3. TRAINING IN WISDOM

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

the 4 noble truths. When this is accomplished, wisdom is complete and the practitioner is awakened.

During practice we can have 2 types of insights: the personal and the universal. At the beginning of practice most of our insights are into our own personal psychological experience. These are aspects of our history and personality that relate to our suffering. They are often about our stories and are centered on the content of our experience (i.e., “I am an angry person,” “My childhood was traumatic,” “I am cruel to my partner,” or “There is a lot of suffering in my life”). This is an important stage of meditative maturation. It is essential to see our habit patterns and areas of unskillful thoughts, speech, and actions and to begin working with them. Over time we can relax longheld tension patterns that have led to much suffering in our lives and create equanimity towards our past. We can forgive ourselves and others for the harm we experienced. Working with personal insights can help us live more skillfully, harmoniously, and peacefully. As practice develops, often our insights become less about our own personal experience and more related to universal experience. Insights at this level are not about our own personal stories but about the impersonal processes of interdependency (see “dependent origination,” page 79) and the universal characteristics of life (see “Insight into the 3 characteristics,” page 85). These types of insights are very profound and are at the heart of insight meditation. They are essential to awakening.