This Is Perfect Wisdom

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What does wisdom mean to you?

In almost every culture, wisdom is a prized virtue and, typically, we revere those we consider to be wise. Yet there are many lines of thinking about what constitutes wisdom. Ask ten different people and you’re likely to get ten different answers.

For some, it’s about the intersection of where someone’s knowledge and skills meet their experience.

A wise mechanic might hear the tone of a faulty engine and just know exactly what to do to fix it. Or a wise trader might accurately predict a subtle market movement and profit from a well-timed deal.

For others, wisdom is more about intuition—some level of unconscious understanding or ‘gut feel’ that leads to good judgement or decision making.

For others still, wisdom might be synonymous with high emotional intelligence, or moral and ethical clarity, or seeing the bigger picture, or simplifying the complex.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines wisdom as:

“The capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct”.

Now, this is a definition I like! Probably because it conveniently ties in with how wisdom is most often perceived on a spiritual path.

It’s about the quality of how we relate to life and, subsequently, how we choose to conduct ourselves.

What Is Perfect Wisdom?

From a Buddhist point of view, wisdom could be described as:

‘Seeing reality clearly and responding appropriately’.

This includes cultivating the ability to recognise our own thoughts, emotions, repeating patterns and behaviours, and to discern which of them help to foster peace, happiness, and wellbeing—for ourselves and others—and which of them further entangle us in perpetual cycles of unnecessary suffering.

It’s from this skilful recognition that we become better equipped to practice compassionately letting go of that which leads to pain, and to be intentional and proactive in bringing about that which promotes peace.

And in Buddhism, one of the factors that promotes the deepest kind of peace is a profound insight that the Buddha referred to as ‘perfect wisdom’.

In a teaching delivered to his own son, Rahulā, he said:

“See everything with perfect wisdom. This is not mine. This I am not. This is not my self.”

It’s a bold and deliberate statement, and goes way beyond any definition of wisdom we typically use in modern, day-to-day life.

What the Buddha is teaching here is the highest form of wisdom there is, is a felt recognition that the ‘self’ we take ourselves to be—that we feel indelibly identified with—has no substance to it whatsoever.

That strong sense of ‘I, me, and mine’ that’s unconsciously infused into just about every thought, experience, and interaction we have, is a construction of the mind. While it feels ever so real, no matter how or where we might look, the ‘self’ can never be found.

I know, I know! If you’re hearing this for the first time it can be a mind-boggling concept to entertain. You may even sense a non-trivial degree of resistance to it. I certainly did.

But, if we can allow ourselves to acknowledge the resistance and be willing to curiously explore what the Buddha was on about, then we’re taking an important step on a path towards genuine inner peace and freedom.

The Insight Of Not-Self

This is an insight that sits right at the heart of all Buddhist teachings. It is the insight of Anattā; a Pali word meaning ‘emptiness’ or ‘not-self’.

But what’s the link? Why does failing to find any evidence of a ‘self’ lead to peace?

So much of our suffering in life stems from the persistent, yet erroneous, idea that we are the central subjects to which life is happening. The sense that there is an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ at the centre of all experience makes us feel as though we are the intended targets of the infinite pleasures and pains, gain and losses, and joys and sorrows of life.

We take living to be an extremely personal endeavour.

Believing there is some kind of fixed, enduring ‘self’ in here somewhere—some core globule of ‘me’ [or insert your own name]—means that we’re vulnerable to constant fluctuations in self-esteem, self-worthiness, and self-value.

This inevitably leads to stress-producing patterns of craving, thought, and behaviour that stem from the desire be and remain significant, relevant, and wanted, and deserving of affection, respect, and belonging.

But, by repeatedly glimpsing the insight of Anattā (not-self), we can gradually learn to soften our grip on all of this—to gradually trust that this ever flowing, ever changing process of life is not personal.

It’s not personal because there is no fixed, central subject to which it can be personal. All there is, is the perpetual unfolding of experience.

What we take to be the ‘self’ is really the feeling of what it’s like to experience the continual arising and passing away of mental activity, bodily sensations, sights, sounds, tastes, and smells. Somehow, we get to be conscious of it all. And it’s the consciousness of all these phenomena, constantly and rapidly arising and passing, like countless notes being produced by individual instruments in a huge orchestra, that results in the overarching melody, or feeling, of “I, me, and mine.”

Put another way, if you were to deconstruct a car and lay all the individual parts out in front of you, there would be no single part that you could point to and say, “This bit here! This is the car”.

But when you put all the parts back together again, suddenly, what we think of as a car, reemerges. A ‘car’ doesn’t exist other than as a designation we use to describe the specific configuration of all the constituent parts.

In Buddhism, it’s the same with the ‘self’.

When the Buddha said, “See everything with perfect wisdom. This is not mine. This I am not. This is not my self”, he wasn’t offering it as a philosophical concept. He was guiding Rahulā to explore and investigate the insight of Anattā for himself.

And we can explore it for ourselves too.

This Is Not Mine

“This is not mine”, invites us to contemplate the fallacy of ownership.

Is it really possible to own anything? Or is the idea that something can belong to us just another mental construct that appears real?

This isn’t just about tangible ‘possessions’. We claim ownership of our thoughts and feelings too. We think, ‘This is my thought’, ‘This is my body’, ‘This is my pain’.

But when we allow ourselves to observe closely enough, we start to see that thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and other senses, are just coming and going all the time, all on their own.

The fact that they arise in the way they do has nothing to do with there being a ‘self’ that’s generating them, but rather it’s because of infinite causes and conditions (very little of which we get to choose) that makes it inevitable for them to arise.

“This is not mine”, teaches us that if our inner experience belongs to anything, it belongs to humanity as a whole. It’s the consequence of being born into this kind of body with this kind of mind, and it’s the same for every being that that was born configured as a human.

This I Am Not

“This I am not”, encourages us to see through the ways we construct our identities based upon perceptions, labels, and external factors.

Every time we have a thought that begins with “I am...”, we are imagining a self that we then take to be real.

Ultimately, we are not what we do for a living. We are not our skills or talents. We are not successes or failures. We are not these thoughts. We are not these bodies. We are not this every changing cocktail of moods and emotions.

It’s true that we can and do carry out very important and beneficial roles in life, such as parents, caregivers, teachers, leaders, business owners, employees, protectors, or emergency responders, but a role, label, or title, does not describe the essence of what it means to be this human being.

This Is Not My Self

“This is not my self”, is really an invitation for us to look closely and to see if we can find the ‘self’ in whatever it is we are looking at.

For example, can the ‘self’ be found in any particular body part? If so, which one?

Were you able to find it in that last thought you had that has now vanished?

Can it be found in a sensation or a mood?

Most commonly, it feels like the ‘self’ is located within the mind. But again, when we look deeply, the mind itself is a river of change that offers no stable or permanent ground for a self to settle.

The Peace Of Not Finding

It can be strange to keep looking but never finding. But this is the fruit of the practice. As one Buddhist master said,

“The not finding is the finding.”

While it can feel discombobulating—particularly in the early stages of exploring the insight of Anattā—having a gentle persistence to keep the exploration alive, while going about our lives, really can help us to soften and let go of much of the grasping and clinging that inevitably leads to suffering.

Living with a healthy awareness of ‘not-self’ doesn’t make our lives any less significant or real. As a wise Mongolian monk once said,

“It’s not that you’re not real. We all think we’re real, and that’s not wrong. But you think you are really real. You exaggerate it.”

Of course, we’re here and we exist. But we each exist in this world as expressions of exactly the same dynamic flow of life. We are not the independent, isolated, separate entities we so often believe our “selves” to be.

So, the next time you feel yourself being identified with, and wrapped up in, a situation or story you’re telling yourself, I encourage you to bring to mind, “This is not mine. This I am not. This is not my self.”

And remember, this is more than just a practice. According to the Buddha, this is perfect wisdom.

Warmest,

Paul 🙏