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Prajna/Wisdom
The term is the transliteration of the Sanskrit word prajñā, meaning wisdom. It refers to the supreme wisdom with insight into the nature and reality of all things. Buddhism believes that such wisdom surpasses all secular understandings, and therefore is the guide for or essence of the effort aimed at achieving enlightenment and attaining Buddhahood or bodhisattvahood. This wisdom has no form, no appearance, and cannot be expressed in words. It can only be achieved by undertaking a variety of accessible Buddhist practices.
The basic meaning of this term is voidness. It denotes that things do not have a constant or unchanging essence. It also means that things are illusory, not real. The essence of something independently existing is called “own-being,” or “svabhāva.” Buddhism denies the existence of this kind of essence. Instead, it believes that all worldly phenomena are assembled or dispersed by causes and conditions. “Own-being” is just the solidification of conceptual thinking vis-à-vis the phenomenal world. “Absence of own-being,” or “nihsvabhāva,” namely the viewpoint of “emptiness,” is particularly prominent within the Great Vehicle (Mahāyāna) sect of Buddhism. It completely denies any permanent real nature summarized in any term or phrase, going as far as to include the doctrine of Buddhism itself.
This term means the suffering from afflictions. The implications of “suffering” in Buddhism are very broad. Namely it refers to the physical and the mental pain experienced in specific events. It also refers to the suffering when joy fades, up to the suffering that all is impermanent and changing. On the whole one speaks of “three kinds of sufferings,” namely “suffering qua suffering or duh khaduh,” “suffering of change, or viparināmaduhkhatā,” and “suffering inherent in conditioning, or samskāraduhkhatā.” The understanding of “suffering” is the starting point to practice the Buddhist doctrine: only when one recognizes that life is suffering can one be determined to try to understand and to analyze the causes of suffering. After that one may eliminate these causes through effective methods. As a consequence one may stay away from affliction and even from the reincarnation. These are the four truths: suffering, its cause, its extinction, and the path.
This term generally indicates any behavior of beings that may bring about a subsequent effect. Such behavior is subdivided into three kinds: corporal, verbal, and mental. The subdivision corresponds with the behaviors of the body, of speech, and of thought. They can all produce results: good, bad, or something in between. Therefore, concerning their value, one can distinguish wholesome action, evil action, and also those which cannot bring about the wholesome or the unwholesome. In the idea of the reincarnation in Buddhism, behavior in a previous life determines the form of existence in a later world. Because of this, no matter whether one has deliverance as one’s goal or not, in order to obtain a result hoped, it is extremely important to control one’s three actions: corporal, verbal, and mental.
The term is a translation of the Sanskrit word pratītyasamutpāda. Yuan (缘) means conditions; qi (起) means origination. That is to say, all things, phenomena, and social activities arise out of the combinations of causes and conditions. They exist in the continuous relationship between causes and conditions. Thus all things originate, change, and demise depending upon certain conditions. Dependent origination is the fountainhead of Buddhist thought and forms the common theoretical basis for all Buddhist schools and sects. Buddhism uses this concept to explain everything in the universe, the constant changes of social and spiritual phenomena, and the internal laws of origination, change, and demise.
This concept refers to appropriate skilful means or methods. “Expediency” is often used together with “ingenuity” (kauśalya). It refers to the Buddha’s or to a bodhisattva’s preaching adapting to the circumstances, in order to convert beings. He used adroit words and terms and narrative techniques, so as to allow listeners of different backgrounds all understand and comprehend it and grasp the implied abstruse meaning. The concept of “expediency” is a key to the Great Vehicle (Mahayana) sect of Buddhism. It emphasizes that all verbal expressions, including the Buddha’s teaching, depend on the concept of the term and appearance. They cannot obtain the highest level. In a certain sense they are all expedient means, like a finger pointing at the moon. That is why they should not be literally interpreted. One should not cling to them.
All beings ceaselessly move in the alternation of birth and death, like the turning of a wheel. The notion of the “turning of the wheel,” i.e., reincarnation, assumes that the soul does not follow the ruin and disappearance of the body. That is why it can ceaselessly return and be received in a new body in the alternation of life and death. In India before the birth of Buddhism, reincarnation was already a popular concept. Because in the reincarnation an individual must passively undergo the results of the actions of previous lives, the process is generally considered to be painful. The fundamental rationale of Buddhist thought is to understand the process of life, of going and returning in this cycle, an endless, continuous array of cause and effect. It furthermore emphasizes that by eliminating causes one can reach the goal of eliminating results and finally stop the “reincarnation,” thus being liberated from this suffering.
This notion means that there is no really existing self. Buddhism holds that a so-called subject in the reincarnation does not exist at all. That is why it is called “egolessness.” This idea was originally directed against the thinking of the then-popular Brahmanism. This religion assumes that in the unpredictable and complex subjective experience there is a permanent and unchanging self. Whereas Buddhism holds that the so-called “I” is just an aggregate of many psychological and physical phenomena. The idea was later extended to areas beyond the subject in life, that is, people and other existence are all egoless. Namely nothing has an enduring and constant core essence or a real self.
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