3. TRAINING IN WISDOM (SKILLFUL VIEW AND INTENTION) ―Thoroughly understanding the dhamma and freed from longing through insight, the wise one rid of all desire is calm as a pool unstirred by water‖. - Itivuttaka 91 The last of the three trainings, wisdom, is both the starting place and the culmination of the path. We need some initial wisdom to want to begin practice and to know how to proceed. As we practice the Buddha‟s path to liberation, wisdom builds and we become more skillful in life. Although developing mindfulness and concentration are essential steps on the path to awakening, they are not enough on their own. We need to use all of the path factors to generate wisdom. In this context, wisdom does not mean merely accumulated knowledge or a keen intellectual capacity. In Buddhism wisdom implies a deep understanding of and insight into the reality of existence. The „insight‟ of insight meditation is an intuitive, non-conceptual seeing into the true nature of phenomena. It is a profound knowing of how things really are. Our ordinary minds are under the constant spell of ignorance – the opposite of wisdom. Due to this ignorance, we constantly misinterpret our experience, projecting onto it our desires, fears, and confusion. We engage in unskillful acts and create suffering for ourselves and others. In meditation practice we are constantly training to uproot ignorance by developing wisdom. We start with conceptual knowledge of the dhamma and, using the 3 trainings, develop it into insight. Awakening it is said, requires the full penetration of and profound insight into
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