PRAJNA

PRAJNA 25 (posting)
 
Commentary by Gendo

 “Prajna,” is an ancient Sanskrit word generally translated as “wisdom,”  something we often regard as the understanding of elders, of people who have endured life experience.
 
I recently crossed the White River on a bridge crowded with teenage boys, who struggled to climb the railing midway and jump some twenty feet into a deep portion of the river.  Two older men stood by the shore, encouraging what I came to understand as a rite of passage.
 
Probably safe, though terrifying.  But possibly (as at Dartmouth recently) fatal;  the innocence of youth meeting the fear of death.  Involving boys more often than girls?  Yet girls are led by their own bodies, by menarche, by the prospect of childbirth, to their own rite of passage.  Of course rites of passage exist in many cultures.  And, what comes to mind, is that rites of passage have something to do with wisdom, with an embrace of life beyond the comforts of childhood.
 
I am reminded of this rather strange statement by the Zen teacher I studied with, and by whom I was ordained as a lay monk: “I have been telling you over and over what it means to be born.  The way a child first appears is to receive both plus and minus in equal amounts.  But what will this born child eat?  Just to say it simply, and perhaps extremely, mother and father are what the child eats in order to grow.”  (Birth Teisho, Joshu Sasaki, 2000)
 
Growth, of course, is not just physical growth, but also the growth we call wisdom, or understanding, growth from the standpoint of consciousness.  And how does that consciousness develop?  We begin life as babies free of self-consciousness, laugh and crying, eating and sleeping.  And gradually, through the efforts of our parents and teachers, we learn to distinguish one thing from another, mother from father, friend from stranger, cat from dog.  
 
It is the nature of consciousness to discrimiinate one thing from another, a principle  Buddhism calls “dependent origination.”   We start out viewing the world from the arms of our mother, first aware of this other called father; and from the arms of father, become aware of  mother!  Even before such words, observation becomes body sensation, sensation becomes the sensibility to act, to crawl from one to the other.  The child is born between parents that compares one to the other,  and develops awareness called ‘self.’
 
Throughout life consciousness develops, the child eats, consuming 'other' (like food) to establish new life, new identity; a new start;  at each stage  held in the arms of a new mother, a new father: ‘my’ family compared to other families, ‘my’ town compared to other towns, ‘my’ school compared to others; ‘my’ country, ‘my’ ethnic group, my politics.  The list, the child,  grows endlessly.
 
Mother, father and self are constantly arising and disappearing together.  Every moment begins, like life itself, with a moment free of separate identity, that breaks apart into background (mother) and object (father), viewed from the standpoint of self and its interests.  One becomes three.  And three becomes a new ‘one.’  
 
Wisdom is insight.   Separate identities arise, yet they are impermanent, and they are, at the same time, unitary.  You can’t have one without the other.  Buddhism calls that insight the “middle way,” the wisdom not to get stuck in our preferences, to embrace an ever changing world of new possiblities.