mentioned here, it is an inexhaustible treasure of Dharma teaching and is worth re-visiting again and again. There is one more aspect I would like to mention. Each of the five Buddhas has a female consort. This is a Buddha in female form, although when we speak of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas we musn’t take gender too literally, it is just one more skilful means used by the Enlightened Ones to try to pierce through the clouds of our ignorance. The female Buddhas are Locana, consort of Akshobya, Mamaki, consort of Ratnasambhava, Pandaravasini, consort of Amitabha, Tara, consort of Amoghasiddhi, and Akashadhateshvari, consort of Vairocana. These male and female figures are depicted in sexual union. Strangely for us perhaps this has nothing to do with sex, there is no erotic content to these images. This is sexual symbolism. In the Tantra this is profound and sacred symbolism, expressing the highest Truth. These images, known as Yab-Yum, are symbolic of the unity or oneness of Wisdom and Compassion. The female Buddha represents the Wisdom aspect and the male Buddha represents the Compassion aspect, which is the active aspect of Enlightenment. The sexual embrace symbolises the fact that there is no distinction between Wisdom and Compassion, they are just two ways of speaking about, or two ways of seeing, what is in fact a total experience. So, the final message of the five Wisdoms is that Wisdom is Compassion. We will end on that paradoxical note, which will perhaps prepare us somewhat for the great paradox of the Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom which is the subject of the next talk.

Wider Horizons

This is the fourth in a series of six talks on Wisdom given at the London Buddhist Centre in 2000

There is a story that the Buddha said that all ordinary people are mad. He probably didn't say it or if he did he probably didn't say it quite like that. But let's assume it's true anyway. The reason we might be considered to be mad, from an enlightened point of view, is because we behave as if changing things were permanent, as if unreal things were real, as if painful things were pleasant and as if ugly things were beautiful.

These are known as the four ‘perversities’ or the four topsy-turvy views (viparyasas). Buddhism makes a distinction, at least provisionally, between Samsara and Nirvana. Samsara is the unenlightened state, it is cyclic existence, it is the constant round of birth and death that we fall into because of our spiritual ignorance. Nirvana is the Enlightened state; it transcends the cycle of birth and death. This distinction between Samsara and Nirvana is, as I said, provisional. It is how we have to approach things because of our unawakened, dualistic perceptions.

There is, of course, only one Reality. Those who Awake to the true nature of Reality do not pass into some parallel Universe or some other dimension. The distinction is really that they are Awake and we are asleep. They can see Reality as it is, we see Reality in a topsy-turvy, perverse way. For instance, we see what is changing as permanent. This does not mean that we think nothing ever changes – that would be perverse indeed – but we behave and live our lives as if we and the transient things of the world were permanent. Perhaps we see this most clearly when we suffer a loss. If our partner or lover decides to leave us, we get upset because having believed in eternal romance, we can’t cope with the inevitable transience. If we lose our favourite pen, or our bicycle is stolen or our TV breaks down, we get upset and annoyed and rail against the injustice because we are attached to things and want them always to remain the same and remain with us. And especially perhaps when someone close to us dies, we are shocked by the unfairness of it. Why did they have to die? And perhaps they weren’t even old. Because we identify ourselves and other people with our bodies we see what is simply part of a process as something final and fatal. But we are not our bodies, other people are not their bodies and when the body ceases to function, nothing final has happened really. That body and those senses have always been in a process of change and gradual dissolution. That is the reality of physical existence. Things come into being, flourish for a while, then decay and die. If we could relate to others in a more real way, rather than becoming attached to their form and senses, we would have a totally different experience of death. But to relate to others differently we would have to relate to ourselves differently. We would have to realise that we are simply a constantly changing process, a mind/body continuum.

However, we usually behave as if we are fixed, unchanging, and substantial. We have a sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ that seems quite real and solid. We may even come to accept our essential impermanence but we think ‘I’ am changing. These changes are happening to ‘me’. So we cling to an ‘I’, an ‘ego’ which is ultimately unreal. This does not mean we don’t have a personality, it simply means that there is nothing ultimately real about our personality, it is change, it is process. But we are subject to the topsy-turvy view that we are a fixed self and this means that we try to take some things in to enhance this self and keep some things out to protect the self. Like a walled city, with gates to allow in what is needed and wanted and defences to attack and keep out what is not wanted, we proceed through life giving vent to craving and ill will. And, of course, this perversity lived out in the lives of individuals is also lived out collectively between nations and tribes and groups of all kinds. This can lead to such horrors as war and extermination camps and torture chambers. No wonder the Buddha might have said ordinary people are mad!

We also hold to the topsy-turvy view that satisfaction is to be gained where satisfaction cannot be gained. In the last chapter we mentioned this in terms of false refuges. For instance, many people are convinced that life would be a real bed of roses if only they had enough money. With money they could do whatever they wanted, go on holiday whenever they liked, they wouldn’t have to work and so on. But it is also well known that very wealthy people are not necessarily happy and, in fact, are frequently unhappy. Money cannot buy existential wholeness, or even love for that matter. That bed of roses still has thorns in it. Many people also think they will be really happy if only they find the right partner – Mr. Right or Ms. Right. And sometimes people will go through many relationships before it dawns on them that the perfect person of their dreams is just a dream, is just a projection of their own mind and will not be found outside them. Some people, of course, never realise this. Others realise it enough to know that their real happiness will not be found in that direction and others half realise it, so that they learn to put up with less than they want, sometimes contentedly, sometimes grumpily. Some people stake their happiness on security in old age. They decide to work hard and put by enough savings and earn a good pension so that when they retire they will be able to do all those things they enjoy; travelling and golf and gardening and going to the theatre and so on. It is a big gamble. They may not be able to do those things when they are older, due to ill health or even loss of interest. Or the whole financial and political order that savings and pensions depend upon may not be quite as stable as it seems. It is only as stable as the human beings who operate it and that is not very stable at all. This does not mean that you should not try to provide for your old age, just that that it is unwise to postpone your life. As E.M. Forster put it “ We can spend our whole life preparing to live”

We could probably multiply examples of how people expect to gain some sort of permanent satisfaction from the transient processes of life. But lets look at the fourth topsy-turvy view. This is the feeling that what is ugly is really beautiful. It is easy to misunderstand this. It is not saying that there is no beauty in the world. What it is saying is that what we normally consider to be beautiful is relatively ugly compared to the greater beauty of Nirvana. So these four viparyasas (topsy-turvies) are how the unenlightened experience the world and themselves. The Enlightened see the world of the unenlightened completely differently. To the Enlightened the world of the unenlightened is characterised by impermanence, insubstantiality and suffering. To move from the world of the unenlightened to the world of the Enlightened we need to experience Insight into the true nature of unenlightened existence. By penetrating deeply into the true nature of unenlightened existence (Samsara) we arrive at the doors of liberation and pass through it into Nirvana, the world of Awakened existence which is permanent, blissful but still insubstantial.

Gaining Insight (Vipassana) then is first of all having a direct realisation of the true nature of unenlightened existence. It is seeing or experiencing the world as we know it as being characterised by impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. These are the 3 Lakshanas or ‘marks’ of unenlightened existence and if we penetrate deeply enough into any one of them we will see the other two.

So let us look at each one in turn. Firstly, Impermanence (Pali, annicca, Sanskrit, anitya). From the point of view of someone with Insight, someone who is Awakened or irreversibly on the path to Awakening, this whole Universe and everything in it is impermanent, transient. This is not just a point of view, this is an experience. Our own bodies are changing all the time, however imperceptibly, our minds are changing very rapidly and our emotions are in constant flux. The world of nature, from the tiniest plant or insect to the biggest mountain, is changing too. And the stars and planets are changing, indeed, some of the stars we see in the night sky are already extinct. And from the perspective of Buddhist cosmology, Universes too come into being, continue for a time and then pass away.

Science tells us that there is no such thing as matter, only various forms of energy. This should make it easier for us to see the truth of impermanence. Perhaps it does. However, what really needs to change is not our ideas about the world and ourselves but our emotional responses which drive our behaviour. This is much more difficult to accomplish but it can be accomplished as the records of the Buddhist scriptures and commentaries for over two and a half thousand years can testify.

The second ‘mark’ of unenlightened existence we will look at is insubstantiality (Pali, annatta, Sanskrit, anatman). As I said earlier, we may accept, at least intellectually, that all things are transient including ourselves but we may still retain the sense that change happens to ‘me’, that ‘I’ am changing. So this Lakshana is realised by turning our concentrated awareness inwards and investigating our experience. We look at the five skandhas, the five constituents of personality and see that there is nothing fixed or permanent in any of them, there is no ‘self’ to be found in them. The five skandhas, which we will be familiar with from the ‘Heart Sutra’, are form, feeling, perception, volitions and consciousness. There is no ‘I’ which changes, there is only change, only process, only transience. And turning our attention to others we see that the same applies to them. They are also devoid of any fixed self. They too are change. Even on superficial reflection we can see how this sort of realisation would radically alter our relationship to ourself and to others. Another practice which helps to loosen our clinging to a self or ego is the Six Element practice. In this practice we systematically go through body and mind and see that all the elements are transitory and therefore not ‘me’ or ‘mine’. This practice is taken up by people about to be ordained into the Western Buddhist Order. Ordination represents a spiritual death and rebirth and, therefore, it is best to loosen the attachment to a fixed self as much as possible at that time. An interesting point about this characteristic of unenlightened existence is that it is also a characteristic of Enlightened existence. Nirvana is also insubstantial. This is because nothing can be said of Nirvana, it is ineffable. It cannot be defined in any way, whether as existent or non-existent. It cannot even be defined as Nirvana because that imposes limits on it. It suggests that it is something other than Samsara, whereas really the Enlightened state transcends all distinctions including the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana. This can remind us not to take concepts too literally and to remember that language is limited in how far it can go to express the Transcendental.

The next characteristic or ‘mark’ of unenlightened existence is that it is unsatisfactory (Pali, dukkha, Sanskrit, duhkha). Dukkha covers the entire spectrum of experience from grossest physical pain to the most subtle forms of psychological or existential unease. The Buddha usually outlines seven different kinds of unsatisfactoriness. These are birth, old age, sickness, death, contact with what one dislikes, separation from what one likes and not getting what one wants.

In addition to these the Buddhist scholar, Dr. Edward Conze, has pointed out four kinds of hidden unsatisfactoriness. Let’s just briefly go through all of these. Birth is physical suffering for the mother, emotionally stressful for the father and probably very disruptive, not to say traumatic for the baby. Old age is characterised by physical deterioration, loss of memory, dependence on others and, in some cases, senility and other unpleasant discomforts. Sickness is not pleasant. It is physically uncomfortable, at times painful and it is distressing and the cause of fear and anxiety. And apart from physical illness there are all sorts of stress and neuroses which are also a cause of suffering. Death is suffering for those who are bereaved. It is also unsatisfactory to know that all our loved ones will die and that we too will die. And the approach of death can cause great distress for those who have regrets. Contact with what one dislikes is unsatisfactory. This could be our work, it could be other people, it could simply be the weather but often we can find ourselves in situations or with people we don’t like which is stressful and upsetting. Being separated from what we do like is unsatisfactory. We’ve mentioned bereavement already. Then people are separated from friends and family by war and famine and natural disasters. This sort of thing can have a life shattering effect from which people never recover. This separation from what we like can happen on a smaller scale when something is lost or stolen. And finally, it is unsatisfactory not to get what we want. This is the pain of disappointment and frustration. You can see it very clearly in young children who stamp their feet and scream when denied what they want. And this stamping and screaming carries on into adulthood, except it is internalised and perhaps only emerges as bitterness or swearing or anger on particularly frustrating occasions. So those are the seven kinds of unsatisfactoriness mentioned by the Buddha.

As well as these fairly obvious forms of suffering, there is concealed suffering and Dr. Conze points out four aspects to this. Firstly, there are pleasant experiences which cause suffering to others. Two examples of this are the enjoyment of eating meat which causes obvious suffering to animals. This could be extended to dairy products too. The other example is being very wealthy. The reason these are cited as examples of concealed suffering is because usually in these cases we are dimly aware that our pleasure is another’s pain and this dim awareness taints the pleasure for us and gives us an uneasy conscience. We feel guilty even though we may not be quite sure why. This is a form of dukkha.

The second form of concealed suffering is when we experience something as pleasant but we are afraid of losing it. An example given here is power. Those who have power find it hard to trust anybody out of the fear of losing their power. An image from the Pali Canon for this kind of thing is that of the hawk flying off with a piece of meat in its claws and the other hawks fly after it. But they don’t peck at the meat, they peck at the hawk until it loosens its grip. The world of politics and business can be like this.

The third kind of hidden dukkha is the experience of something pleasant that binds us to something unpleasant. The example given is the body. We experience all sorts of pleasant sensations through the body but because we have a body we also experience all sorts of unpleasant sensations. We can’t have the one without the other.

The last kind of hidden unsatisfactoriness is that the deepest yearnings of the heart are never fulfilled by worldly pleasures. We are always left with a feeling of lacking something, of feeling empty even. This is because there is something in us that only responds to the spiritual, to the Transcendental even. There is something in us that yearns for Nirvana, that ultimate peace. This is what gives rise to shraddha and sets us on the spiritual path. You could say this is our Buddha nature.

So those are the three Lakshanas, the three characteristics of unenlightened existence: impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. When Insight arises in us this is how we see unenlightened existence. And we can help to bring about Insight by penetrating deeply into one or all of these Lakshanas.

The experience of one with Insight is permanent, insubstantial and blissful. It is permanent in the sense that the Awake can never fall back into being unawake. It is insubstantial in that it is indefinable, as we’ve already said and it is blissful because there is no longer any craving or aversion. We don’t want anything and we don’t not want anything. As David Smith puts it in his Record of Awakening, “It became clearer and clearer that everything in this great, big beautiful world of trees, rivers and mountains is only a creation of mind.” Seeing that all is mind created we are no longer attached or afraid.

The three Lakshanas are gateways to liberation and when we investigate them deeply, thoroughly and effectively we emerge into the three Liberations or three Vimokshas. The three Vimokshas are the Imageless, the Unbiased and the Void.

The Imageless (animitta) is the freedom we experience when we penetrate deeply into impermanence. It means that we will no longer feel the need to label things with words or thoughts. We have transcended the level of concepts and have a direct experience of Reality of which nothing can be said or even thought.

The Unbiased (apranihita) is the liberation experienced when the lakshana of unsatisfactoriness is probed into deeply. Unbiased means there is no leaning in any direction, no tendency towards this or that. There is just complete calm and equanimity. Utter peace.

The Void (Shunyata) is the freedom attained when insubstantiality is penetrated to its depths. The Void translates Shunyata. Shunyata is the term employed by Mahayana Buddhism to counteract any tendency to dualism, such as the tendency to see Samsara and Nirvana as separate. Shunyata is the experience of realising the emptiness or voidness of the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.

These three doors of liberation, the Lakshanas and Vimokshas, are also sometimes related to three Bodhisattvas, Avalokitesvara, Manjushri and Vajrapani.

Avolokitesvara is the embodiment of Compassion and those who meditate on his form and chant his mantra are developing that compassion within themselves. Compassion is the response of a truly loving heart to suffering. Compassion is not horrified by suffering nor is it sentimental about those who suffer. The suffering which Avolokitesvara is responding to is the suffering of the unenlightened, which they cause themselves through their craving, ill will and delusion. Sometimes this compassion will come as an unpleasant shock because it is a wake up call, a call to wake up from the slumber of spiritual ignorance and make the effort to see things as they really are, not as we want them to be. Those who are compassionate may not always be nice to us. The Buddha, for instance, wasn’t nice. Sometimes in the Pali Canon he is depicted as quite fierce. For instance, in the story of Saccaka (Culasaccakasutta, Majjhima Nikaya, 35), he completely humiliates Saccaka. Clearly, for someone so inflated and egotistic as Saccaka, a complete humiliation was all that was going to break through and allow his better nature a chance to come to the fore. Avolokitesvara appears in many forms. One of the most evocative is the eleven-headed, thousand-armed form. He has eleven heads so that he can see in every direction and know where his compassionate activity is needed. He has a thousand hands each holding different implements to symbolise the variety of responses needed when dealing with the suffering of the world. And each hand has an eye in the palm. This is the eye of Wisdom because Compassion is never divorced from Wisdom. At his heart he holds a jewel, the wish-fulfilling jewel, which is the jewel of full and perfect Enlightenment. Meditating on Avolokitesvara and chanting his mantra – om mani padme hum – is another way to open up the door to liberation and free ourselves from suffering.

Vajrapani is the embodiment of liberated Energy. When we enter liberation through the doorway of Insight into impermanence, tremendous energy is released. We are not limited by words, concepts, and thoughts. We are able to flow with the energy of the universe. Vajrapani is Energy. He is the energy that breaks through all obstacles. The energy that takes risks, that is not held back by fears. Those who meditate on Vajrapani and chant his mantra develop the heroic qualities of the warrior, who is fearless and undaunted by forces ranged against him. Vajrapani is often depicted in wrathful form looking very fierce, wielding a vajra and trampling under his feet figures representing greed, hatred and delusion. There is something unstoppable about Vajrapani and contemplating his form and chanting his mantra can put us in touch with that determination and courage which is needed to break through our fears and doubts.

Manjushri is the embodiment of Wisdom. His name means ‘gently auspicious’. He is also known as Manjughosa, ‘the gentle voiced one’. He is depicted as a beautiful youth, a prince, richly adorned and sitting on a blue lotus throne. With his left hand he holds a book to his heart and with his right hand he very delicately holds a large, sharp sword with flames coming off the end. The book is the ‘Perfection of Wisdom’ with its profound paradoxical teachings on Shunyata and the sword is the sword of Wisdom which cuts off all ignorance. We meditate on the figure of Manjushri and chant his mantra – om a ra pa cha na dhih – to help us to develop clarity and see through all the mental obscurations that cloud our minds. These three archetypal Bodhisattvas are known as the Family Protectors. This has nothing to do with ordinary families and home and hearth. The families referred to here are the families of the Buddhas Amitabha, Akshobhya and Vairocana. These were the original three Buddhas that formed the beginning of what later developed into the Mandala of the five Dhyana Buddhas, or the Mandala of the five Jinas. In the next talk we will look at the five Jinas and their respective Wisdoms.