Upon whom should the bodhisattva bestow his or her generosity? Although answers to this question in the early Mahayana sutras occasionally vary, for the most part they prescribe universal giving. Although in practical circumstances it may be necessary to target those who are most needy, what the sutras want to cultivate is the desire to be generous with everyone. The virtues of nondiscrimination and impartiality are given high praise. Although there was a theory in circulation during the early years of Mahayana Buddhism that the value or merit of a gift is proportional to the worthiness or spiritual merit of the recipient, many texts speak directly against this idea. In this spirit, the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom describes the true bodhisattva as “having given gifts without differentiating, … But if a Bodhisattva, when faced with a living being … who does not seem worthy of gifts, should produce a thought to the effect that ‘a fully enlightened Buddha is worthy of my gifts, but not this [one],’ then he does not have the dharma of a Bodhisattva.”

Wisdom is the ability to face the truth and not be unnerved or frightened. It is the capacity to be disillusioned, but not disheartened. It is the ability to consider the contingency and the groundlessness of all things, oneself included, and not turn away from that consideration in fear. Wisdom means setting aside illusions about oneself and the world and being strengthened by that encounter with the truth. It entails willingness to avoid seeking the security of the unchanging and to open oneself to a world of flux and complex relations. This includes, as the Vimalakirti Sūtra puts it, “overcoming the habit of clinging to an ultimate ground.” One way to say this is that bodhisattvas – those who seek wisdom and open transformation throughout their lives – can be distinguished in terms of how much truth they can bear, how many illusions of comfort and security they are willing or able to set aside.

Philosophy as a form of Buddhist meditation does have an overarching rationale or aim. Theoretical practice is considered most worthwhile when it aims to improve the quality of life. This practical, ethical orientation in Buddhist meditative thought can already be seen in the early parable of the “poisoned arrow.” In this parable the Buddha poses a rhetorical question: Would the person struck by a poison arrow be well advised to pose speculative questions about the archer, his background, his motives, the quality of the shot, and so on? Or would he be best off attending to the practical question of how to deal with the situation at hand – the poison – in such a way that one’s life is preserved? Similarly, questions unrelated to the quest for “awakening” were thought unwise, irrelevant to the one issue that really matters. Questions aimed at transformative vision were considered to be the essence of philosophical meditation.

One of the most important functions of philosophical meditation is that this is the practice within which the conception of the Buddhist goal is engendered, honed, and articulated, and the means through which that conception becomes a reality in one’s daily life. “Conception of the goal” here means what Western philosophers have meant by the “concept of the good” and what Buddhists mean by the “thought of enlightenment.” This thought, and the realization that there may be forms of life clearly superior to the one I am living, when taken in their full force, lead to the practice of meditation on ideals.

To someone terrified, in despair, and depleted of sufficient energy to do anything it is not helpful to recommend the practices enjoined in the perfection of energy. These practices, as we have seen, are training for someone already well endowed with the capacity for energetic striving; it is training intended to prevent the occurrence of extreme despair by providing both purpose and the energy to stay with it. Energy to engage in practice, not to mention motivation and purpose, is precisely what those in terror and despair lack. In such a predicament, Mahayana sutras often recommend devotional exercises – prayer, chanting, and ritual. Here is how it is put in the Vimalakirti Sūtra, a text that is otherwise entirely focused on practice and conception at the level of the most discerning bodhisattvas. Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, poses a question to Vimalakirti, the sutra’s most exemplary image of wisdom:

Mañjuśrī: To what should one resort when terrified by fear of life?

Vimalakirti: Mañjuśrī, a Bodhisattva who is terrified by fear of life should resort to the magnanimity of the Buddha.

The magnanimity of the Buddha is the Buddhist image of compassion and grace. In situations where we simply lack the power to pull ourselves up out of a lifeless despair, only “outside” help remains. “Outside help” would include theistic grace, medical and psychological assistance, the kindness and concern of family and friends, and more. The fundamental teachings of Mahayana Buddhism preclude conceiving of these as truly outside,” however. “No-self” means simply that the lines separating inside from outside are porous, temporary, and always open to erasure by way of the confluence of community interaction. When one person is saved or revived through the compassionate agency of others, the community heals itself.

How should we understand the higher form of generosity – “perfect giving”? The answer can be found throughout the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, because wisdom is precisely what is needed to perfect generosity. Wisdom is the sixth perfection, the most perfect of the perfections, and the essential ingredient in all the others. Therefore it will need to be considered here in order to complete our understanding of the ideal of perfect generosity.

Perfect wisdom, whether related to generosity or any other dimension of life, consists in the realization of “emptiness,” and it is this teaching that the sutras promulgate from beginning to end. Although emptiness Śūnyatā) was an infrequently used word in the earliest layers of Buddhist literature, when it did make its appearance as the central concept in Mahayana sutras, it was defined in terms that were already familiar in the Pali sutras. To say that something is “empty” is to say that it is subject to continual change, that its existence is wholly dependent on factors outside of itself, and that it has no unchanging core or permanent essence. Making that claim, Mahayana Buddhists invoked the basic Buddhist teachings of impermanence, dependent arising, and no-self. All things are “empty” of their own self-established permanent essence because they are always subject to alteration and revision and because they are composed and defined in terms of what lies outside of them.

The “perfection” of giving incorporates the wisdom of “emptiness” to transform the perspective from which acts of giving occur. When the impermanence, dependence, and insubstantiality of all things are absorbed into one’s worldview down to the level of daily comportment, everything changes. A new, non-self-centered identity gradually emerges, one that entails reciprocity with everything that previously seemed to be other than oneself. This identity dissolves previous habits of self-protection and self-aggrandizement, opening the “self” to others in a connection of compassionate identification. To see how the vision of “emptiness” transforms thinking about generosity or giving, we look closely at passages in the sutras.

Instructing his disciple, Subhūti, in the perfection of generosity, the Large Sutra has the Buddha say: “Do not imagine that the gift is one thing, its fruit another, the donor another, and the recipient another. . . . And why? Because this gift is empty of a gift, its fruit empty of a fruit, and also the donor is empty of a donor and the recipient empty of a recipient. For in emptiness no gift can be apprehended nor its fruit, no donor, and no recipient. And why? Because absolutely those dharmas are empty in their own-being.”

The Buddha says, “Do not imagine.” Imagine what? Do not imagine that the world is divided up into separate self-subsistent entities, the way we ordinarily assume it to be. Do not imagine yourself as one of these isolated entities. Why not? Because all of these seemingly separate “things” are what they are only in connection to other things that make them what they are. Nothing stands on its own, and that is what it means to be “empty” of “own-being.” Applied to the act of giving, we see that the gift is not a gift without a donor and a recipient. Likewise, without the gift, there is no donor, no recipient. Each depends on the others, and when one changes, so do the others.

Several realizations make wisdom more difficult to imagine than the other five ideals we have examined. Wisdom differs from the others in the extent to which it is readily identifiable and noticeable. When we look for acts of generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, and meditation, we know roughly where to look. Acts of generosity, for example, are located in a certain sphere of our lives; they are easily identified wherever something beneficial is intentionally and freely transferred from one person or group to another. But where do we look to find examples of wisdom? Nowhere in particular, or anywhere. There is no specific domain of wisdom. You can be wise or unwise in any dimension of life. Wisdom can be found at work in all of the other perfections and in everything we do, rather than in its own domain. There is wise giving, wise tolerance, wise eating, wise shopping, and so on. Wisdom appears at a more comprehensive level than the other perfections, and this is how it can guide, encompass, and perfect the other perfections.

The ideal of this fifth perfection is to live in a meditative frame of mind regardless of whether we happen to be meditating. The goal, therefore, is not always to be meditating, always to be practicing a preparatory activity, but rather to live in the spirit of composure and insight that the practice has produced.

Desire is the basis of motivation. It is the source of our energy. Without wanting something enough to motivate our will and energize our action, we are unlikely to pursue or get it. Imagine what it would be to eliminate all desire while still living a human life. Without desires we would be inactive and impotent. Lacking ambition, we would be without purposes and plans. Existing in so dispassionate a way that we desire nothing, we would be indifferent to any outcome; we would not care—about anything. Apathetic, that is, lacking pathos and passion, we would be devoid of feelings of any kind as well as the activities and spiritedness that follow from them. Although it is no doubt true that there have been a few aspirants who have understood the Buddha’s enlightenment to be a state of complete desirelessness, this is not the image of the compassionate and energized bodhisattva that we are likely to imagine and admire. A richer and more complete conception of Buddhist enlightenment encompasses and elevates desire rather than rejecting it. …

Those skilled in practices of mindfulness and in the discipline of character know how to assess desires. They consciously evaluate and rank desires, and when some of them are out of accord with chosen purposes—a “thought of enlightenment”—they also know how to extinguish them. Keeping these points in mind, we can still say, in the spirit of traditional forms of Buddhism, that the bodhisattva’s wisdom arises from having eliminated desires, as long as what we mean by that is that enlightenment is incompatible with many of our immature, uncultivated desires. Immature desires—based on a narrow self-understanding—are eliminated in the process of enlarging the sense we have of ourselves to encompass aspects of the world or ourselves previously beyond incorporation. Our very best desires, however—those honed by compassionate elevation of vision—need to be cultivated and maintained. Desire of this kind fuels our energy; it propels our most capacious vision.

Accepting the reality in which we stand, tolerant people do not indulge in moods of resentment; they do not waste energy resenting that things are as they are. In the grip of resentment, we falsify the world, refusing to face the reality that has come to be. Wise patience does not struggle in this way; it does not exhaust resources of mind and body wishing that things were other than they are. Resentment of the real undermines our best efforts to see what we face and to deal with it constructively. Ideally, the practices of tolerance and patience would release us from the grip of these agitations, freeing the mind to deal with the situation calmly and directly. Letting go of unhelpful distractions, we are in a much better position to participate thoughtfully and effectively in the world.

“Guarding awareness” in the realm of morality, while indispensable, also leads to certain problems. The most significant of these recognized in Buddhist texts is attachment to rules and procedures themselves. “Grasping” the precepts too firmly and too rigidly was thought to prevent the development of more skillful forms of moral awareness. “Clinging” to rules for monks and nuns stands in the way of a deeper moral consciousness, just as craving and attachment cloud perceptions of the world generally. Moreover, attachment to moral rules often undermines the compassionate and liberating connection to other people that morality intends to cultivate in a society. Wherever rule-following becomes mechanical and self-serving, where there is only joyless guarding of one’s own moral standing, there the “perfection” of morality is rendered impossible.