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The Paramitas: Six Practices

Caitríona Reed

 
   Reflection on the Teaching of the Six Paramitas, (The Six Perfections), from a Dharma talk given at Manzanita Village in May 2001.
 
Sooner or later it becomes clear to anyone committed to living an examined life, that the teachings, descriptions, and practices that we learn on our journey all contain and evoke each other. This is true of any path that leads us towards awareness, not just of Buddhism. As we become integrated, happy, attentive, we can describe our experience in many different ways, some of which may at first seem contradictory. Later, what once seemed to be contradictory, becomes simply an expression of subtler truths.

The different aspects of different teachings also echo and invoke each other. The eight aspects of the Eightfold Path point to each other. The lay Buddhist Precepts do the same. The Six Perfections—a key Buddhist teaching—do the same. The essential message is clear—Pay attention. Trust what is happening. Love. Take responsibility for your life.

It is helpful if we understand that the Buddha only taught ‘practices.’ All that passes for; or is extrapolated into description, metaphysics, theoretical psychology, cosmology in Buddhism is more usefully understood as a practice, or a transformational contemplation, rather than as a representational model of abstract absolute truth; or as a description of the way things are.

We can begin to see the Six Perfections, for example, or the Four Noble Truths, or the teachings on causality, not as some fixed model, but rather as a practice, a starting place to reflect on and create change in our perceptions and in our lives. The teachings are strands in a matrix of embodied understanding, clues towards freedom and well-being, our own and others’.
 
THE SIX PARAMITAS 
 

Dana is ‘The Gift’. It is both giving and receiving. It is abundance and scarcity. It is responding effectively to what the world offers to you; as well as to what it asks of you. It is recognizing that we start with nothing, that we knew nothing; that everything we now know, and will ever know, passes through us; through our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, mind. It is knowing that these are not boundaries; that they are themselves gifts, continually changing and adapting to circumstance. It is gratitude and energy, confidence and a lightness that comes from knowing you are safe. If you were to loose everything you would still be ahead. Your connections mean that you have it all, always, forever. The net of life is unbroken.

Sila means the Five Buddhist Precepts. It is Integrity. It is kindness, kindness to oneself as well as to others. It is non-harming and not-stealing. It is satygraha , the way of intelligent non-violence. It is has nothing to do with Commandments passed down from God, it is the natural, and ancient, human capacity for responsibility and loving action. It is keeping rules and breaking rules. It is action based on the understanding that the world is real and that everything in it is interconnected. It is both the discipline and practice by which one comes to such understanding, and it is the spontaneity by which one expresses it. It is willingness to ask questions and to take risks. It is living with the uncertainty of exploration. It is the unknown. It is the freedom to be afraid, to risk everything for what you believe. It is knowing that there will always be times when we make mistakes. It is Jean Cocteau’s “The only lasting beauty is the beauty of failure. Who doesn’t understand failure is lost.” It is being willing to learn from our life. It is celebrating the unattainable perfection, but discovering in the process that there is a deeper perfection to be found, moment by moment, in the grit and fabric of everyday life. It is co-evolving. It is process. It is awareness, wholeness, confidence, trusting ones own abilities. It is kindness.

Kshanti (Khanti) is Patience. It is the serenity prayer. “ . . . grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference . . . ”   It is humility without pretense. It is appreciating what happens in your life, not with resignation but with the understanding that all things come about due to conditions, individual as well as collective, obvious or obscure. Kshanti is saying, “Trust this,” to life. It is learning from everything. It is noticing the details as well as the bigger pattern. It is joy and contentment. It is attentive. It is waiting for the right moment. It is awake to when the moment is ripe. It is action without expectation.

Virya is Energy. It is engaging in your life. It is balance. It is neither depression nor excitement. It is focus, choosing what sustains and nourishes you, then cultivating those things. It is rest and momentum. It is being neither victim nor oppressor. It is letting go of perceived limitations and of unconscious habits of thought, word and action. It is energy; Blake’s Energy— “eternal delight.” It is finding ways to express your connection with all things, especially with those things that motivate, nourish, and inspire you—past, present and future. Your ancestors, your communities, your truth. It is being inspired to give priority to whatever sustains the flame of awareness in your life. It is knowing that it took at least four and a quarter billion years of biological, planetary co-evolving to get you this far, and that you do have support.

Dhyana (Jhana) is Meditation. It is concentration and focus. It is training the mind. It is remembering to keep still often enough, and for long enough, so that your natural capacity for joy emerges. It is work, developing new understanding. It is ripening fruit. It is the faith that recognizes that just by being here—HERE! . . . joy emerges. It is attention suffused with, but not dependent on, joy. It is motivation, and it is the fruit of motivation. It does NOT deny the ugly, the incomprehensibly bitter, the disappointing, or the difficult. It is not mere excitement. It is satisfaction, serenity, and peace. It is stillness out of which things emerge. It is before and after everything that is.

Prajña (Pañña) is the recognition that since everything is interconnected, everything you do matters incalculably and utterly. Your life, your thoughts, your words, reverberate in other lives—beyond any imagined restrictions of time and space. It is to experience everything as a living system. It is what moves you to practice and it is the fulfillment of that practice. It to know that everything is sacred, it is to hold that everything is of inestimable value. It doesn’t take itself seriously. It is easy and light. It is skillful discrimination. It is choice. It is rest.

 
 
 
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