The Path of Aliveness by Christian Dillo

Author:Christian Dillo [Dillo, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

WISDOM

13

What Is Wisdom?

Liberation is a prerequisite for wisdom, and wisdom is an extension of liberation. The guiding question for wisdom is: How can I live and act in accord with how things actually exist? As long as I am mired in reactivity, I don’t have a mind open enough for that; instead, I want things to be in accord with my preferences.

In a koan story, when a monk asks about the fundamental teaching the Buddha conveyed over the course of his lifetime, Zen master Yunmen says, “An appropriate response.”[1]

In Western rhetoric, the ancient art of speaking, appropriateness is the core concept. Your speech, so the idea goes, can only be effective if it is in right relation to yourself (the speaker), your audience, the subject matter, and the situation in which the speech is given. Zen more or less shares this idea but extends it beyond speech to any expression. Any thought, speech, or action is supposed to be appropriate not only for the four variables listed above but for the complexity of the entire world—the “ten thousand dharmas,” as the tradition refers to it. The questions then become, How can we tune ourselves to the ten thousand dharmas? How can we let the ten thousand dharmas gather within us and inform our responses?

Because everything is complex and changing at all times, there is no way to prescribe the “right” response in advance. Each moment is unique and fundamentally unpredictable. To “know” means to live the present based on the experiences of the past. There are some who will argue that big data is changing this situation. It is slowly and eerily becoming common knowledge that your social media account “knows” you better than your friends, your spouse, and even you yourself do. While statistical probabilities are good enough for certain applications—whether motivated by good or manipulative intentions—they say nothing definitive about this one singular action now. What brings me into accord with this very situation now? What action is appropriate, and with what words and gestures should it be enacted?

As I’ve mentioned before, in Zen we say, “Not knowing is most intimate.” Not-knowing should not be confused with ignorance. Not-knowing is not the removal of knowing but its deep reevaluation. Not-knowing means giving up on the idea that one could know in advance or once and for all, or that the knowledge of the past will suffice for the present and the future. Not-knowing is an indirect way of pointing toward a different kind of knowing that is nonconceptual and nonhabitual. A knowing that, instead, functions through attunement to an implicit order.

The word intuition comes to mind, and it has been used a lot in the Western translations of Zen texts. It points to contents of mind that arise contextually and in nonlinear ways. These intuitions come with the power of situational truth, a power the spiritually inclined feel should or even must be followed, while rationalists consider it, well, irrational. We come close to what a mind of not-knowing is like when we characterize it as a stream of intuitions.

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