The Six Perfections - Dale S. Wright - 0. Introduction

 INTRODUCTION

The question my life presses upon me, whether I face it directly or not, is “How shall I live?” “As what kind of person?” All of us face the task of constructing a life for ourselves, of shaping ourselves into certain kinds of people who will live lives of one kind or another, for better or worse. Some people undertake this task deliberately; they make choices in life in view of an image of the kind of person they would hope to become. From the early beginnings of their tradition, Buddhists have maintained that nothing is more important than developing the freedom implied in their activity of self-cultivation—of deliberately shaping the kind of life you will live. For Buddhists, this is the primary responsibility and opportunity that human beings have. It is, they claim, our singular freedom, a freedom available to no other beings in the universe. And although circumstances beyond anyone’s control will make very different possibi­lities available for different people, Buddhists have always recognized that the difference between those who assume the task of self-sculpting with imagination, integrity, and courage, and those who do not is enor­mous, constituting in Buddhism the difference between enlightened ways of being in the world and unenlightened ways.

This book adopts a Buddhist point of departure on these crucial issues in order to develop a philosophy of self-cultivation. The primary purpose of such a philosophy is practical, that is, to guide life practice. That has certainly been the goal of Buddhists who for over two millennia have spoken and written profoundly on the methods, goals, and significance of the pursuit of enlightenment. At the center of this long-standing Bud­dhist practice has been a list of “perfections,” understood as particular ideals of human character that guide self-cultivation. The perfections provide a concrete image of the human qualities that Buddhists consider truly admirable. An early Buddhist list of “faculties” requiring perfection names five: faith, energy, mindfulness, meditation, and insight.¹ The Jaitaka Tales about the Buddha’s own previous lives list ten perfections, as do late Mahayana texts, although these two lists differ. But the most frequently named group of perfections, and to my mind the most inter­esting, is the six perfections, found throughout the early Mahayana sutras and then beyond in many strands of the Buddhist tradition. These six qualities of enlightened character are the basis of this book’s meditations on self-cultivation. One sutra introduces the six perfections by having a disciple ask the Buddha: “How many bases for training are there for those seeking enlightenment?” The Buddha responds: “There are six: generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, meditation, and wisdom.”²

This sutra claims that the six perfections are “bases for training.” This means that they constitute a series of practices or “trainings” that guide Buddhist practitioners toward the goal of enlightenment or awakening. These six “trainings” are the means or methods to that all-important end. But the perfections are much more than techniques. They are also the most fundamental dimensions of the goal of enlightenment. Enlighten­ment is defined in terms of these six qualities of human character; together they constitute the essential qualities of that ideal human state. The perfections, therefore, are the ideal, not just the means to it. Being generous, morally aware, tolerant, energetic, meditative, and wise is what it means for a Buddhist to be enlightened. If perfection in these six dimensions of human character is the goal, then enlightenment, understood in this Buddhist sense, would also be closely correlated to these particular practices. Recognizing this, one sutra says: “Enlighten­ment just is the path and the path is enlightenment.”³ To be moving along the path of self-cultivation by developing the six perfections is the very meaning of “enlightenment.”

The six perfections, therefore, provide a concrete image of the Bud­dhist goal or ideal end. This end, which in classical Greek philosophy is called the “idea of the good,” or the “ideal of a good life,” is in Buddhism called the “thought of enlightenment.” For Buddhists, the “thought of enlightenment” is the ideal image that gives purpose and direction to human lives—it guides decisions, provides reasons for acting, and shapes the will. There is an important sense in which almost everyone has a “thought of enlightenment”—some “idea of the good.” We all imagine better lives than what we have managed so far—better ways to do what we are doing, better relationships with others, better character, and so on. For most people, though, this idea or thought is underdeveloped and immature. It has not been systematically cultivated to become the driving force behind deliberate change. More a daydream than a well-honed understanding, an immature “thought of enlightenment” will have little capacity to guide a life and very little power to shape deliberations on how we might best live our lives.

For those who do cultivate ideals for the purpose of self-sculpting, there are still a number of difficulties to overcome. One common mistake is to project an idea of the good for your life that does not inspire, an image of life that is so bland and ordinary that it hardly amounts to an aspiration. When we lack imagination for what we might do with our lives, little movement is empowered. When the goals that guide a life are entirely conventional, they fail to provide the exhilaration and energy sufficient to generate movement and inspired effort. The opposite mistake is to project a “thought of enlightenment” that is simply unattainable, a goal that no human being could ever accomplish. In cultivating a “thought of enlighten­ment,” not just any concept will do. Worthy ideals are not the products of fantasy. If we take as our “thought of enlightenment” some flatteringly divine image, that image will be unable to guide us in shaping our lives because it is out of accord with the reality of our situation. An authentic “thought of enlightenment” would be one that fits our actual possibilities and that can be revised as our situation in life changes. It would be a conception of an ideal for our lives that accords with possibilities that are both really our own and truly ideal. To find it, we ask ourselves: What can we reasonably and ideally aspire to be under the circumstances that we now face?

Now in any particular form of Buddhism, of course, this image of the ideal is given to participants. It is given in the form of images of enlightened saints in sacred stories and texts, in the ideals that the tradition provides to participants for admiration and emulation. But when we stand back to examine these traditions over large stretches of historical time and geographical space, we see that these ideal images are multiple and various. Different Buddhist teachers in different Buddhist cultures at different times have conceived the “thought of enlightenment” in somewhat different ways; they engage in different practices and lead intriguingly different kinds of enlightened lives. Although initially troubling, this complexity and diversity in Buddhism is enormously beneficial, a gift to Buddhists and in the long run to the world. “Enlight­enment” has not been and cannot be static and unchangeable if human beings are not. It cannot be a single human possibility set for all time, even if some Buddhists have naively assumed that it is. The human ideal varies in accordance with the circumstances in which particular people find themselves, and it evolves as human history unfolds.

If Buddhism offered only one option, a single form of human excel­lence, then it would be useful only to people in situations just like the original circumstances in which the ideal was formed. Fortunately, Bud­dhism and its “thought of enlightenment” have histories—complex re­sponses to the issue of human excellence derived from a variety of circumstances over long stretches of time—and many of these are avail­able as models for consideration in crafting an image of the human ideal that best suits contemporary circumstances. Along with the “thought of enlightenment,” of which each of the six is a part, the perfections evolve in the minds of Buddhist practitioners. Our understanding of excellence in all spheres of life grows as we develop and move toward it. We learn to extend our image of excellence in sports and music, for example, every time we see or hear the greatest performers. Encountering their bril­liance, we revise and enlarge the image of what perfection in that domain might be.

Similarly, in the realm of ethics or human character, we learn what enlightened life is by encountering images of greatness. We extend our understanding of admirable generosity, for example, when we learn about Mother Teresa or other people who embody that particular excel­lence of human character. Where do we encounter these images of human excellence? Occasionally in person, but more commonly in outstanding cultural achievement—in literature, philosophy, and the arts, where some vision of the ideal or anti-ideal is set out before us. Buddhist literature and culture abound in vivid examples of human excellence, concrete images that function to show us what greatness of character might look like.

The Sanskrit word traditionally translated as “perfection” is pãramitã. This is an ancient word whose origins are obscure. On one account, pãramitã derives from param, meaning “the other side” plus the past participle ita, meaning “gone.” From this perspective, something is per­fected when it has “gone to the other side,” that is, when it has fully transcended what it would be in ordinary lives. Others, however, link paramita to the term parama, which means “excellent,” or “supreme,” such that something is perfected when it arrives at the state of excellence or supremacy. But whatever its etymology, the word paramita soon became a technical term in Buddhist ethics naming the dimensions of human character that are most important in the state of enlightenment.

As a central term in ethics, however, the English word “perfection” is far from perfect. The most troubling implication in the word “perfection” is the suggestion that at some point there would be an end to human striving and self-cultivation, a final point of completion beyond which no further enlightenment would be possible. In this picture, enlightenment is imagined as the finish line in a race, a particular threshold that, once crossed, ends the activities of human imagination and enlargement. Moreover, if there is such a fixed and final goal for human beings, “perfection” would mean that this final state is the same for all people in all situations and all times. Neither of these implications is credible on Buddhist grounds because, understood in this way, both “enlightenment” and human life lose their depth, becoming static, one dimensional, and lacking all evolutionary potential.

No doubt, many Buddhists have assumed that the “perfections” and “enlightenment” are permanent and fixed in this way. Buddhist wisdom, however, makes a specific target of this common assumption. It suggests, instead, that all things change in complex ways, that nothing is fixed or static, and that, like everything else, the path of enlightenment is open and ongoing, without end. The quest for enlightenment is ongoing, not because we never attain greater insight or comprehension but because in ascending to a higher level we become capable of envisioning something even greater beyond where we currently stand. To travel far is to develop the capacity to see more, not less, and movement in this direction enlarges the space within which ongoing exploration can take place. The truth is that as long as we are human, we will always be perfecting multiple dimensions of our lives and the world. In a healthy spiritual tradition, authentic achievements transform and enrich the “thought of enlighten­ment” that guides practice, making possible both greater insight and greater freedom.

What is it that we are perfecting in the six perfections? The best word in English for that would be our character. It is through resources of character that we undertake enlightening practices, and it is our character that is enlightened. The English word “character” is derived from ancient Greek words meaning to “stamp” or “engrave,” activities that leave a “characteristic” mark or impression on something. But this image will be misleading if we take it to mean all of the marks that have been stamped upon us by generative forces in our world—the genetics of our birth inheritance, or the impact of parents, family, neighbors, friends, teachers, and others upon us. All of these forces and many more do make an enormous contribution to the shaping of our identity, but they do not define character. I reserve the word “character” for that part of our overall identity that is shaped by the choices that we ourselves make.

Your character, therefore, is defined by your own acts of self-construction. Unlike other dimensions of your overall identity, character is neither given to you at birth nor imprinted upon you by environment. Many unique developments will shape you into a particular kind of person, often without your being aware of them, but none of these forces will individuate you more than the development of character through a lifetime of deliberate choices. The more character you have developed, the greater the role it will play in defining your overall identity.

Character is a disposition to engage in the world in view of a chosen end, a tendency to impress a “thought of enlightenment” upon all acts and choices. When you act in view of your own vision of the good, your acts will be shaped by that vision, and through that shaping, your char­acter will be gradually formed. Cultivating character in this way pre­supposes conceiving of yourself as both free and responsible, free to choose what you do and responsible for the outcome of those actions. It also implies the capacity to cultivate the desires that motivate your action and the depth of character to take responsibility for the kind of person your desires will create. Since, as we have seen, the six perfections define and give content to the “thought of enlightenment” in Buddhism, taken together they provide concrete guidance for the construction of character.

Some Buddhist texts maintain that the greatest “awakening” in life is the first one, a point in life when we awaken to the fact that we are both free and responsible to engage in enlightening self-transformation. They refer to this initial breakthrough as “generating of the thought of enlight­enment,” the moment when we realize that there is a wide variety of human destinies possible for us and that deliberately actualizing one of them depends in part on what we do and how we live. Prior to this awakening, our identity is largely fortuitous—our lives are shaped by things that simply happen to us, without reference to our own delibera­tions and choices. Generating a “thought of enlightenment” awakens us from this default condition and gets the creative part of our lives under way.

The Buddhist teachings on the six perfections imply a kind of ethics that focuses directly on daily life. Instead of a set of principles to help solve occasional moral quandaries, ethics of this sort permeates everyday activ­ity. Its actions are an integral part of what we do from moment to moment. In this sense, the six perfections are less like a set of principles or rules and more like a system of training. The aim of these six regimes of training is to put into practice a certain manner or quality of spiritual life, and this is accomplished through the daily practice of shaping character. A good analogy for this would be training in physical fitness. Practicing the six perfections, one engages in training to become more generous, moral, tolerant, energetic, meditative, and wise. To train, one must practice on a regular basis, shaping one’s life around the various aspects of the training regimen. Just as a physical training program would prepare you to engage in an athletic event, an ethical training program like the six perfections trains practitioners to engage in these basic dimensions of life in deeper and more enlightening ways.

For the kinds of Buddhist ethical practices suggested by the six perfections, more important than the application of rules and adherence to duty is the appreciation and admiration of human lives that embody the kinds of excellence of character contained in the perfections as ideals. Admirable lives, in Buddhism as in other traditions, serve as models to follow and emulate in one’s own life practice. In the sutra traditions surrounding the six perfections, these models are called bodhisattvas, “enlightened beings” whose practice of the perfections is most highly accomplished. Images of bodhisattvas serve as models of spiritual excel­lence available for anyone to contemplate and imitate in constructing their own lives.

There are dangers to heed in the activity of emulating paradigmatic lives, however. One danger is that since no previous life has ever arisen in a context exactly like yours, and no prior human being has ever been exactly like you, there will be no perfect model for the kind of life that you ought to live. Your own individual life must be shaped out of circumstances that are precisely your own, out of experiences, personal relationships, and histories that are unique. Drawing on previous, admi­rable lives as models, therefore, we will need to consider the adaptability of the personal excellences we see in other lives to our own settings, and decide which of these will adequately correlate with our own context and which will either be inapplicable or require adjustments and alterations.

Fortunately, traditions as voluminous and comprehensive as Bud­dhism offer a wide repertoire of options, some of which, but not all, will be worth considering in our own lives. To make use of these models, we need as much self-knowledge and imagination as we need outward appreciation and imitation of these other lives. The danger is that we might feel obligated by ideal images of human excellence to copy their actions when those might not be suitable for us. Furthermore, we make a mistake in self-cultivation if our admiration of these figures puts us in a slavish or servile relationship in which we are bound and overwhelmed by them. It is therefore essential to maintain enough freedom from models, especially religious models, to avoid subservience and to maintain wise, critical thinking. It is also important to realize that, whatever others have done in the past, it is we who must now make admirable lives for ourselves and we can only do that in a position of freedom and self­respect.

This point leads to a second danger entailed in the emulation of models of greatness. In Buddhism as in other religious traditions, the image of religious exemplars tends over time to ascend to incredible levels of elevation. The stories about saints and prophets accumulate elevation over time through repeated telling, even to the point where they tend to rise above the human realm altogether. This is certainly the case with the literature surrounding bodhisattvas, enlightened beings in Buddhism who represent the ideals of the tradition at the highest levels. In their literary forms, bodhisattvas are imagined to attain the most perfect forms that can be conceived by human authors, including capacities of knowing and accomplishment that rise above the constraints of finitude. Bodhi­sattvas of this kind are magical and supernatural beings. Wherever this heightened level of transcendence appears in Buddhist literature, the images that they offer are the most exalted forms of life that their authors can imagine without facing the constraints of human finitude. But in that form they are no longer human and are therefore not helpful models for human beings to emulate in deciding how to live their lives.

So, whereas Buddhist bodhisattvas have historically served two func­tions, only one of these is applicable to the practice of the six perfections. Where bodhisattvas are models of truly admirable human lives, they are substantial resources for our efforts at self-cultivation. On the other hand, wherever bodhisattvas are objects of devotion projected out beyond the human realm into the sphere of the divine, they are removed from the domain of spiritual self-cultivation and placed in the setting of confes­sional or devotional religious practice. In this sphere, the human role is one of worship and devotion rather than admiration and inspiration.

The more images of excellence we have before us, the more breadth there is to our understanding of the perfections and to our “thought of enlightenment.” All of us are born into particular cultural contexts that offer models of excellent human character. But as we encounter more and more of the world, we come to realize that the possibilities presented to us by the immediate context of our family, religious heritage, and education are limited, and that we now have access to an even richer set of possibilities by virtue of an emerging global cultural awareness. The cultivation of breadth of cultural awareness enlarges our ethical imagina­tion by acquainting us with images of greatness that derive from very different settings. Seeing this in travel and in cross-cultural education, we come to realize that the conventional possibilities for life available to us are really only a small subset of the global possibilities into which we may now tap. The global citizen of the future will understand him or herself as inheriting all traditions of human excellence and as responsible for creative, thoughtful arbitration between them.

One common criticism in our time to the entire topic of self-cultivation is the critical point that the extent of focus on the self that self-cultivation implies is itself inappropriate, even delusory, and that it fails to acknowl­edge the more fundamental communal or social dimension of human life. This is an important point, and one that Buddhists have faced as directly and as responsibly as anyone in other traditions. The overall Buddhist response to this critique entails two primary points. First, and most important, Buddhists maintain that the beneficiary of your practice of self-cultivation is not just you but others around you and, ultimately, the whole of humanity. Early in the career of Mahayana Buddhists who are serious about practicing the perfections, a vow is taken—the bodhisattva vow—in which practitioners vow to seek enlightenment not just for themselves but on behalf of everyone equally. It is the whole of society that needs to be enlightened, not just certain individuals, even if indivi­duals are the catalyst through which such enlightenment might become a reality. In effect, the vow is just to seek enlightenment, at whatever level and to whatever degree that can be accomplished, and not be possessive about it—enlightenment not simply for oneself but on behalf of greater vision for everyone and everything.

The second point follows from the first. We have no choice but to begin the quest wherever we happen to be. If, like most people, we attend primarily to our own well-being, then our interest in enlightenment or the six perfections or anything else extends only so far as the good we think it will do for us as individuals. If the range of our interest and concern does not extend far beyond our own lives, then that is where we must begin, imagining the perfections and enlightenment as beneficial for us as individuals, which, of course, they are. Nevertheless, as we will see shortly, each of the six perfections functions as a system of training to overcome the narrow and myopic sense of self that we all have in immature stages of development. As we progress through the perfections—even if we began for essentially selfish reasons—the practices themselves undermine that sense of self, gradually showing us its superficiality and opening us to a more comprehensive vision. The general criticism of self-cultivation as being too individualistic fails to recognize that we are unable to be of service to others until we have undergone enough self-transformation to begin to see larger realities beyond the importance of our own personal well-being.

So we might say, paraphrasing a Buddhist point on this matter, that all of us need self-cultivation up to a certain point of maturity, but that beyond this point there is very little point in calling it self-cultivation because our concerns have broadened dramatically to the point where we are just cultivating enlightenment. This enlightenment is not intended as the property of anyone in particular but as the common good. Making the shift from the primacy of one’s own personal development to a broader concern for the well-being and development of all beings is the overarch­ing intention of the six perfections. From a Buddhist point of view, we are always in the process of shaping ourselves to be more attentive to the needs of everyone, even when, at an advanced point of development, we no longer think of it primarily as a process of shaping ourselves. There is no end to the need to open ourselves to the world.

Like many others, I came to the study of Buddhist philosophy in pursuit of truths that would wake me up, providing the kinds of trans­formation that I could see in images of bodhisattvas and other figures of greatness. I assumed that a close encounter with Buddhist styles of contemplation would change not just what I thought but who I am. I assumed that the primary point of this study was personal transforma­tion, a transformation of mind and character far-reaching enough that it would open me to the world in new ways. I was, at that point, naive enough to be surprised when it became clear that graduate programs in philosophy and religion at our universities are not organized in accordance with these assumptions. I learned, early on, that academic professionalization required a separation between personal quests for self-transformation, on the one hand, and sophisticated study of world culture, on the other. I was taught that studying different cultures’ answers to important religious and philosophical questions need not have a bearing on the kind of person you are, and that the quest for knowledge and the quest for self-transformation are best left to separate parts of oneself, on separate occasions.

Eager to engage in the cultivation of knowledge for what it might contribute to the global enlightenment of character, I made the adjustments necessary to be a full participant in the world of higher knowledge. My original orientation to these matters did not shift decisively, however. I was not persuaded by the dichotomy that separated these forms of self-cultiva­tion. I still sought to be fundamentally reoriented in my own life by means of what I studied. I burden you with this one autobiographical segment only to make the simple point that this book is the result of my ongoing effort to cultivate and extend this initial motive for study. In studying the six perfec­tions and in engaging in the “thought of enlightenment” implied in them, I unapologetically place knowledge in the service of practical wisdom, and strive to make the effects of this search profoundly transformative both to me as writer and to you as reader. What matters most, from my point of view, is not so much what we know as who we become in the process of learning. On this issue, I have learned a great deal from the mainstream of the Buddhist tradition. Throughout its history, Buddhist philosophy has been placed in the service of enlightenment, defined as a profound transfor­mation of human character that encompasses within it the development of knowledge.

Given that particular orientation in its composition, this book is addressed to particular kinds of readers—to many readers, I hope, but certainly not all. This book, like others, is written in a particular style, at a particular level of conceptual difficulty. To whom, then, is it addressed?

•    To all those who feel themselves to be faced with the question:

How shall we live our lives? To all those who are aware that living passively—simply inheriting the form of their lives without question— is an inadequate, weak response to the obligations and opportunities of life. To all those who already sense that sculpting a worthy life for themselves and others will require disciplines aimed in a practical but long-term way to cultivate a variety of essential human powers, from generosity to wisdom. For all readers of this sort, I have written this book as a guide to reflection and life practice. My aim is to serve as a pathfinder for those who will soon be finding their own, or who are already on the way.

•    To young readers, especially, those just now realizing that an intel­lectual, spiritual, and practical pursuit of this kind is a real option— those, perhaps, just now beginning to see its possible value. My hope is to awaken them to the importance of this task for their future and for the future of human culture. These are the readers who in principle have the most to gain from the practice of philosophical reflection on ideals in human life and from practices of intentional self-cultivation. Although having struggled along this path myself, I aspire to serve as their guide on this early stretch of the journey, my hope is that the forms of excellence that they might one day attain would extend out beyond my comprehension.

•    To readers who may or may not be educated experts in these intellectual fields—ethics, philosophy, religious studies, Buddhist studies. I therefore write without presupposing technical philo­sophical language, or Buddhist terms. The few Buddhist concepts for which there is no adequate English translation I explain as clearly as I can. That does not mean, however, that this book will be easy to read. It will require of you both a willingness and an ability to think hard about issues that are so close to our lives that they are difficult to see. Philosophy that is easy to read and simple to conceive is not really philosophy. I urge you to challenge yourself, or take the challenge from me, to expand your capacities of imagination and conception in the very act of reading in a meditative way. In order to avoid any distraction from this task of thinking, I have kept the academic etiquette of references and endnotes to a minimum. The spirit of the book is exploratory and experimental, an exercise in reflective meditation on human ideals. I invite all readers to think critically along with me, to disagree, and taking off from what I have said, to ask themselves how to go beyond what they have found here. Engagement in that critical practice is the point of the book.

•    To those who are Buddhists, I offer a reflective meditation on central values in your tradition. In doing so, I hope to provoke Buddhists, to challenge them to recognize and to use the enormously profound resources in their own tradition to confront contemporary life in insightful and innovative ways. It is my belief that if Buddhists overcome the comforting temptations of traditional orthodoxy that simply hold to past ideas and norms in spite of their lack of fit with current circumstances, they will find an incredible range and depth of cultural resources capable of having an enlightening impact on the contemporary world. This is not a call to discard tradition. On the contrary, it is a challenge to make innovative use of traditional resources in a way that offers wise and compassionate leadership in a struggling world. As the great Buddhist texts make clear, although the first step is a reverent absorption of the tradition, the second step is to guard against attachment, literalism, and other unskillful ways in which a tradition can do as much harm as good. The best way to show gratitude to your tradition is to extend it further and improve it, and that is the challenge that I put to you.

• To those who are not Buddhists, I offer this opportunity to explore Buddhist resources for the purpose of reflection on issues that are of fundamental concern to all human beings. Throughout these chap­ters, I claim that Buddhism makes available to everyone in our global culture a set of concepts and practices that are extraordinary in their applicability to the task of constructing wise and admirable lives. It is my belief that these Buddhist resources can make a valuable contri­bution to the development of an ethical consciousness suitable for the global culture of the twenty-first century. In order to clarify and identify specifically Buddhist ideas, I have divided each chapter into two segments. The shorter opening segment of each chapter provides an overview of traditional Buddhist views of the topic of that chapter, describing what the most important Buddhist sutras and other texts have said about each of the six perfections. The second, longer section in each chapter takes that descriptive account up into contemporary reflection. In this more substantial segment—the heart of the book— I aspire to provide for contemporary Buddhism a basic theory for the practices of the six perfections. This section is constructive, not descriptive. Rather than describe what Buddhists have thought on these matters so far, it attempts to build on that foundation, to think further. It raises questions that have not been addressed in Buddhist texts because these questions are crafted in a new era and from the perspective of a culture that is not historically Buddhist. Using Buddhist resources, this book aspires to make a creative contribution to contemporary thinking. It poses the question of how today we would need to conceive of these dimensions of enlightenment in order to regard them as truly “enlightening.” It asks what the six perfections of generosity, morality, tolerance, energy, meditation, and wisdom would need to mean today for them to be the admirable ideals that they are intended to be.

Is this book primarily practical or theoretical? It is both, from begin­ning to end, because it entails the practice of Buddhist theory—the practice of philosophy—insofar as this theory aims at the transformation of everyday life. The same is true throughout the history of Buddhist philosophy—by altering the way you understand the world you alter the way you live and participate in it. It is instructive to note, as we will see in the chapter on the perfection of meditation, that the practice of philoso­phy in the Buddhist tradition is positioned as a subcategory within the overarching context of meditation. Meditation as contemplation or thoughtfulness is simply one form of meditation practice aimed at trans­forming the way you live in the world. So, when these chapters engage in philosophical meditation, they are to be understood as a form of “prac­tice,” and their aim is the transformation of our daily life—what we do in the world and how. The ultimate goal of this book, as it is for Buddhist philosophy, is practical wisdom.

If this book is exploratory, as claimed, and if there is no end to the ways that human ideals can be extended in our evolutionary future, then it will have failed miserably if, arrogantly, it purports to be a definitive account of these issues. A definitive account of something, as we can see in the root word fin or end, puts an end to discussion. This book intends the opposite. It seeks to be exploratory, to open up new paths for reflection in contemporary ethics. While it offers possible answers to many ques­tions that arise in the course of these meditations, the best answers are those that open paths previously unknown and that lead to lines of question and answer that we cannot even imagine now. If this book is successful, it will have evoked new thinking and new meditation, rather than settling matters once and for all. It aspires to enrich and deepen the quality of questions that we are able to pursue.

Is this book primarily philosophical or religious? The aim of the book is to develop a philosophy of spiritual self-cultivation. For thousands of years, many Buddhists (although certainly not all) have undertaken the quest for authentic spiritual life without reference to questions that seem essentially religious from a Western point of view—questions about God or the existence of deity. Without taking a position on the existence or nonexistence of divine beings, Buddhists have placed primary emphasis on the task of self-shaping and the quest for enlightenment, kinds of training wherein we consciously seek to awaken to a broader sense of freedom and responsibility. It is best, I think, not to delay embarking on such a quest until traditional religious questions have been settled. Once you are seriously engaged in enlightening practice, the kinds of questions that seem important will already be in the process of change.

And finally, it is worth our asking: Is this book Buddhist, or not? Yes it is, in certain important respects at least. It considers basic teachings of Buddhist spiritual practice and does so from points of view that include many forms of traditional Buddhism. But something about this question misses the point—that is not what the book is really about. This book, based on Buddhist ideas and written from a point of view that has been shaped by both Buddhist and non-Buddhist resources, is about ideals and the cultivation of character. Drawing on the most insightful resources available, wherever they can be found, it sets a stage upon which you, the reader, will be challenged to ask: How shall we live? From an authentic Buddhist point of view, it matters little whether something can be identified as “Buddhist” or not. What matters is whether what it says is transformative and whether the transformation it offers will enlighten and awaken our lives.

The traditional Buddhist sources for studying the six perfections are enormous. Many of the great texts of this tradition discuss the perfections at length. For the purposes of this study, the classic Mahayana sutras constitute the primary source, especially those known as the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, for example, the Diamond Sutra, the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, and the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines. In addi­tion, I have drawn resources from the Vimalakĩrti Sutra, the Samdhinir- mocana Sutra, and especially revealing accounts of the perfections found in the Pãramitãsamãsa by .Arya-Siira, and Santideva's Bodhicaryãvatãra. Other sources of inspiration, both within and beyond the Buddhist tradition—those without which I could not have even begun to write this book—are listed as “references” at the end of the book.