[T]he Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom says: “But if it occurs to the bodhisattva, the great being, that ‘I course [train] in perfect wisdom, I develop perfect wisdom’ – if he perceives thus, then he moves away from perfect wisdom. … If the bodhisattva even perceives the perfection of wisdom, then he has fallen away from it.”

So, if you seek a kind of wisdom that is unchanging, an eternal wisdom that exists in and of itself, something that just is what it is without reference to context, relations, and time, then you seek it unwisely. The sutras recommend instead that you engage in the quest for wisdom without objectifying any of the elements in it—the seeker, what is sought, and the search are all “empty.”

Early Buddhist texts are insistent on the necessity of meditation in the quest for Buddhist enlightenment. Without this kind of intense and deliberate discipline, various forms of human diminishment were considered very likely to prevail. Early sutras name the “three poisons” – greed, aversion, and delusion – that were thought to dominate human minds. The kinds of calm, focused mentality formed in meditation were considered the most effective remedies for the “three poisons” of human life. When human greed prevails, we pull the world toward ourselves. When aversion dominates, we push the world away, and when delusion obtains, we are oblivious of our true circumstances, or hide in denial. The goal of meditative practice, therefore, is to eliminate the oppressive force of these obstructions so that the truth that is otherwise hidden from us is open to our minds. Particular meditations aimed at each of these poisonous obstructions were designed so that cures would be as appropriate as possible to the particular ailments they were meant to alleviate.

Wisdom is the sixth perfection, the final stage in the hierarchy of practices, and the most profound achievement for Buddhists. The other five practices can only reach a level of perfection when wisdom informs them thoroughly, altering their inner structure and deepest motivation. The difference between the ordinary practice of energetic striving and that same practice honed by wisdom is located in the quality of the conception of practice. Ordinary practice “perceives a basis,” that is, it operates as though the seeker, the act of seeking, and the energy sought are each separate and self-constituted entities. Ordinary practice “bases” itself on the naïve thought that all things are permanently identified by their “own-being.” This “common-sense” view fails to see what wisdom enables one to see, that there is no permanent “self-nature” separating the self from the energy that it seeks. …

Seeing all things wisely as “empty” of their “own-being” the bodhisattva begins to live differently in the world. Based on the vision that this perspective enables, this new way of living absorbs energy from the surrounding world and transmits quantities of energy that can be harnessed by others. Wisdom empowers that ability, in part by offering “freedom from the ideas of pleasant and unpleasant” and from all static dichotomies that keep us isolated and closed. Recognizing the contingent and ironic existence of all things, including one’s “self,” the bodhisattva is not overwhelmed by hardships. Although these hardships do not go away, their presence is “empty” of “own-being” and therefore open to a wide variety of conceptions and attitudes. Not bound to conventional self-understanding and not obligated to experience suffering and hardship as unbearable or insufferable, the bodhisattva attains levels of freedom, flexibility, and energy that are inconceivable in ordinary existence. It is in this light that the classic texts of Mahayana Buddhism envision the perfection of energy, and in this sense that they claim that “where there is energy, there is enlightenment.”

The mental attitudes of intolerance and impatience take an enormous toll on all of us. Residing in these closed and rigid postures, we resent the situation in which we stand, and that resentment undermines flexible points of view from which we might engage the world effectively. When impatient or intolerant, we diminish ourselves and others by inhabiting a rigid smallness of mind. The perfection of tolerance includes a patient willingness to accept present reality as the point of departure for transformative work in the world. The patient person is content to be wherever he or she is right now, no matter what this situation happens to be. Contentment in this case is not letting go of effort and striving; what it releases is the struggle, the unnecessary conflict that stands in the way of lucid assessment and sustained conviction.

Those who are most profoundly cultivated in the disciplines of morality will feel some degree of obligation to reach out to hungry beings wherever they are found on the planet. Beyond this sense of obligation, however, stands the personification of an ideal – the bodhisattvas – who respond to the needs of strangers not out of a sense of moral obligation but out of a far deeper sense of identity with all living beings. These bodhisattvas – people like Mother Teresa – no doubt begin their path with a sense of moral obligation but conclude it having shaped their own identity to include the welfare of others as an integral part of themselves. Although it may be true initially that I respond, if at all, to the hunger of unknown people in other cultures out of a sense of moral obligation and not out of a deeper sense of identity, it could occur through the practices of morality that my identity is so enlarged that I actually experience the links between their well-being and my own. When this occurs to the extent that my feelings for them are engaged, my actions will begin to be motivated by compassion rather than duty.

This is the image of the bodhisattva’s perfection of morality, an expansion of the self that includes others in the innermost domain of self-concern. Buddhists sometimes refer to this expansion as an experience of “no-self,” but it could just as well be conceived as a magnificent transformation or expansion of the self. Although moral practices begin by cultivating the sense of duty or obligation that we owe to others, it comes to ideal fruition in the irrelevance of this same sense of duty made possible by an enlargement of the self toward the ultimate goal of profound reverence for life.

Beyond material gifts – the first level of generosity – is the gift of the dharma – teachings aimed at the elevation of human life to an enlightened level. …

That material generosity, while important, is less exalted than spiritual generosity is a point made frequently in early Mahayana sutras. Picturing human life as most importantly a spiritual quest, the kind of generosity that the sutras most fervently proposed was the gift of visionary life and human excellence, not material objects, and it is in this vein that they were written. Thus the Sandhinirmocana Sūtra says: “When Bodhisattvas benefit sentient beings by means of the perfections, if they are satisfied merely by providing benefits to beings through giving material goods and do not establish them on virtuous states after having raised them up from non-virtuous states, this is not skillful. ” The principal reason for giving material gifts is that human beings might be solidified in their lives and elevated to the point where a spiritual life of wisdom and compassion becomes possible. So, no matter how much material well-being is imagined, the possibility of an authentic spiritual practice goes far beyond it. Therefore, the Diamond Sutra makes this point firmly: “If someone were to offer an immeasurable quantity of the seven treasures to fill the worlds as infinite as space as an act of generosity, the happiness resulting from that virtuous act would not equal the happiness resulting from a son or daughter of good family who gives rise to the awakened mind and reads, recites, accepts, and puts into practice the sutra, and explains it to others, even if only a gatha of four lines.”

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Wisdom is the capacity to envision and work with the “emptiness” of all things. Therefore, the sutras maintain that the bodhisattvas’ “home is deep thought on the meaning of emptiness.” “Emptiness” is a universal predicate in this Buddhist tradition, a claim about all claims, a view about all views, a position with respect to all positions you might hold. The bodhisattva dwells on the concept of emptiness, hoping eventually to embody its meaning at a more profound level than the conceptual.

What “emptiness” means is best explained in terms of what it is that things are empty of. All things are “empty,” the texts claim, insofar as they lack their “own-being.” “Own-being” is a technical term (svabhāva) for the quality of being self-generated, self-possessed. Tzu-hsing, the Chinese translation for svabhāva, literally means “self-nature,” the immortal self or immutable nature of a thing. Things in possession of their “own being” – things with “self-nature” – are not subject to conditions, influences, and change. They just are what they are without respect to other things or time. The central insight of “emptiness,” then, is that all things lack this characteristic – nothing generates itself, nothing stands on its own, and nothing just is what it is forever. If nothing controls its “own being” in this way then, in Buddhist terms, all things are “empty.” Claiming that all elements of existence are “empty” in this sense, Mahayana Buddhists took the word “emptiness” to name the character of reality overall.

What reasoning leads Buddhists to the conclusion of pervasive “emptiness”? Essentially the same line of reasoning and life experience that had generated the Buddhist tradition in the first place. Three early Buddhist principles are brought together to help define the Mahayana concept of emptiness: “impermanence,” “dependent arising,” and “no-self.” In the following passage from the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, wisdom is defined in terms of “emptiness,” and “emptiness” is defined by way of these three early Buddhist concepts: “When he thus surveys dependent arising, a bodhisattva certainly does not see anything that is being produced without a cause, nor does he review anything that is permanent. … He reviews nothing as a self, a being, a soul, a creature.” All things are “empty” insofar as they “arise dependent” on other things, insofar as they are “impermanent” and subject to change, and insofar as they therefore lack a permanent essence, an independent soul or “self.” Wisdom is the ability to see how all things are “empty” in this sense, and to transform one’s relationship to everything accordingly.

“Emptiness” is the meditation that yields freedom, whether this meditation is performed in Buddhist or non-Buddhist terms. If you do not understand how the choices you make are conditioned by your background and the context within which you face them, you will have very little freedom in relation to these conditioning factors. If you do not understand that your political views are largely a function of the particular influences that have been exerted on you from early life until now, you will have no way of seeing how other worldviews give justification to other views just as yours does for you, and therefore no way of even beginning to adjudicate between them except by naively assuming the truth of your own.

If you do not realize that what seems obvious to you seems that way because of structures built into your time and place and the particularities of your life, you will have very little room to imagine other ways to look at things that stretch the borders of your context and imagination. You will have no motive to wonder why what seems obvious to you does not seem obvious to others in other cultures or languages, and to wonder whether you might not be better off unconstrained by those particular boundaries of worldview. The extent to which you are limited by your setting is affected by the extent to which you understand such constraints both in general (anyone’s) and in particular (yours). The way you participate in your current given worldview shapes the extent to which you will be able to see alternatives to it and be able to reach out beyond it in freedom.

“Emptiness” and similar non-Buddhist meditations on the powers of interdependence and contextuality are among the most fruitful means of generating sufficient freedom to live a creative life. Reflexively aware, we are more and more able to see and act on alternatives that would never occur to us otherwise. In reflexive meditation, we come to embrace the finitude of all acts of thinking as a way to liberate us from dogmatism and certitude. Understanding the uncertainty that is constitutive of our human mode of being, we develop the flexibility of mind necessary to be honest with ourselves about our own point of view.

The most important distinction within the practices of energy, emphasized in virtually all classical texts, is that between mundane or ordinary practices of energy on one side and their perfected forms on the other. This is the same internal distinction that we find in all six of the perfections. It separates ordinary practice predicated upon common modes of self-understanding from extraordinary practice taken to the level of “perfection.”

As the classic Mahayana texts describe it, the mundane practice of energy is hardly “ordinary”; indeed, it is admirable in virtually every way. The bodhisattva at this level meditates on various dimensions of energetic practice – on the possible sources of this power, on ways in which it can be put to use, on how to avoid discouragement, on ways to transcend previously generated levels of energy. The bodhisattva adopts an intentional way of living that incorporates a variety of individual practices and pursues these with a sincerity of purpose and concentration of mind as well directed toward the cultivation of energy as possible. In order to generate and maintain this focus, the bodhisattva purposefully cultivates a desire for enlightenment and uses this desire to motivate discipline.