At earlier stages of “self” cultivation, where one hopes to achieve something for oneself, the merit and progress accrued in virtuous acts is very important as motivation. But by the time the sutras work up to the perfection of wisdom, all talk of merit and individual accomplishment disappears in the texts. Wisdom entails overcoming the isolation of the self, not just for the self but on behalf of a larger collective reality beyond the self. It imagines stages of self-cultivation where self-concern is no longer the focal point of the activity, where doing what is right, doing the good on behalf of all members of a community are the images of perfection. At this stage, there is very little point in calling it “self-“cultivation because all attention is now focused on a set of concerns that go far beyond the individual.

This evolution beyond the “self” is symbolized in the sutras in the practice of dedicating one’s own merit to another (parinamāna). Meditating on the act of giving one’s positive merit to someone else begins the process of learning how to take the lives of others as seriously as we are able to take our own. Thus one sutra says: “That the bodhisattva wishes to make that ease of nonattachment, that ease of freedom, that ease of the Blessed Rest [enlightenment] common to all beings, and therefore dedicates his store of merit to the supreme enlightenment of all beings, that should be seen as his magnanimous resolution.” Achieving that ability, however, one no longer dwells on merit at all, and the symbolic, preparatory gestures of meditative giving can be set aside in preference for actual giving – work on behalf of the enlightenment of everyone, oneself and others. At this level, wisdom and compassion are functionally synonymous.

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