The most difficult challenge associated with the perfection of tolerance is tolerating the truth of uncertainty that derives from human finitude. Having learned to accept the uncertainty of life and its very real risks, we are now asked to tolerate the uncertainty of all the wisdom we have acquired. Mahayana Buddhist texts unflinchingly proclaim that the highest realization, the truth that is most difficult to encounter, is that all the teachings of Buddhism and all the other “truths” you have acquired are “empty.” Recall that “emptiness” was the term used to coordinate the realizations of “impermanence,” “dependent origination,” and “no-self.” To say that all things without exception are “empty” is to say that all things change over time because what they are is dependent on other equally impermanent things. Change and dependence imply that there is “no-self” to anything in the sense of a permanent identity that is what it is, independent of other things. Being “empty” and having “no-self” are thus the same realization.

But what, then, does it mean to say that in addition to everything else to which it applies, “emptiness” is applicable to itself; “emptiness” is itself “empty”? Insight deriving from long-term reflection on this one thought in Buddhist history is extensive. One outcome of this meditation is the realization that no doctrine is final, permanent, and beyond doubt. “Emptiness” was in many ways a teaching about how to live well in view of the prospects of human finitude. Through reflection on this teaching, Buddhists contemplated the uncertainty of human thinking and sought ways not around this insight but through it to greater and greater realization. They sought to learn through experience how to live well in the absence of certain knowledge, yet without being rendered immobile by the fear of being wrong or getting stuck in sheer hesitation.

[The] ultimately communal orientation in the pursuit of morality links the perfection of morality directly to the bodhisattva’s vow, the vow to pursue awakening on behalf of all beings. The point of moral action is not just one’s own purity or enlightenment but also the perfection of human society as a whole and its movement toward enlightenment. Indeed, one’s own enlightenment is linked to that of others; the pursuit of one is the pursuit of the other. To seek the enlightenment of others is to enlighten yourself, and seeking your own enlightenment will help bring about the enlightenment of others. Nevertheless, because enlightenment is defined in terms of certain qualities of selflessness and because our uncultivated inclinations are already shaped toward self-seeking, Mahayana Buddhist texts orient most moral practice in the direction of compassionate concern for others rather than concern for one’s own enlightenment.

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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The imagination as a meditative discipline is inherently creative, a discipline of change rather than conservation. Its goal is always transformation, breaking through the weaknesses of previous orders and pushing toward something extraordinary and new. In this sense, products of the imagination are often counterintuitive. They run against the grain of our previous ways of understanding ourselves and the world. Our measure of them is the degree to which they open up new dimensions of reality to our mind. But sometimes this “opening” takes time to see or to feel. This is especially true of the most imaginative acts. Imaginative acts are most transformative when they are directed not toward a product that has been conceived in advance – where we already know clearly what we want. Instead, the imaginative acts that are most useful lead us to see and desire something that we could not have conceived or desired before that moment in time.

Although emotions can indeed blind our judgment and confuse our minds, they can also motivate our striving and stimulate energy in the pursuit of enlightenment.

In order to play this constructive role, emotions need to be shaped and cultivated; they need to be educated. Educated emotions are fundamental to depth of character, and self-conscious development is the primary means to prevent their distortion and excess. Emotional maturity of the kind we would imagine in a contemporary “thought of enlightenment” would be far less vulnerable to the extremes of destructive outbreak.

Although no human being is invulnerable, those who have given mindful attention to the development of their emotional responses will be better positioned to manage the storms of difficult situations. As we all know from our own internal experience, choosing well and acting well have many root conditions, but one of them is feeling well. When we have feelings of compassion, compassionate choices and actions are much more likely to arise than they would be otherwise. Feelings of peace tend to generate peaceful acts. Having an emotional life that is well balanced and suited to an earnest effort to live in accord with a “thought of enlightenment” is crucial.

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The perfection of tolerance is the meditative discipline of working with everything that assaults us, discomforts us, and forces suffering on us. Holding the mind steady, we learn to examine the pain, seeking to locate dimensions of our character that are not so severely affected by the apparent crisis and from which we can respond with resolve. Contemplating these, we begin to open a spiritual power not otherwise accessible. Patiently sitting still with our suffering entails neither wallowing in it nor celebrating it, but instead promises a freedom from its tyranny. Patience of this sort is far more than passive endurance. It is the energy to pass through suffering without allowing it to get us wholly in its grasp.

When we understand all things, especially ourselves, as constituted through relations to others, the larger issue of identity begins to take on a new look, and along with it, the kinds of moral questions that will be posed. Seen from an ideal of the bodhisattva image, those who are hungry will be fed not because it is the bodhisattva’s duty to feed them or that they have a right to be fed, but rather because of a sense of common belonging and shared identity so fundamental that a compassionate response becomes “natural.” Whenever we think of moral life as a duty imposed upon us by the moral law, we hold the motivation for moral action outside of ourselves and continue to alienate ourselves from deeper sources of motivation.

[O]ver and over, the sutras recommend that “when the Bodhisattva is faced with a beggar, he should produce a thought thus: he who gives, he to whom he gives, what he gives,” in all of these “the own-being cannot be apprehended.” The Bodhisattvas’ “own-being” “cannot be apprehended” because they have no “own-being.” Their being – what they are – depends to a great extent on other beings, and they change over time. Nothing is self-established; nothing stands on its own. All of us who fail to understand this will, as donors, tend to be more self-concerned in giving than concerned about the other. Understanding ourselves and others as isolated entities, each on our own, in the act of giving we will likely be as much or more self-promoting as truly generous.

The gift may still be a good thing. The beggar will, for example, still get the food he so desperately needs. But he will not get the sense of human dignity and equality that he may need to recover his standing in the world, nor a glimpse of the open-hearted human love and concern that we all need to live well. Moreover, the one who gives will not get these either, and the deep sense of well-being that might have come in the act of giving is stifled, replaced tragically by more isolation, pride, and arrogance, and hence more future suffering for both the giver and others.

Unless we as donors can see clearly and unflinchingly that who we are as donors – secure in wealth and health – is completely dependent on numerous turns of good fortune, on the care and help of others, and on opportunities not available to everyone, our acts of giving will be less than fully generous. These acts will therefore not have the liberating effects that they might otherwise have had. When we are able to see that the homeless person’s parents did not do for him what ours did for us, that his teachers did not do for him what ours did for us, then we begin to understand the contingency of our fortune, and, looking more deeply, the thorough interdependency of all reality.

From points of departure in ordinary mentality where most of us reside, it was widely thought in Mahayana Buddhism that an initial faith is required to begin this practice of wisdom. As the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom defines it “Faith here means the believing in perfect wisdom, the trusting confidence, the resoluteness, the deliberation, the weighing up, the testing.” Without some faith that these practices are worthwhile, that exerting oneself in them would be a healthy engagement of time and effort, no one would or should take them up. But the sutras imagine, sensibly, that in the process of engaging in these practices, on the basis of that initial faith, what at first requires faith because it seems so foreign and unnatural later becomes a second nature, internalized on the basis of experience. At some point the practitioner “knows” something, feels something strongly, based on what has already taken place. The more deeply ingrained the practices of perfection become, the less discipline is required and the more one is able to perform a wise act spontaneously out of a profound sense of what is right under the circumstances.