by Gil Fronsdal
“Wise people of great wisdom do not think of harming themselves, of harming others, or of harming both. Rather, wise people consider their own welfare, the welfare of others, the welfare of both, and the welfare of the whole world. In this way, one is a wise person of great wisdom.”
—The Buddha (Numerical Discourses 4.186)
“From where comes love?”
—“From wisdom.”
“From where comes wisdom?”
—“From love.”
While wisdom is useful, being a wise person is more important. Wisdom can be found in writing but then never applied in life; a wise person is only found by how that person lives their life. For the Buddha, this is a life lived with care for the welfare of everyone, with no one excluded and no one favored at the expense of others. It involves having the wisdom and care that awaken interest in the well-being of even one’s enemies, betrayers, and offenders. With such an all-encompassing love, wisdom becomes the perfection of wisdom.
This understanding of wisdom does not require reading books, acquiring exceptional knowledge, understanding metaphysical ideas, or having privileged access to transcendent experiences. Instead, it requires first-hand experience and knowledge of what is harmful and what is beneficial, what is unwholesome and what is wholesome, what dispirits us and what inspires us.
The experience needed for this perfection of wisdom, the fourth of the ten perfections, is found in the well-being born from the first three perfections: generosity, virtuous conduct, and Dharmic renunciation – provided we experience the happiness that these can bring. A person who is unable to feel the inner benefits of giving, virtue, and letting go, doesn’t benefit from or grow in what is wholesome.
Generosity—freely given without obligation, without harm to oneself, and without the expectation of repayment—feels good. That feeling can include delight, joy, and happiness in benefitting others. It can consist of somatic feelings of contentment, satisfaction, and peace that come from acting out of a wholesome motivation which is free of selfishness. Interpersonally, it can support warmhearted relationships of mutual appreciation and gratitude. Generosity tends to soften tensions and disconnections between the giver and the receiver, thereby facilitating a sympathetic understanding of each other.
Virtuous conduct—i.e., restraining oneself from causing harm—requires sensitivity to what harms others. The more generosity reveals our human potential for warmhearted relationships, the better we understand how causing harm extinguishes this interpersonal warmth or the potential for it. And the more generosity sensitizes us to inner happiness, contentment, and peace, the more we recognize how harming others harms us by erasing these good feelings, maybe replacing them with regrets and empathic pain.
Renunciation—letting go of clinging— creates space inside us for wholesome qualities to grow. This growth itself nurtures more room for compassion, awareness, and mindfulness. In addition to letting go of clinging, we learn to let go into the felt experience of our goodness, wholeness, ease, and peace. Renunciation doesn’t leave us with nothing; it allows the wholesome to grow and even thrive.
Through these first three perfections we increase our capacity to experience what is spiritually, emotionally, and interpersonally healthy. This experience gives us the raw material needed to become wise. The more we understand and feel what’s beneficial, the more we can understand what is harmful, limiting, and undermining. The ability to recognize and feel the distinction between well-being and harm becomes the guiding light for a wise life.
To be wise, we don’t have to read books; instead, we read hearts, both our own and those of others. Most important is to read our own inner life, as this experience is the most reliable reference point for knowing and feeling what is wise, i.e., how to live with care for the well-being of all.
The ancient commentary on the perfections associates the perfection of renunciation with meditation, perhaps because samadhi requires letting go of clinging and letting go into deeper and deeper states of well-being and psychological health. The text explains that samadhi is the proximate cause of the perfection of wisdom. This is because settled meditation provides a strong and clear experience of wholesomeness, which supports the recognition of even the most subtle forms of welfare and harm. Experiences of wholeness free of clinging and the limitations of self provide a sacred, non-personal source for the greatest wisdom and the greatest caring love. Here, wisdom and love are indistinguishable.
While the first three perfections offer clear foundations for wisdom to grow, this growing wisdom in turn supports the further development of these three. Wisdom applied to generosity, virtuous conduct, and renunciation reveals the subtle and hidden harm and selfishness that can accompany them, as well as the potential for these three to bring greater well-being and freedom, which in turn fosters further wisdom.
Integral to this iterative process are our actions of body, speech, and mind, i.e., of actually living our life. Wisdom is not something to pursue for its own sake; it is something to guide how we live. Wisdom that is not applied remains inert and decays – and may even undermine the development of one’s practice. Wisdom that is acted on enables us to participate in the generative process of life, a process that is “personally transpersonal” (lokuttara).
Generosity, virtuous conduct, and renunciation are foundational activities for developing wisdom, and they are also primary representatives of the kinds of actions that arise from loving wisdom. Innumerable other activities can be born from the wisdom of caring for oneself, for others, for both self and others, and for the whole world.
It is up to you whether what you do in the next five minutes—no matter how mundane it may seem—is wise and wholesome. May you experience the wisdom that allows you to do so.
“What is love?”
—“To care.”
“What is wisdom?
—“To care well.”
Wisdom arises from [spiritual] practice;
Without practice, it decays.
Knowing these paths to gain and loss,
Conduct yourself so that wisdom grows.
—Dhammapada v. 282
Wisdom is the opposite of greed, hate, and delusion,
In so far as greed, hate, and delusion create blindness,
while knowledge restores sight.
—Treatise on the Perfections