Mahayana is referred to as "the great vehicle" of
Buddhism because it is vast and challenging and open
to everyone. At the heart of the mahayana path are
compassion and wisdom, or prajna. For the
practitioner, the challenge is how to bring these
two together.
Prajna is a Sanskrit word literally meaning "best
knowledge," or "best knowing." Prajna is a natural
bubbling up of curiosity, doubt and inquisitiveness.
It is precise, but at the same time it is playful.
The awakening of prajna applies to all aspects of
life, down to the tiniest details. Our inquisitive
interest encompasses all levels, from the most
mundane, such as how do I turn on this computer, up
to such profound levels as, what is the nature of
reality?
Prajna is symbolized in many ways: as a book, a sun,
a vase of elixir, as a catalytic spark. One of the
main ways prajna is symbolized is as a sword. When
you think of a sword, it may make you feel a little
uncomfortable. A sword can be dangerous and if you
do not handle it properly, you can get hurt. So
depicting prajna as a sword points to knowledge
that's threatening.
Why
is prajna threatening? Because prajna is the means
by which we perceive emptiness, or shunyata, it
undermines our very notion of reality and the limits
we place on our world view. Opening to the vastness
and profundity of shunyata requires us to let go of
our petty-mindedness and self-clinging completely.
Many sutras deal with the topic of prajna. One of
the most beloved is the extremely concise and
elegant exposition known as the Heart Sutra, which
is recited daily by Buddhists of many traditions. In
such famed and provocative phrases as, "No eyes, no
ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind … no
suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of
suffering, no path … no wisdom, no attainment, no
nonattainment," the Heart Sutra, step by step,
precisely and systematically-almost
surgically-removes any and all barriers separating
us from the vivid experience of shunyata.
The
sharpness of prajna cuts at many levels. In the
mundane sense, prajna represents a sharpening of
perception and inquisitiveness. As we go about our
lives, and particularly as we enter a spiritual
path, we are always raising questions. We are always
trying to understand. Instead of just accepting a
superficial understanding, we think deeply and ask,
"What do I really understand? Does any of this make
any sense whatsoever?" Prajna has this quality of
creative doubt-not just accepting things based on
authority or hearsay, but continually digging
deeper.
In
addition to being sharp, swords have sharp points
and they are able to puncture. The sharp-pointed
sword of prajna punctures all sorts of delusions,
all sorts of self-deception, all sorts of false
understandings and false views. This puncturing
quality of prajna is abrupt and immediate. It
catches you by surprise. Perhaps you are a new
practitioner exploring the dharma, studying these
interesting new things and starting to practice
meditation. Suddenly prajna sneaks up on you and you
feel skewered. You are caught. Prajna has caught you
in the act, whether it's the act of self-absorption,
the act of being bloated, or the act of lying to
yourself. Prajna is a lying-free zone. Whenever we
try to remove ourselves from the present, immediate
reality of things, we're setting ourselves up as a
target for this puncturing quality of prajna.
You
could say that prajna is a defense mechanism. If we
keep bloating and bloating, at some point we are
punctured by prajna and the whole thing collapses.
That's good, but at the same time, this sharpness
and puncturing quality can be seen as a threat. We
are threatened by the possibility of being found
out, but since prajna is our own inherent insight,
who are we being found out by? By ourselves! It is
not that someone else is going to say, "Oh, I know
your number." Through prajna, deep down we actually
know what's going on: we know our own number. To
continue to fool ourselves takes effort. If we don't
work to keep fooling ourselves, pretending that we
don't really know what is going on, then sooner or
later we are going to be skewered.
You
could view all this as a bit of a warning: as soon
as you enter the Buddhist path and start practicing
meditation and studying the dharma, you are picking
up this sword of prajna. Now that you have this
sharp thing, this sword that skewers and cuts
through ego trips of all sorts, you have to deal
with it.
The sword of prajna has two sharp sides, not just
one. It's a double-bladed sword, sharp on both
sides, so when you make a stroke of prajna it cuts
two ways. When you cut through deception, you are
also cutting through the ego's taking credit for
that. You're left nowhere, more or less.
The
more mindfulness you develop, the more powerfully
the sword of prajna cuts. Once you have this sword,
it cuts every possibility of escape. But no one is
doing this to you-it is your own intelligence, not
some cosmic boogey man. The stroke of prajna is like
hara-kiri. As you are holding the sword, you take
your back stroke, getting ready to attack-and you
find you've sliced yourself in two. Prajna never
stops cutting. If you are pruning a plant, you can
just say, "I'll just prune, prune, prune and then
I'll have this little twig left over to grow back."
But prajna keeps cutting and keeps cutting, so
there's nothing left over, just this sword, slicing
and slicing.
Prajna does not allow us to make a credential or
ground out of anything. We could create credentials
out of anything we do, including spirituality or the
Buddhist tradition or the practice of meditation. We
could use any of those things in our usual,
conventional way of building credentials, building
identity, trying to be special. We could say, "Now
I'm a spiritual person who does blabbady-blah-blah."
The response of prajna is, "Well, that's fine. You
can say that, but you know that it doesn't hold a
lot of water. You know that it's not all that
solid." The sword of prajna cuts through our
clinging to solid ground.
Another image for prajna is the sun: the sun of
prajna is illuminating our world. If we're
inquisitive, if we're attentive, a kind of natural
illumination happens. There is light shining on the
dark corners and a sense of being under the
spotlight, totally exposed. What is funny is that we
actually think we can hide. How could we think that?
How could we think that we actually don't know who
we are? But a lot of times we take the approach of
not really wanting to look too closely at ourselves
or at our lives. We just look the other way and move
on. However, there's no corner where the sun of
prajna isn't shining. Prajna is like having a sun
shining all around, everywhere, never setting.
Once
you open up to prajna, to this fundamental
inquisitiveness, it tends to burst into full flame.
It is like a little spark dropped into a pile of dry
leaves. Once there is that little spark, that little
bit of insight, that little bit of suspicion we
actually know more than we think we do-it explodes,
it's all consuming.
Prajna is represented iconographically by the
feminine deity Prajnaparamita and the masculine
deity Manjushri. Prajnaparamita is depicted as a
beautiful feminine deity with four arms. Two arms
are folded on her lap in the classic posture of
meditation, and her two other arms hold a sword and
a book. Through these gestures, she manifests three
aspects of prajna: academic knowledge, cutting
through deception, and direct perception of
emptiness.
As the masculine deity personifying knowledge,
Manjushri is also depicted holding a sword.
Sometimes he also holds a vase filled with the
elixir of knowledge, which symbolizes direct
intuitive insight. The sword is the activity of
prajna and the vase is the receptive aspect of
learning. Sometimes Manjushri holds a book and a
flower. The book symbolizes scholarly learning and
the flower represents the organic unfolding of
prajna, which like a flower, naturally opens and
blossoms. It does not need to be forced.
Prajna has to do with cultivating inquisitiveness of
mind, cultivating deep understanding that is not a
mere credential but transforms who we are
altogether. How can prajna be cultivated? The
process of deepening our understanding is referred
to as the three levels of prajna, or the three
prajnas. These are called hearing, contemplating,
and meditating.
The
first prajna, hearing, is based on being open to new
information, gathering knowledge, and really trying
to listen. Although it is called hearing, in
addition to listening with one's ears, it also
includes reading and observing through all our
senses. When you hear the dharma or listen to the
teachings, you are supposed to be like a deer in the
woods. You hear a noise-footsteps on leaves-and you
don't know if that noise is a hunter or a mountain
lion. At that moment your senses perk up completely.
You are focused and ready to leap from danger, if
need be. You are absolutely alert and absolutely
tuned into the environment. That quality of refined
alertness and attention is the quality of hearing.
You need to listen to the teachings as though your
life depended on it. That is the proper way to go
about the first prajna.
However, at this point, we see knowledge as
something that's separate from us, an object out
there that we are trying to figure out how to deal
with. To go deeper, we turn to the second prajna,
contemplating. Once we've heard or read or
experienced something, contemplation means really
chewing it over. We continually question what we
have heard, looking at it from different angles,
taking time to explore it. I remember my teacher,
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, saying that if you really
understand the teachings, you should be able to
describe them to your grandmother in a way that she
can hear it. That's pretty challenging-you can't
just march in and lay out your cookie-cutter talk or
your many layers of lists and terms. You have to
have chewed things over and really thought it
through. You need to get to the point where you can
express the teachings in your own words, your own
images. You need to find your voice, and that takes
time. That is the idea of contemplation.
Studying the Buddhist teachings is not like going to
school, where you take one course after another. In
the Buddhist tradition, you take one or two things
and you study them over and over and over. You take
a topic and you come back to it and come back to it.
You work with it your whole life. Over and over you
come back to a few basic ideas, and each time
there's a deepening of your understanding. The
process of contemplation is a long-term
relationship, like that of an old married couple. It
does not happen quickly; it takes time.
The third prajna is called meditating. This is the
point where you have studied something so
thoroughly, looked into it so completely, that it's
not separate from you anymore. It is part of who you
are, down to your very bones and marrow. The prajna
of meditation means that you have actually digested
the teachings. There's no need to try to call the
dharma down from somewhere, or make an effort to
reconstruct it, because it's already there. It's in
your cells and your DNA.
Hearing is like putting a morsel of food in your
mouth. Contemplating is like swallowing that food
and starting to digest it and seeing whether it
gives you indigestion or not. Meditating is when
you've already digested it and that food is a part
of you. It cannot be separated from you; it is
completely incorporated in your being. You have
taken the essence and you've discarded anything
that's irrelevant, the same as we do with the food
we eat or the air we breathe. The whole process is
as natural as eating.
Usually we think that knowledge means having all the
answers, but the quality of prajna is more like
having all the questions. The phrase Trungpa
Rinpoche used over and over again was, "The question
is the answer." We're looking in the wrong direction
if we think some path or some teacher or some book
or some practice is going to provide us with "the
ultimate answer." What we really should be looking
for is the ultimate question. We could learn to
trust our questioning mind. We could learn to trust
our insight without reducing it or pinning it down
into our conventional categories. In fact, prajna
can't be pigeonholed. That would be like trying to
put the sun into a pigeonhole. It simply doesn't
work.
What
is this knowledge that can't be possessed, that we
can't hold, that isn't our credentials, that isn't
an object? What is this knowledge that seems to only
appear when we're not trying to grasp it? What is
that knowledge that seems to come from nowhere? What
is this knowledge that is inspiring, but at the same
time threatening? What is this knowledge that
challenges us to recognize what we know but prefer
to keep buried? What is this penetrating insight
that leads us to the direct experience of emptiness?
Fundamentally prajna is big questioning mind. It is
big questioning, not even mind.
Judy
Lief is a senior teacher (acharya) of Shambhala
Buddhism. She is the author of Making Friends with
Death: A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality.
For
more info visit
www.judylief.com