...Paramita

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
-Siddharta Gautama Buddha

What does "perfection" mean? To most of us, myself included, the idea of perfection connotes something that just can not get better. It is the ultimate. After perfection, there is nothing. To most of us, there is one state of perfection, one ultimate. We generally like to call this "God," and generally believe it is a state which we are incapable of achieving. So, when I stumbled across a book in the library today called "The Six Perfections" by Dale S. Wright, I found myself wondering, "six?" and feeling a bit skeptical and very intrigued. I've only read the introduction of the book so far, but it was enough for me to discover something very interesting. The six perfections, or paramitas, as they are called in Sanskrit, do not describe perfection in the sense of "the end of the road" or "that one ultimate thing that is better than anything else." Rather, they are simply qualities or characteristics which enlightened beings strive to live for every day. Basically, perfection, rather than being the end of the road, is in fact the road itself. Perfection, according to Buddhists, encompasses the characteristics of giving, moral behavior, tolerance/patience, vigor, meditation, and wisdom. We could not hope to become enlightened beings if we do not build our path upon these principles. Of course, says Wright, most of us English speakers think perfection is something that can't get any better and that it is completely out of our reach. We were taught to understand the function of the word as this. In the Buddhist framework of reality, however, this concept of perfection is very, very flawed and very, very harmful.

Now hold on a minute, my brain shouted upon first reading this philosophy. What then, is "enlightenment?" Isn't enlightenment equal to our understanding of perfection? Isn't enlightenment that end state Buddhists hope to reach in order to achieve knowledge of and compassion for all things? Isn't that the one state which can not get any better? Isn't an "enlightened being" perfect? This just doesn't make any sense.

Here's where it can get tricky. An enlightened being is indeed perfect, but at the same time, the enlightened being understands that perfection can always be better and is always evolving. This seems paradoxical to my English brain. If we think, however, of the notion of impermanence-that nothing is forever, "this too shall pass," then it starts to make a little more sense. If the rule is true that there is no such thing as permanent, if everything changes, then perfection can not possibly be outside of this rule. It gets really tricky if we think in terms of inter-connectivity and dependence: that in order for perfection to be an exception to impermanence, it would have to be entirely contained within itself, independent. We would not be able to affect or achieve it in any way and vice versa. Not so far off, many of us might say. The only thing that could achieve it is the omnipotent being known by most of us as "God." But then, God does affect us, whether we agree with the concept of God or not. And, alternately, we affect God (i.e. in the Bible, the reason Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden, the reason God flooded the earth, the reason Jesus came from the heavens). Basically, it seems to me that no matter how you look at it, things change, and everything depends on and is connected to everything else. People don't practice Christianity the same way they practiced it in ancient times, and the state of enlightenment is not the same as it was when Gautama Buddha achieved it. But this does not mean perfection does not exist in these things anymore. It simply means the idea of perfection changed, evolved with the times, adapted to the circumstances of the universe. According to Buddhist thought, enlightenment, perfection, is the understanding of impermanence and is the ability to expand one's mind to include such inevitable change without sacrificing practice of the six characteristics. Enlightenment and perfection, therefore, can be the end of nothing. It can not be and at the same time it is the ultimate existence, ever changing and ever expanding.

And therefore, I shall strive to find paramita in every breath I take.