The Paramita of Losing
- Sensei Sevan Ross
The six Perfections include morality,
vigor, meditation, forbearance, giving, and wisdom. We recognize these as attributes of someone
transformed -- as a synergistic cluster of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that personify the Buddha-dharma in organic human form. These Paramitas are not ideas, but are rather qualities. They
are tangible and identifiable. All have opposites which (as with all things) help to define
them and give them value. The opposite of giving is greediness;
of vigor, torpor. The opposite of wisdom in ignorance -- delusion.
Someone
outside of Buddhism might hear of these Paramitas and imagine a far different wisdom than that meant here.
Most people see wisdom as a cumulative quality, usually growing with age and experience. It is generally seen as a handmaiden to knowledge and learning -- a kind of worldliness which culminates in higher
judgment and discernment. This is ironic in that this common wisdom proceeds from the
judgment born of dualistic thinking. Addison and Steele, those great Augustan writers of 18th
Century England, defined judgment as the discerning of differences where they are not apparent. And
while we commonly see wisdom as this refined and matured judgment for the most part, this is not the wisdom of which we speak in Buddhism. And yet this wisdom is in no way excluded in the Paramita.
Instead of a cumulative wisdom, the
wisdom of Prajna is the wisdom beyond wisdom -- it is the wisdom of great loss. There is the
loss of self and thus the loss of the matters of self. There
is loss of other and the threat of and the comparison to other. There is the loss of enlightenment and of ignorance and the
judgments proceeding from these. Good and evil become hollow in light of this wisdom. There is the loss of time and of all the worries surrounding the temporal. Things lose their thingness and space its vacuum.
And yet through all of this loss there is no change whatever. Fundamentally all form and
beauty of form, all subject and object and field and figure stand magnificently firm in the factualness of their being. As clear as the sunshine against the mountains, I am here and you are there,
freely being what we are, and still and all empty of any content or identity.
Practice is all about losing. Altogether, all our efforts can be summarized as just this: Lose
it all. Lose every assumption and fact, every idea and observation. Indeed, lose all vantage points until none whatever remain, and here Truth freely manifests its naked activity. Herein lies the Paramita of wisdom.
But actually we begin our journey toward
this great loss by manifesting this highest Truth from the very beginning of practice. We are, and we always have been, home. But since we do not recognize it as such, we suffer. So we begin in
ignorance. We may become composed and concentrated on the mat.
We focus on the practice, and the heart of this practice is loss. We must give up self
concern and attainment to the work, or it will not unfold for us. We feed it our identity, our
thoughts, worries, our story. We send it our energy, our sleep, our interests, our preferences. Finally our identity, vantage point, and all assumptions whatever must go to nourish the practice. It demands total loss on our part. Nothing whatever can be left behind. No traces. No dualities. No
identities. No knowledge. No wisdom.
To reach the other shore, one must leave
this shore. In doing this one must lose all bearings, direction, strength, and even hope of salvation.
One must simply, stupidly, paddle the raft, no matter the results or conditions. No
matter how long it takes. No matter how sore we become. No
matter how tired.
For this Paramita can not be discerned
nor learned. It can’t be “cultivated” to some “degree” in the way that, say, giving or forbearance can. This is wisdom without stages of development along the way to its being grasped, although once seen,
clarity may grow ever greater. This wisdom Paramita demands from us that our entire identity be given up before it will in any measure reveal itself. This is a wisdom of experience, not of acquisition. It requires that we look
directly, until the seer and the seen are one. And when this Prajna finally finds expression in
us, we are free at last. And everything we had has been lost.
And it is all truly ours.
Reprinted
with permission of Rochester Zen Center
First
appearing in Zen Bow, Summer 2003