What Is Wisdom?

Wisdom all too often connotes either a “Gnostic wisdom,” a type of contemplative, mystic experience of the ultimate, transcendent of mundane details; or a worldly wisdom, secular resignation to not knowing but accepting of a troubled world, based on age and experience. The Greek philo sophia, “love of wisdom,” is quite like the former, though more positive, and perhaps more realistic in its quest of the true, the good, and the beautiful. In Indian Buddhism Sophia emerges as Prajnyaapaaramitaa – divine knowledge of freedom seen as the supreme feminine, Mother of All Buddhas.

In Indic languages prajnyaa can mean something like a “super-knowing” of reality, both relative and ultimate. From the earliest times, Buddhist thinkers distinguished between “relative” (paratantra) or “superficial” (samvrti) reality and absolute, ultimate (paramaartha), “deep” (gambhiIra), or “profound” (samvrta) reality. The former are realities which seem to be there on first glance, but when investigated, dissolve under analysis, though they may re-appear when one retreats from analytic investigation. The latter are realities which truly exist just as they appear, not dissolving under analysis, being actual. It turns out of course, that the only reality that qualifies as the latter is voidness (shunyata), an absolute or exclusion negation, also referred to by all its many synonyms. One delightful corollary of this two reality theory (often referred to as “two truth” theory), is that the two correspond to samsara and nirvana, the worlds of suffering and bliss, respectively, the former produced by misknowing and so being relatively unreal and the latter discovered by superknowing and so at least relatively more real. This may be why the Buddha had a dazzling smile.

The superknowing of actual reality is the only way to achieve freedom from suffering, as its opposite, misknowing – ignorance or delusion – is the cause of the endless suffering of the egocentric life-cycle (samsara). As the Indian Buddhist Shantideva said, all of the Buddha’s teaching is nothing but a preparation for the attainment of superknowing wisdom, since it is only superknowing wisdom that causes freedom from suffering. Renunciation, ethics, compassion, meditation – all these are important and necessary to complement the central path, but only superknowing of reality leads to freedom.

The Buddha became so famous and founded such a powerful movement because he discovered (or thought he did!) that the human mind was capable of “superknowing,” i.e. overcoming misknowledge, misperception, and unrealistic beliefs, and rationally and experientially coming to know accurately the true nature of relative and ultimate realities. He saw this movement toward liberation and freedom, from misknowledge to knowledge to superknowledge, as an educational (shiksha) process, which he could open up for other human beings so they also could find out what was real and so also escape suffering.

The Buddha’s four noble truths were a challenge to humans to rise from their confusion and misery, not a religious credo or anything of the sort, but a diagnosis of the unenlightened human illness and a prescription for health.

The Upanishadic knowing of God – Brahman – was like the Western gnostic contemplative type of mystic knowing. And India had its secularists, the Charvaka materialists, who denied the existence of a soul or an afterlife, scoffed at transformative education, and ate, drank, and were merry, apparently in a quite sophisticated round of pleasures (kaama). So the Buddha was not just expressing a form of “Eastern mysticism.” He was not presenting himself as a religious prophet or founder – he was coming on like a scientist.

“Eureka! I have discovered a reality like an elixir, profound, calm, untroubled, luminous, and uncreated! Whomever I instruct in it, they will not understand – better to stay alone in the forest without speaking!” These are the words of the (“mad?”) scientist, alone in his lab, whose insight into reality’s deep nature has taken his breath away, and his delight knows no bounds; but enthusiasm is tempered by an awareness of how difficult it will be to explain it to anyone else. These are not the words of a prophet inspired by divine revelation with a holy mission. Thus, the Buddhist tradition is more science than religion (as usually defined today as an organized form of subjective, nonrational-in-principle faith in various unprovable things). It is more a process of education than an adoption of a credo or a joining of an institution.

The Teaching in Practice (adhigama dharma) consists of the “three higher educations” (trini adhishikshani), the most important of which is the superknowing higher education (prajnyaa adhishiksha). Only wisdom, “superknowing,” defined as accurate intellectual and experiential knowledge of the nature of reality, can liberate a being from suffering; that is to say, the practice of “empirical science” is the primary soteriological path. Corrective learning is the primary method, critical reflection is the indispensable second step to deepen what is learned, and concentrated meditation the essential third step to bring the critical insight to the level of transformative experience. “Corrective learning” means study of the great treatises of previous possibly enlightened beings and taking up the challenge of re-examining one’s own worldview in the light of the critiques put forward in those treatises. “Critical reflection” means engaging in the rational and experiential struggle between one’s persistent habitual views and those advanced by the Buddha and his successors, often aided by a regime of formal debate with others, since inferential investigation within one’s own mind operates on the same patterns as inferential argument with others; and public engagement and exposure of the ego intensifies the level of emotional investment, immeasurably. “Concentrated meditation” naturally follows intense critical reflection, since the points of doubt, the web of perplexities, become so existentially gripping sustained, single-pointed focus on those points becomes a natural preoccupation. The three types of “superknowing wisdom” emerge from these three levels of development – the important point being that the intellectual and experiential are not contradictory, but are connected along a range of understanding.

The Four Noble Truths as an Experimental Program

Here, “truth” (satya) is more propositional than ontological. Calling them “noble” was the Buddha’s way of acknowledging that they are not true for an ordinary being, who doesn’t suffer all the time, who doesn’t think there is (or needs to be) a final freedom from suffering. A “noble” here is not a person of higher social class, but rather someone of a higher cognitive class, who has transcended egocentrism at most levels, and so perceives things from others’ points of view as equal to his / her own.

The first truth is the diagnostic observation that the ego-centered, ignorance-dominated life is inevitably frustrating and unsatisfying; hence, suffering. Let us emphasize that this is not all life but only that dominated by misknowledge. How does that come to be the case?

Second truth is an etiology; how that happens, that the cause of that suffering is misknowledge, ignorance as misperception of reality, delusion especially the delusion about the absoluteness of self, or intrinsic essence in persons and things. Therefore the antidote to that cause is wisdom, the opposite of misknowledge or ignorance.

Third truth is the experiential or experimental discovery that freedom from suffering is attainable upon the perfection of wisdom, upon dispelling delusions by insight and understanding. From this experiment a hypothetical prognosis is put forward.

Fourth truth is the therapeutic process, the eightfold path to that freedom, which is the threefold higher or transformative education, the educations in higher wisdom (realistic worldview and intention), higher ethics (realistic speech, evolutionary action, livelihood, and creative effort), and higher mind or meditative concentration (realistic mindfulness and concentration).

The realistic worldview branch is the first of the eight. It is the branch of philosophy, defined as the quest of the nature of reality through critical reasoning and yogic (i.e. e. experimental) experiencing. Realistic worldview involves above all the insight into the workings of causality, seeing how things are caused to be as they are, how they can be transformed by bringing other causes to bear, and so on. The Buddha has been celebrated for millennia as the discoverer of causation, not as the bearer of revelation. (Om ye dharmah hetuprabhavah hetun tesham tathagatahyavadat/ tesham ca yo nirodho evam vadi mahashramaniye svaha) The realistic world view is the matrix or target of the liberating wisdom that is the goal of the path.

Of course, once we are encouraged to investigate the world in terms of causality, there are many versions of causality, linear through time, complex in the multiplicity of causes and conditions, structural in terms of parts and wholes, and in some regions of Buddhist thought mental and linguistic in terms of the relationships between term and referent, thought-construct and constructed things. “Buddhism” refers to an immense historical, multicultural complex of ideas, people, institutions, cultures, nations, languages, literatures, and so on – it is simplistic ever to say “the Buddhist view is…” plain and simply anything. There are many Buddhist views, many contradictions, many varieties of thought and practice.

In fact, the “Dialecticist Centrist” (Praasangika-maadhyamika) school of thought elaborated in Tibet based on a thousand years of development in India, is esteemed by Buddhists who know about it, precisely because its theory of “conventionalism” about relative realities, and its hermeneutic principle that all teachings about relativities are “interpretable in meaning,” i.e. are valid only contextually and cannot pretend to absoluteness in validity, and so forth, are eminently flexible in accounting for and validating in relative context the vast variety of teachings, while negating them in terms of ultimate reality.

You could say that higher wisdom education is basically philosophic and scientific (as we define it) in procedure and goal, higher ethical education is social or political, and higher mental or contemplative education is religious (in the sense of cultivating and deepening the transformative experience of the liberating reality discovered by wisdom’s superknowing).

We might also put in a brief word here about the relation of philosophy and science as understood by Centrists and most other Buddhist investigators. What nowadays passes for “science,” was originally in the West, “natural philosophy,” a branch of philosophy, which was itself thought of as the pursuit of the knowledge of and insight into the nature of reality. Its “natural” branch was concerned with empirical exploration of “nature,” perhaps not necessarily physical only at first. Only when Renaissance and Enlightenment movements succeeded in breaking philosophy free from the dominance of the inquisition by emphasizing that “natural” meant only physical, defined as only “material,” did science become captured by the dogma of philosophical materialism, and “philosophy,” the Queen of Liberating Wisdom, was eventually enslaved as a “handmaiden” of the materialistic enterprise. From the Centrist point of view, “philosophy,” the pursuit of wisdom, remains the central concern, the most powerful of the sciences since it maintains the “software” of the extraordinary machines scientific materialism has created in its foredoomed quest to understand reality by measurement and control and exploit it by manipulation.

How does Buddhist mind science relate to the Occidental enterprise of “philosophy” and “natural science?”

If we assume “natural science” to be an impartial, experimental, nondogmatic, systematic investigation of the nature and structure of reality, then the current dialogue between “Western science” and “Buddhism” or “Buddhist mind science” can not be properly described as a “dialogue between science and religion.” It is rather the encounter between two different scientific traditions. Both aim to understand “ultimate” or “actual” “reality,” both insist upon empirical procedures, looking to see what is there inside and outside, interpreting the results of experiences (or experiments), in terms of measurements, observations, and insights, with clear and critical reasoning, and both consider conclusions adopted to be hypothetical, hypotheses that account for the fact observed up to now, awaiting potential disproof by further experiments, experiences and critical reflections. Neither countenance, or should countenance, a priori dogmas, sacred rules, laws, or truths that are not subject to experimental verification or disproof, and so forth.

On the other hand, if “western science” is defined as dogmatically materialistic, it has to differ from Buddhism. Buddhist mind science is based on the absolutely negational insight known as “the wisdom of voidness,” which affirms, based on Buddha’s and other enlightened successors’ experimental experiences, that ultimate or actual reality is devoid of intrinsic essences that correspond to any sort of constructs, whether verbal, mathematical, or symbolic. Therefore, no formulation or description of reality – other than that negational one – can possibly claim absolute validity. But this essential voidness or sheer relationality of all things does not preclude their study and investigation. In fact, all statements, formulae, laws, rules, descriptions, explanations, interpretations, and so on, may be valid or useful from certain perspectives within certain contexts; and may also be incorrect and useless in other contexts.

Therefore, Buddhist mind science can acknowledge the value of materialism in some contexts (such as the medical in some cases), of idealism in others, of mind-matter dualism in others, and mind-matter nondualism in still others.

As for the problem of “mind” and “matter”

Neither can be found under analysis, ultimately all things dissolve under analysis; “analysis” being the critical effort to understand things by dissecting them into their underlying historical or causal processes, their constitutive parts, or their relationship to their conceptual counterparts.

Both mind and matter can only be found without analysis, that is, conventionally, when not looking too hard at them, seeking to find their essential natures.

The discovery of voidness as the metaphysical basis resulted in the relativization of all metaphysics, and opened the possible usefulness of mind-to-matter reductionism, matter-to-mind reductionism, and matter-mind dualistic interactionism, etc.

Here some of the Buddhists might get stirred up. There is no necessity of insisting upon a “real,” ultimately nonmaterial, “mind,” as an active agent in material reality for all domains of exploration. It is certainly useful in the field of popular ethics, where the (normally esoteric) concepts of subtle and extremely subtle minds and materials might be confusing. It may be also useful in certain domains of contemplative exploration, such as the Kalachakra Tantra’s use of “void form,” visionary embodiment devoid of all atomic processes, where the contemplator is empowered by conceiving “mind” as capable of relieving beings’ suffering without resorting to coarse physicality. But most of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras consider mind and matter to be ultimately indivisible, when reduced to the level of extreme subtlety. And even most mind-matter dualists in most other domains of Buddhist philosophy, especially the more sophisticated ones, consider that ultimately you cannot find mind, you cannot find matter, neither “really” or “truly” exist, and both only exist in a relative or illusory manner.

All theory is hypothetical, conventional, only relationally useful, and therefore none is absolute, nor will any ever become absolute – except for that theory, absolutely negational, of emptiness or relativity of all theories.

Affirming this principle opens the way for real dialogue of material and mental sciences, with a built-in pre-emptive critique of any absolutist dogmatism from either materialistic or mentalistic side. For example, the question of first person vs. third person research can thus be upleveled to a different plane than that of mind vs. matter – simply a choice of perspectives with utility judged by relativistic results, failures or successes of specific endeavors.

So we Buddhist philosophers / mind scientists should cease giving our empiricist, materialistically inclined dialogue partners the easy way out for dismissal of mentalistic phenomena, such as rebirth etc., by clinging to the slogans about how mind is absolutely, categorically nonmaterial. Believe me if you insist it is nonmaterial, materialistic scientists will simply feel confirmed in their view that it therefore cannot “matter.”

Consider the Buddhist theory of rebirth – the continuum of a being’s consciousness carrying over from life to life. According to Buddhists rebirth does not require a nonmaterial soul somehow inexplicably residing in one body then after its death hopping over into a new zygote. The consciousness of a dreamer connects subjectively to the same person’s waking consciousness in a continuum that is really hard to explain or describe in exhaustive detail; yet it is not necessary to insist that it is nonmaterial. Just as a gene is a very subtle encoding of instructions to cells that control the formation of a gross body, there could be very subtle processes of mental energies that control or shape grosser mental processes, emotional habits, personality convictions, spacetime senses, and so on – they need not be nonphysical to exist at a level not detectable by our gross body senses, even with their sophisticated mechanical extensions.

After all, the physics that deals with the super micro or subtle domains of physical reality has experienced the dissolution of any apparent solidity of matter and energies, leaving a domain of probabilistic energies that transcends the reach of any sort of formulaic capture, or nonprobabilistic description – though hope springs eternal in the minds of quantum mathematicians still seeking what they consider to be the “Holy Grail” of the G. U. T.! perhaps the Holy Grail was already offered up by Bohr and the quantum gang in Copenhagen in 1926, when they promulgated the essentially Dialecticist Centrist teaching that “deep reality” was elusive of all controlling explanation, and the ever more sophisticated tracking and investigating and predicting of surface realities was the path of further development.

My point here though in urging consideration of the abandonment of the Buddhistic obsession with demanding the physicalists’ acceptance of a respectable mentalism is just to stir up and expose the tendency to mentalistic dogmatism among Buddhist thinkers. Scientific experiments and theory that seek to explain mental functions in neurological or biological terms can be very valuable in certain contexts. After all, the Tantric schemata of gross bodymind, subtle bodymind, and extremely subtle bodymind represent a type of reductionism for a certain purpose. And as for the physicalists and their dogma of scientific materialism, they don’t need to be provoked by Buddhism, which they cannot help but perceive as somehow being “a religion” interfering in their secular business, they need to study their own philosophies more deeply, incorporate the insight that moved the 20th century that “atoms” have disappeared ultimately, “matter” has dissolved under analysis, and it is time to assume responsibility for the role off conceptualization in science. The Handmaiden should be excused from menial services with sincere apologies, and she should be once more exalted in her honored position as Mother of All Wisdom.