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Wisdom 101: An Ongoing Project

First Topic: The Wisdom Which Has Gone Beyond, And Come Back To Tell Us What The Other Shore Is All About

Where is this other shore, and why is wisdom there?

The other shore is the place where mind exists in an of itself, without attachment to sense objects; free of reaction. This other shore of the famous Mantra 'Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bhodi Svaha" is the birthplace of wisdom; that part of universal intellegence from which the 'right' actions of body, speech and mind are launched. This is the place that meditation intends to take us, whether done by way of Tibetan, Greek, Egyptian, Taoist, Islamic, Christian, Yogic or any other means. Wisdom is there because the only place it can be is a place free of attachment, because true and clear wisdom cannot exist as something belonging to a person, place or thing. Wisdom is the other shore. Wisdom is the pure and primordial state of mind, the greatest gift of human existence.

A lot of these "sessions" in Wisdom 101 will be about words, phrases and such. These definitions and analyses will try to crack the hard nut that Buddhist, Taoist, African and other wisdom bearers talk about when they say "there is no equivalent word in English" or "English does not have a vocabulary for this type of phenomena". Well, I think that English used to, and Greek certainly did. Many of the terms in Old Saxon and other languages that make up English as we know it today were based on natural metaphor and allegories that were common to all people. All those people whose words came together to make up the English language had wisdom-bearers full of inspiration that guided them, and many of those inspiring ideas were held in common by the minds of ancient times. In these ancient times of which I speak, there was more of a bond between East and West than our modern, agenda-based historians have led us to believe.

For instance, the Bohdisattva Manjusri, is often depicted holding a sword aloft (that's Manjusri below the menu on the right), and is associated with intellect, reason and discriminative wisdom. We have this word "decide" in English which comes from the Latin "to cut off", meaning that any alternate courses of action have been eliminated. Yet we commonly use the word 'decide' to mean the act of debating with ourselves, so that we can find an equitable rationale for the course of action we've already reconciled ourselves to and that usually promises, according to our values and other attachments, the least pain.

This clarity that Manjusri symbolizes is a lot like the Japanese term Joriki, which has no English equivalent, but a true decision, without equivication or rationalization, carried out with focus and intent, can only be made by the faculty of mind that the Japanese describe when they use the term Joriki.

Lifeboats and Losers

Following a way of wisdom, a way of the heart, is never easy. It is especially difficult in a world such as our modern industrial one, which is built on the denial of and disdain for wisdom. That may seem like a harsh statement, but look at the Titanic disaster. So many people died there because of the lack of lifeboats. This was not a design flaw, or an issue of late delivery. This was a conscious decision based on the delusion that nothing could happen to this boat. The decorators did not want the lifeboats cluttering the deck of a ship and blocking the view from the best cabins. The people who owned the company must have been sleeping (or dipping pigtails in ink, or whatever schoolboys did in those days not to pay attention) when their teachers were trying to relate the wisdom-tales of ancient Greece and the lesson of Hubris to them, because this was evidence of a severe wisdom deficiency. One of the things the Greeks harped on constantly is, to put it simply, nothing pisses off the gods more than people pretending to be them.

I was watching a streaming video the other day, taken from a security camera, in which two would-be hooligans (check it out) walked up to a store window with some form of plasticized glass and threw a brick at it. The brick rebounded and hit the number two hooligan in the head, knocking him out. Guess what. The first hooligan threw the brick at the window again, and once again the brick rebounded, knocking him out. You don't really expect hooligans to be wisdom bearers, but isn't the beginning of wisdom common sense (or the framing of common experience of the environment into mutually beneficial rules)?