The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

  According to the Buddhist tradition, virtue can be defined as clear perception. Clear perception is not involved with ego. If you have ego, you cannot have clear perception; your perceptions will still be clouded. When you no longer have any obstacles or cloudiness, you experience clarity, and you are able to practice immaculately. Because you are able to practice immaculately and purely, you can also help others beautifully—and because you can help others, you yourself become trained at the same time. And because of that, you can attain enlightenment and help others attain enlightenment.

  Enthusiasm in Working for Others

  The third level of samten is enthusiasm in working for others. You are not purely interested in peace and insight, or shamatha and vipashyana alone, but you develop agitation in your state of mind. That agitation is to work for sentient beings. From the mahayana point of view, when you develop shamatha, you are developing shunyata, and when you develop vipashyana, you are developing compassion. So you have a sense of compassion and shunyata already.

  At the third level of samten, you gain further energy to combine shamatha and vipashyana, to join emptiness with compassion. So the discipline of working for sentient beings begins to evolve. But nobody is going to get an award for saving all sentient beings, that’s for sure, because nobody can keep up with it. That is the saving grace. It is like working as a doctor: if you are a doctor, how many people are you going to cure? Are you going to cure the whole world, or are you going to cure people one by one? You just keep working every day. Do you expect that everybody is going to be healthy, that one day the whole world will just say, “I’m healthy”? You wouldn’t expect that—but you still keep working.

  With samten, or meditation, you cannot be moved by wandering thoughts. Your attention is good, and your desire to do things becomes very real. Exertion encourages some sort of feistiness, and the practice of samten establishes that feistiness as grounded and real. “We mean business,” so to speak. Working for sentient beings is finally becoming fully and thoroughly established as the ground of your whole being. Your state of mind is completely and fully soaked in it. At this level, working for sentient beings becomes the activity of shunyata and compassion.

  The other paramitas are very good in their own way, but they could be very jumpy. With dhyana, because your span of attention becomes much more vast and definite, you do not have to be constantly jumpy. You have learned how to concentrate, how to attend to one theme for a long time, and that affects how you can practice compassion and how you can work for others. If you want to help someone, you spend lots of time with them, you cultivate them, and you never get frustrated. Your span of attention becomes so vast, so good, and so willing, that this person can shit on you, piss on you, kick you, try all sorts of ways to provoke you, but you are never moved. You are just like a mountain. Since your span of attention cannot be interrupted, you can listen to someone and work with them for many years. You do not look for shortcuts. Your real commitment to that person is an act of compassion—and because you are also practicing exertion, you enjoy what you are doing.

  EIGHT MAIN OBSTACLES TO SAMTEN

  There are eight main obstacles to samten, to stabilizing one’s mind. (1) When the body is not controlled, you have physical chaos; (2) when the speech is not controlled, you have chaos in your discursive, habitual thought patterns; (3) when the mind is not controlled, you have the problems of mindlessness, random thoughts, and casualness. (4) When there is too much indulgence in your kleshas, or your emotions, and you make a big deal of them, you have the problem of emotional upheavals. (5) When you engage in mindless talking, chatter, and gossip, it is a problem not just for yourself, but also for your neighbors, because it allows them to re-create their memories and gives them a chance to reconnect with their own subconscious gossip. (6) When you let go and relax too much, or in the wrong way, you allow yourself to be attacked by evil forces: you get influenza, you run into all sorts of accidents, and you become subject to the obstacles of Mara. The remaining two obstacles are (7) heedlessness and (8) regressing in your practice of shamatha and vipashyana.

  Once you are able to overcome those obstacles, you begin to attain some kind of relaxation. This approach is quite similar to the hinayana description of the obstacles to shamatha and their antidotes.2 But going further, you begin to realize that what you experience in your daily life is not particularly a threat or a source of discomfort. You begin to quite happily snuggle yourself, so to speak, into samten. Because of your exertion in shamatha-vipashyana discipline, you begin to find that both mind and body are shinjang-ed. However, you do not exactly fall asleep in your snuggly bed. Instead, you become industrious, full of delight, and active. You might even discover the possibility of creating discriminating awareness, or prajna. You become very industrious in helping others. You have given birth to ultimate and relative bodhichitta, and you are able to generate compassion, properly and fully.

  IMPLEMENTING SAMTEN

  The meditative state of samten can be divided into four types of practice, which correspond to the four limitless ones we discussed earlier. With the first limitless one, loving-kindness, or maitri, you develop intellectual and theoretical reasons for why you should practice meditation, and you begin to cut through discursive mind. You realize that your thought patterns are not such a big deal. Therefore, you develop a sense of gentleness and lovingness to yourself.

  With the second limitless one, compassion, or karuna, you begin to feel compassion toward others very naturally and toward yourself as well. Therefore, you have a sense of delight.

  With the third limitless one, joy, or mudita, you are delighted because what you are doing is perfectly legitimate and excellent. You don’t have second thoughts about whether you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing, because what you are doing is very satisfactory, delightful, and good.

  With the fourth limitless one, equanimity, or upeksha, you are beginning to lose the notion of taking sides, of friend and enemy, and so forth. There is a sense of equality about everything.

  Altogether, the four limitless ones are about pragmatic implementation. They are about how practically to cultivate the ideal meditative state, based on egolessness and compassion.

  1. Lohan is the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit arhat, or “worthy one,” a term applied to a level of realization that many disciples of the Buddha attained.

  2. For more on the obstacles to shamatha and their antidotes, refer to volume 1 of the Profound Treasury, chapter 32, “Identifying Obstacles to Shamatha,” and chapter 33, “Antidotes to the Obstacles to Shamatha.”

  32

  Prajna

  [With prajna] you cut methodically, one situation after another. When you cut through your primitive beliefs about reality and your conflicting emotions, there is compassion. Emotions are very aggressive, so in order to cut through them, you need some kind of cool moon, fresh water, iceberg. So prajna is automatically linked with compassion. The freshness of a cool mountain stream and the tenderness of a pigeon’s heart are always connected.

  THE SIXTH paramita is prajna. Prajna paramita is described as a sword; it is the clear perception of the phenomenal world. The closest word we have come up with to define prajna is “knowledge.” Pra means “superior” or “higher,” and jna means “knowing,” “knowledge,” or “comprehending.”; so prajna means “superior knowledge.” Prajna transcends purely technical knowledge alone, or the kinds of learning you go to school to cultivate. The hinayana approach to prajna is based on soso tharpa, or individual salvation, but in the mahayana you are helping others, so it is an altogether different level of prajna. It is like the difference between going to nursing school to learn medical theory, and practicing that theory by actually working with others.

  The Tibetan word for prajna is sherap. She means “knowing,” and rap means “the best”; so sherap means the “best knowledge,” or “supreme knowing.” It is the “best of cognitive mind,” the “best of cognition,” and the “bes
t of knowledge,” all put together. The emphasis of sherap is on both the knowledge itself and the state of mind of the knower. But we need to clarify what we mean by knowledge. Ordinarily knowledge refers to being knowledgeable about something or other. You collect information and try to understand that information, and then store it in your memory bank. But in the case of sherap, we do not qualify or give credentials to the knowledge. It is simply knowledge. Sherap, or prajna, means being able to discriminate black from white, light from dark, purple from yellow, green from red. It is being able to discriminate sharp from dull, awake from asleep, happy from sad. Sherap is unconditional knowledge, where knowingness can take place at a very high level. It is not knowing this or that, but simply knowing, which connects with the quality of wakefulness. Sherap is not described in terms of technicalities or information, but in terms of simply being there with knowledge. Sherap is the state of knowingness, the state of wakefulness.

  Sherap refers to the subject and the object together. You possess sherap when you have the state of mind that is capable of learning, but the various subjects that you learn are also known as sherap. So sherap can refer to both subject and object. It includes both knowledge and the person who looks at the knowledge. It is like the lute and the hearing consciousness: the sense object and the sense consciousness are put together, and you hear music between the two. Sherap is very fresh and very much on the spot. You could even say it is very much on the surface, although it is not superficial.

  In describing sherap as the best of cognitive mind, cognition means being able to see, rather than being able to perceive. The word perceive might have the sense of banking things in the memory, but cognition has the quality of simply seeing without storing. The senses do not have to be captured and re-stored. Fundamentally, the sense processes could come and go, like anything else in our state of being. Capturing is what our parents told us to do. and it is how we have been educated, but it is a bad habit. That is what is called samsara: we just take in and churn out, take in and churn out. The problem with samsara is that it is like pissing on the ground: when you piss on the ground, it goes out into the rivers, and from the rivers it goes back into the reservoirs, so we drink our urine again and again. But the experience of prajna is fresh. It occurs, and it has happened, and that’s it. It is like the vajrayana concept of nowness. Nowness is like getting fresh banknotes and spending them on the spot—there is a quality of freshness.

  Cognition goes beyond the level of the alayavijnana, or alaya consciousness; it does not stay on the level of resting in alaya—it is just seeing.1 Such seeing is not necessarily visual; it is any first beam that projects out, be it vision, hearing, touch, or whatever else. Cognition could accommodate anything. It is somewhat related with re-cognition, as if you have seen your own nature before. Cognition is the subject, and knowledge is the object.

  The basis of prajna is that you are fully trained in the practice of sitting meditation. Because you are inspired by shamatha-vipashyana discipline, you are able to develop the wonderful paramitas of generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, and meditation—and with prajna you are actually able to put them into effect. Prajna shows you how to develop ideal compassion, true compassion that is sharp and precise. Without prajna, when you try to help somebody, you might do it in the wrong way and actually cause harm instead.

  Prajna is said to be the medicine that will free us from the sickness of the two veils that prevent us from going beyond samsaric bondage: conflicting emotions and primitive beliefs about reality. The interesting thing about the analogy of prajna as medicine is that there is the implication that originally we were well and then suddenly we became sick. This is slightly different from the usual idea of bondage or obstacles. With prajna, the way to relate with the world and with ourselves when we experience obstacles is to view them as a temporary fever or flu.

  SKILLFUL MEANS AND WISDOM

  Prajna cannot develop without the rest of the paramitas; they work together. The first five paramitas are known as upaya, or skillful means. But skillful means also need wisdom, or prajna.2 This combination of skillful means and wisdom makes mahayana special and unusual. We could even go so far as to say that by joining skillful means and wisdom, mahayana is superior to hinayana. Prajna is connected with the feminine principle, and upaya with the masculine principle. Prajna is sharpness; it is said to be very precise and clear. Prajna has passion and directness, and upaya has the resources to work with the prajna.

  Upaya without prajna would be ineffective. It would be like the sun without rays. The first five paramitas can free you from the samsaric world, but they can never enable you to go beyond the transcendent world. The mahayana concept is not to dwell in either the samsaric or the transcendent world. You have to go beyond both nirvana and samsara in order to be of benefit to others. As all the rivers flow south to join the ocean, likewise all the other paramitas flow toward the ocean of prajna. Therefore prajna is a very important factor in mahayana Buddhism altogether. Without prajna it is impossible to attain enlightenment, because you have no way of viewing your journey, no way of looking at your path. It would be as if you were a blind person trying to enter a big city, not knowing where it was or how to get there.

  In the mahayana, you start with skillful means, and you become a good bodhisattva. You begin with generosity, and go on to discipline, patience, exertion, and meditation. You practice all those paramitas as they are given to you, and then you begin a big reviewing process. You question what you are doing with all of these. In doing so, you are developing prajna, which allows you to look back at the whole thing properly. So you practice first, and you figure out what you are doing afterward.

  PRAJNA AND SHUNYATA

  The nature of prajna is that it has allegiance to shunyata. Without that connection with shunyata, it would be completely overwhelming if there were too many clear perceptions. But clear perception qualified by emptiness is stable. So shunyata is solid as much as it is empty. If you want to buy a poodle, you have to know what it eats and how it should be groomed. In the same way, if you want to know prajna paramita, you need to understand shunyata.

  In understanding shunyata, intellectual learning is not applicable. Nonetheless, you could try to understand shunyata logically and come to the conclusion that everything is nonexistent. You could definitely do that. But having understood this, you should not dwell on that understanding, but try to absorb that understanding into your whole being, if there is any being left at that point. Loneliness might be a beacon that points in this direction. From there, you can explore further. You ask basic questions, such as “Who am I?” or “Does this have any substance?” You begin to look for real substance, not just something imaginative, and not just what your mother and father told you.

  Shunyata opens up all kinds of questions. The teachings only go so far, then it is up to you to figure it out. You need to question yourself. For instance, if you know about shamatha-vipashyana, but you continue to choose fixation, you could ask yourself why. This is what is called the study of Buddhism. Somebody gives you a clue: “This is the case. This is the world, and this is you. This is what not to do, and this is what to do. Now I leave it up to you.” But then you need to do it and find out for yourself. If you do, you will come to a conclusion no different than what the Buddha found. Strangely enough, everybody comes to the same conclusion, but from different directions and in different ways. So the question is the answer.

  You might ordinarily think that finding yourself nonexistent is a source of panic. But in this case, it is a source of joy. Egolessness is the source of great joy, the greatest joy, because you do not have to maintain yourself anymore. So from a practical point of view, there is great joy because there is less struggle and less hardship. In terms of personal experience, it is also joyful, because there is no need to keep this and that going simultaneously. Nobody has to synchronize the two worlds of this and that, which is what we usually tend to do. So shunyata is an open world. It is empty
, yet joyful.

  At a certain stage, nonreference point is the reference point. That is why we call it brilliance or luminosity. But it is not so solid, which is why you have to go through training and do practices. It would be too easy to say that once you understood nonreference point fully, you would be enlightened right away. In our tradition, we do not actually believe in sudden realization. Nobody can be enlightened all that suddenly. Sudden realization is more like a password or initial behavior pattern, and after that you go on a journey; you keep going with nonreference point. That is why prajna is known as discriminating-awareness wisdom. There are more subtleties than just becoming enlightened in one go.

  DISCRIMINATING-AWARENESS WISDOM

  Discriminating awareness means that you are able to separate dharmas. The opposite of prajna is being unable to see or experience precision; it is being ignorant and wallowing in confusion. Discriminating does not mean taking sides. It is not that you like something and you accept it, or that you dislike something and you reject it. In this case, discriminating refers to having tremendous precision, and being able to see the sharp edges of situations. Everything is very bright and beautiful. Although you do not take sides, you still have a sense of what is what, which is which, when is when, how is how, and why is why.

  When you begin to work with your body and mind with proper posture in the sitting practice of meditation, you actually begin to act like a prajna person. You begin to distinguish between confusion and direct precision. In meditation practice, you begin with the first and closest thing to work with, which is the breath. You notice that you do breathe, and you notice that you do think. You learn that certain things could be accepted and included as part of the practice, and that certain things could be rejected. Through that kind of precision and directness, you are developing prajna as a contemplative technique.