Essential wisdom

(1) This is the experience an individual has when he feels the infinite totality of things in its most fundamental sense. In psychological terms, it is when the finite ego, breaking its hard crust, refers itself to the infinite which envelops everything that is finite, limited and transitory. The experience is somewhat similar to a totalistic intuition of something that transcends all particularized, specified experience. Superconscious knowledge can thus be said to be based on the direct perception of truth.

(2) In Zen writings, prajna or transcendent wisdom is that which transcends the knowledge of things and of the mind, of sanjna and vijna, which are the awareness of material things and their use and value. It is beyond the duality of subject and object. Such wisdom is equated to Buddha mind: subject, predicate and object are all the same. This special process of knowing, abruptly seeing or seeing at once, does not follow the general laws of logic or result from reasoning. When reasoning is abandoned as futile, use of the will-power finished, then one suddenly finds one's self facing sunyata or emptiness. Seeking for such knowledge implies the desire to know, and therefore to have an underlying interest in, life itself. It is the basis of love, and the knowledge of this is wisdom – as is implicit in the word philosophy, love of wisdom. It is said there is no real meditation without prajna, and without meditation no prajna. It is prajna that gives rise to nirvana and nirvana gives rise to such insight, the two thus being two aspects of the same state. The working of prajna is the basis of religious knowledge, when contradictions, absurdities, paradoxes and impossibilities are accepted as revealed truth. What is normally seen is turned upside down, like the turning of a brocade cloth. What was seen on the surface may have been bewildering; abruptly turning it over, interrupting the course of the eyesight, reveals the whole scheme. The Zen experience is the seeing into the working of prajna, which is where the ordinary world of contradictions starts. As prajna paramita, this is the perfection of the arhat who has succeeded in perfecting heart, mind and will and is deserving of that perfection beyond human perfection. Even books of scripture dealing with this perfection in transcendent wisdom are treated with reverence in Zen practice.

(3) According to Patanjali, prajna stands for all the states of consciousness in samadhi, from vitarka to asmita. When pure awareness of reality takes place then prajna comes to an end in vivekajam jnanam, awareness of ultimate reality.

(4) In Mahayana Buddhist thought, wisdom ranks with compassion as one of the two principal virtues. In Hinayana Buddhism it is the supremely important factor on the path to enlightenment.

The sixth of the six (and later ten) paramita (virtues) a bodhisattva perfects on the path of enlightenment. The sixth, or culmination of the first five perfections or paramitas of Zen.