Wisdom is seeing, wisdom is seeing things clearly.
Is knowing them as they are. I mean, there's an ordinary
wisdom, one might say, where one is able to kind of know
how things work, know how art works, know how medicine
works, know how language works.
And that's wisdom because it's able to discriminate
between false opinions and the actual way things work,
the way things fit together. So in a way, even the spiritual
wisdom that we talk about in Buddhism is simply that:
seeing how things are, seeing how they work.
That's why it's in the reach of everybody
because we can all, if we use our fundamental intelligence,
we can all start to see what is actual, how things work,
and how they don't. So that for Buddhism, the relationship
between suffering and the actions
that cause suffering is really fundamental.
Actions rooted in ignorance, and therefore,
in this kind of mistaken view of a self,
this kind of self-centered view of the world,
they produce suffering. That's not, in a way, that's a very
plain and ordinary wisdom, it's just how things work.
But the thing is that, on the one hand, wisdom should
therefore be in our reach 'cause it's just like,
yeah, it's obvious, look at the world and you can see it,
you can see how it works. But we've bewitched ourselves
for so long with our fantasies, with our determination
that the world be other than it really is,
that we've got a whole pile of bad habits,
bad habits of perception, which are then acted out
in our emotions. So we have to, as it were,
deconstruct all those fantasies, all those fictions
that we've projected onto the world,
and so, wisdom does that. Wisdom is that cutting through,
that dissolving, that kind of, those mistaken structures
we've created out of our imagination,
out of our fantasy about the world.
So it's like: dismantle fictions, cut through your
projections, and the world starts to come into proper
perspective, you see the way things are.
You see that, in fact, where you thought there was this
kind of permanent self, and where you thought that external
objects had some kind of intrinsic essence:
that if you grasp them, they lead you to happiness,
or if you overcame other ones, that you'd be free from suffering.
That's simply not true. So, wisdom is that,
it's knowing how the world works because you dismantle
your fictions about the world. So as I started by saying
in a way it's nothing other than clearly seeing,
clearly recognizing. There's no great mystery, in a way,
about it: we are the ones who are strange
and mysterious, because we've made ourselves so
by our fictions, our fantasies.
The world is actually, in a way, extraordinarily simple.
And our relationship to the world, one of interdependence,
is also extraordinarily simple.
So wisdom is that. In a way wisdom is just the what we see
when we bring the mind into alignment with this present
moment. There we clearly see and all our fantasies
and imaginations dissolve. That is the perfection
of wisdom, as we call it in Buddhism.
Yeah, we can talk about it in great philosophical terms
about how wisdom is recognizing the non-self nature
of all phenomena, the impermanence of all conditioned
phenomena, recognizing that suffering arises from
self-clinging. We can say that wisdom sees the true nature
of reality to be beyond all extremes, to be beyond all
conceptual elaborations, and that's all true.
But actually, what that really means
is simply that wisdom is seeing things clearly.
That is wisdom in Buddhism.