Concentration and wisdom

• Object-ascertaining mental factors of aspiration, belief, mindfulness, concentration/stabilization and wisdom
• Review of aspiration, belief (appreciation) and mindfulness
• Intention moves the mind to an object, mindfulness holds the object of meditation without getting distracted, belief sees what is valuable in the object and cherishes it
• Discussion on stabilization (concentration), stays on mentally imputed object single-pointedly for a long time, classification
• Discussion on wisdom, analysis of the object, classification—(conventional existence, emptiness), (inborn, hearing, contemplating, meditating)

Mind and mental factors 06: Mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom (download)

We started out with a meditation looking at our aspirations that we had today, examining what kind of aspirations popped into our mind, and then also looking more expansively at what our general aspirations in life were, what we valued, what we held as desirable. What things did you learn from doing that kind of meditation? What things came up for you?

Hello? What happened? I mean, you don’t want to talk? Was it too personal? Were you falling asleep? Was it boring? What happened? You can say what you think? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): It’s very interesting how in meditation where you start off checking what are your intentions and what are your aspirations, how very quickly you lose that and transform it into an internal civil war or an internal final judgment—maybe not final, but judgment. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Well, what we’re doing is just trying to observe, not to judge. It’s very difficult just to observe, huh? But the judgment kind of jumped in there very quickly. I think it’s helpful to remember that observing and judging are very different mental factors, aren’t they? Just because one is there doesn’t mean the other has to be. What else did you find out? Did that happen to anybody else, that they started getting into judgment? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It’s interesting, isn’t it, the habits our mind gets into of judging everything we think? We need to push the pause button on that one—or the off button. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: So, at the beginning you had the intention to watch the breath, but somehow that lapsed in the middle.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Yes. Did you notice when the intention came that shifted your mind to something else? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: You could find it sometimes, like when the mind exited left. 

Audience: When a stray thought that came that caught my attention, I found myself lost in it. It was at a moment of recognition when I found myself not being on the intended object, the breath, that I could see the intention in the sense of the breath. But it was a lot more subtle when the thought would come, and then the intention, that was the harder one to see.

VTC: Yes. So, the intention to return to the breath was clear. But the intention to leave the breath… [laughter] There’s another mental factor called introspective alertness. And it’s the one that pops up and checks up to see what’s going on in my mind at the time: “Am I on the breath? Am I on something else?” And that’s the one we need to develop. Also, it’s important to see when there’s an intention to shift. So, our introspective alertness, that mental factor, is a little bit undeveloped. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: That often happens in our meditation. Sometimes when it’s not a negative thought, we actually get a nice thought, like you said, to do something spiritual for your father’s illness. So, we get that virtuous thought. But then we also get distracted by that one, too, don’t we? And it leads to one thing after another, and many, many things.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Yes. Our good intentions are hard. And you can see also how you have the extra added mental factors of frustration and anger, and that influenced your intentions so no longer was it a positive one to help somebody. That intention was replaced by, “Let’s get this guy out of here,” or whatever you wanted to do. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It’s very helpful. The reason I was asking you these questions is just to get you to observe what’s going on in your mind. But really try when you’re doing it not to judge yourself. It’s very, very important. And when judgment comes in, then just notice, “I’m judging myself.” Look at this mental factor of self-judgment.

And look at the ramifications, where the mental factor of self-judgment leads me. It leads me to laziness, because laziness is discouragement. It leads me to cynicism. It leads me to all sorts of other mental factors. And so here you begin to see the domino effect in the mind. But just recognize that there are some mental factors of self-judgment, but this one, it’s only here in my mind because the cause for it existed. If I change the cause, if I change my intention, if I shift to something else, this isn’t going to be here. In other words, self-judgment is not one of the five omnipresent mental factors that always has to be there. And let’s remind ourselves of that.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It’s associating with self-judgment. Like it’s just some other voice that’s this cartoon shark that’s going yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. That can be very helpful. I think it’s really helpful in some ways to depersonalize some of these mental factors. Because especially what’s happening with self-judgment is we’re personalizing every mental factor. We’re making this as my mental, my thought, my this, you know? And so just remember, it’s just that mental factor arising in the mind. That’s all. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Intention doesn’t have to be some big, drawn-out, huge process that we take after ten minutes of meditation—the blah, blah, blah, blah. But that’s the whole thing. When we just watch with the breathing meditation, there’s this very quick intention to move my leg. And often I don’t even notice the intention to move my leg. I just notice my leg’s moving. But where did the thought come from to move it? Where did that intention come from? Those are much shorter intentions, and there’s no big, huge, enormous thought process preceding them.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Exactly. Exactly. It’s there every single moment of consciousness. And it’s just helping you to get to an object. But it doesn’t have to be any big thing. 

Last week somebody asked, “Do intention and aspiration always go together?” And I thought about it this week, and I don’t think so. Because we have these very small kinds of intentions. It’s going every single moment of our mind. We don’t have aspiration every single moment of our mind. Aspiration is much more, and we can see that by the definition here, because aspiration has focused on an intended object and takes a strong interest in it.

So, for aspiration to arise, there has to be more extended attention on an object and really discriminating its desirable qualities and thereby generating a strong interest in it. And that’s the aspiration. So, I think aspiration develops after much more contemplation. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: I think it’s expired. Yes, I think it’s a different word.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: I don’t know the Western languages.  But that’s one reason why I asked the question. Really, what do we aspire for or to in our life? And then all of a sudden—whoa. Well, let’s look big here. Yes.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Well, remember I was saying that there are different texts and some say aspiration is only in regards to virtuous objects. But then there are other texts that say aspiration could be for a negative object also. In which case it would closely be linked with attachment, I think. Yes. When there’s a lot of attachment, there’s a lot of aspiration for chocolate and all this other stuff. 

That’s why I was asking, “Well, let’s check up what we aspire for—just today what we aspire for. And then in our whole life in a big way what do we aspire for?” And then we generated the aspiration for enlightenment. 

Review

I wanted to just finish the review that we were in the middle of. Because we got last week as far as aspiration. And then the second of the object ascertaining mental factors was belief. 

This is a distinct mental factor that stabilizes the apprehension of a previously ascertained object and cherishes it so that it can’t be distracted by something else.

Again, this is one that’s a previously ascertained object, something that we’ve been thinking about. And we think about it in such a way that we really see what is valuable in it and cherish it. For example, yesterday some people came, and we were doing the refuge. If you think about the qualities of the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, then you have a much stronger appreciation or belief in them. I said this was the mental factor of belief, didn’t I? If we think about the qualities of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, we have a stronger belief in it, and then our refuge increases. That’s one of the reasons why when you’re doing the refuge visualization, you think about the qualities of Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and then you generate this mental factor. 

Or, similarly, when you’re doing purification, let’s say with Vajrasattva or with the 35 Buddhas, if you spend some time thinking about karma and you develop conviction in karma and how karma works—how causes create effects, how what we experience derives from our previous actions—if we spend some time thinking about that in our meditation, then we also develop belief or appreciation of karma and its effects. That also enhances our meditation. And it helps make our purification stronger. Our aspiration to purify, our intention to purify, gets much stronger when we have that kind of belief in the functioning of cause and effect. What I’m trying to get you to see is how these mental factors work in the Dharma practices that you’re doing. 

Just to review, the third object ascertaining mental factor is mindfulness, or it’s sometimes translated as memory. It’s really important to remember that the way mindfulness is often used in Buddhism in America does not follow at least the strict definition in this particular text. Because often when we talk in a general way, saying things like, “Be mindful of what you’re thinking; be mindful of what you’re doing,” we’re meaning to just be aware of what you’re doing. 

If you want to look at mental factors, that one of just being aware of what we’re doing is the one I mentioned before: introspective alertness. Introspective alertness is one that’s like a little spy, and it pops up and is just aware of “What am I doing? What’s going on in me?”

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It does, but attention is an omnipresent one. And this one of introspective alertness isn’t always there. Introspective alertness notices what’s going on in our mind. We often use the term mindfulness when we mean introspective alertness.

Mindfulness, in terms of ethics, is mindful of our precepts. If we’ve taken lay precepts, if we have the guidelines for refuge, if we have bodhisattva precepts or tantric precepts, then mindfulness is aware of what our precepts are. Then this other one, introspective alertness, is going to check up on whether we’re abiding by the precepts or whether we’re breaking them. And if we’re going off track, then this other mental factor of conscientiousness is going to bring us back. 

We’ll discuss conscientiousness later. It’s one of the eleven virtuous ones. It’s one that cherishes what is positive. 

In terms of meditation, then mindfulness is what holds the object of meditation. When we start our meditation it’s really important to generate strong mindfulness or memory of the object. Mindfulness has to do with a familiar object, and its subjective feature is that it doesn’t forget that object. And it functions to prevent the mind from getting distracted to something else. 

We’re saying how at the beginning of the meditation there’s a strong intention to stay on the breath. Then you also need to generate strong mindfulness on the breath to be able to keep that intention there. And then you have the introspective alertness that pops up from time to time to see if you’re on the breath or off the breath. If you’re off, then you reinvigorate the intention and go back.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, he said it could be also sense consciousness. He said the other four could also be sense consciousness. All of these object-ascertaining minds can come with nonconceptual minds, too. It’s probably good to investigate in our own mind to see how they would appear. What would they look like if they were in a nonconceptual mind? 

The mental factor of stabilization

I think that’s enough just to review memory. The next one is stabilization. The Tibetan term is ting nge dzin, and the Sanskrit term is samadhi. You hear this term samadhi a lot. The term samadhi is used in different ways. One way is as this mental factor of stabilization or concentration. I’ll get into that a little bit, the different ways that word is used. 

Stabilization or samadhi is a distinct mental factor that is capable of dwelling one-pointedly, bearing the same aspect for a sustained duration of time, upon a single referent.

What that means is that it’s on a single referent, it’s on one object, and it has the capability to stay on that object for a sustained period of time in a one-pointed way. That means it does that without being distracted by dullness—by the mind getting heavy—or by excitement and the mind scattering to something else. It can abide single-pointedly on the object of concentration. It functions as the basis to develop intelligence or wisdom—vipassana, special insight. 

Remember, the three higher trainings are woven into this all. We always have ethics, concentration, and wisdom. The concentration in the three higher trainings is also samadhi. It’s that same term, samadhi. And there it’s regarded as something that develops better because you keep ethical conduct, and something that acts as a good basis for developing wisdom, the third of the three higher trainings. Because if we can concentrate then it’s easier to meditate, so our meditation is effective. 

It’s like if you hold a camera. If you’re able to hold the camera still, whatever you take a picture of will be much clearer. If your camera isn’t still, you might get something—you might even get a beautiful thing—but it’s not going to be clear.

Samatha versus Samadhi

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, samatha and samadhi are two different things.

Samatha is translated as calm abiding or the Tibetan is shinay. There are nine stages in the development of calm abiding or samatha. And in each of those stages you’re developing this mental factor of samadhi more and more. We have this mental factor of samadhi in us right now. It’s quite underdeveloped. As we do the meditation on calm abiding, we’re trying to strengthen it and develop it more and more.

It merely being this mental factor of samadhi isn’t sufficient to be that which is usually designated as samadhi. Because what we usually call samadhi is when somebody has calm abiding and the steps above the ninth stage of calm abiding. What we usually call samadhi is actually a special kind of this mental factor. In other words, it’s calm abiding—the full calm abiding. Even before we’ve attained full calm abiding, we still have this mental factor present. It’s just not in its developed state.    

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Yes. Right. And we’re going to use a lot of other mental factors to develop samatha also. Because we need mindfulness; we need introspective alertness. Even when we do this whole section on concentration in the lamrim, it talks about the five hindrances and the eight opponents.

The five hindrances you can look at, and most of them relate to disadvantageous mental factors that get in the way. And the eight opponents also relate to the mental factors. They are different mental factors to cultivate so we can develop our ability to concentrate. 

All these subjects interrelate. When you study lamrim and then when you study mental factors, you’re not studying two disparate objects. They overlap in a lot of ways. And what you’re beginning to do is look at the same material but from different viewpoints, which helps you to understand it in a more complete way. 

The samadhi that we’re trying to develop is a one-pointedness of mind with regard to an imputed object. In other words, the object is imagined. The observed object that you’re focusing on when you meditate to develop calm-abiding is an imagined one. That is, that it’s mentally imputed.

You might start out with a physical object, let’s say the breath. But eventually, when you get to the higher stages of calm-abiding, you’re going off to an imputed object and you get like a visual object at the tip of your nose. It’s an appearance to the mental consciousness. If you do this, like meditating on an image of the Buddha, or if you’re developing calm-abiding in relationship to tantra, then you might develop it in terms of visualizing yourself as one of the deities or in a certain part of the body. And so those are all imputed objects.

They’re appearing to the mental consciousness. So, even though this mental factor, samadhi, can come with a sense consciousness, when we’re using it in meditation, we’re using it with mental consciousness. This is actually quite important because there are some schools of meditation, usually non-Buddhist ones, that recommend concentrating like on a flower or on a candle and developing concentration like that. That’s using your sense consciousness. If you just stare at a candle or stare at a flower, that might help you to concentrate, but to actually develop calm-abiding and really develop this mental factor fully, you have to switch so that it’s a mentally imputed object: one that’s appearing to the mental consciousness. That samadhi isn’t something attained with the sense consciousness; it’s attained with the mental consciousness. That’s important to know for practice. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, it can be with all of them. The mental factor of samadhi can be with all of them. But when we’re developing the samadhi that we need in calm-abiding, that has to be with the mental consciousness. Because calm-abiding is attained in relationship to the mental consciousness and the mentally imputed object. We don’t get samatha by staring at a candle.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, it’s a state. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: You’re asking: in tantra we spend a lot of time visualizing deities and so on; is there a point where you give that up for another kind of object? 

Within a tantric sadhana—a sadhana is like the practice that you do—there are many types of meditation within that. For example, in the highest class tantra sadhanas, there’s a point where it’s called transforming death: transforming the intermediate state and rebirth into the three bodies of a buddha. At that point, you’re meditating on emptiness. You’re not focusing on a deity at that point. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: You can’t go beyond the object of emptiness, dear. What else do you want? [laughter] 

You might focus on different things. When you’re meditating on emptiness you’re focusing on the ultimate truth. There’s nothing more you can go to beyond that. As you get to know the tantric sadhanas, you’ll see that there are different types of meditation involved. Sometimes at the beginning, you’re meditating on refuge, trying to cultivate faith. Other times, you’re doing visualization. Other times, you’re doing like a non-conceptual meditation on emptiness.

There are different kinds of things going on. There’s a certain point in the tantric practice where you stop, and you try and develop calm abiding in the course of that. When you get to the completion stage practices then you’re working a lot with the winds and energies of the body. There are a whole lot of different meditations that come in tantra. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Let’s see—what else about samadhi? Samadhi or stabilization is always associated with calm abiding, whereas the next mental factor of wisdom or intelligence is associated with vipassana, or special insight. And what we want to do ultimately is these two things, which if it’s one it’s not the other. We want to be able to make these arise in the mind at the same time so that we have both stabilization and wisdom arising and we can focus on the ultimate truth of emptiness.

Classifications of stabilization

If you’re going to classify stabilization, there are different kinds. One kind is that associated with the desire realm. Remember the desire realm? When we talk about the six realms of beings, it’s the three lower realms, and the human beings and the demigods, and then certain kinds of gods that have the Beverly Hills, super-duper, sense-pleasure deluxe—that’s all considered desire realm. 

Then you have the form realm gods and the formless realm gods. In the description of the six realms of being, all those different kinds of gods are included in that one realm of god, when we’re talking about the six. But there’s one kind of samadhi that’s in the desire realm. And then because there are four types of form realm gods, there are four types of samadhi associated with each of those. And then with the formless realm, there are four types of samadhi associated with those, too. 

And then there’s a type of samadhi associated with super-mundane realization, when you’re out of cyclic existence. Should we say “beyond the mundane” instead or “transcendental?” How about that? 

Intention moves the mind to the object. And when a distraction comes, intention again moves the mind to the object. Mental engagement or attention helps the mind stay on the specific characteristic of the object. Mindfulness or memory—[the one we just covered]—enables the mind to hold the object.

It brings the mind on to the object so that it doesn’t forget it; it doesn’t get distracted. 

And stabilization is able to abide single-pointedly on the object.

You can see that all these mental factors are related, aren’t they? And you can see where many of them would arise in one consciousness at the same time. For example, let’s say you have calm abiding, so then you’re going to have intention and attention and memory and samadhi also. You’re going to have all of those present in the mind at the same time. There is some interrelationship here that can be good to understand. 

Another way of classifying stabilization is the stabilization that’s focused on relative truth. 

In other words, it’s the conventional functioning of phenomena. 

And the second classification is the stabilization of samadhi focused on the ultimate truth, emptiness. 

So that’s a bit about stabilization of samadhi. If you want to develop it, then the best thing to study is to go to the Lamrim, where we have the fifth far-reaching attitude of concentration or meditative stabilization. That gives the most detailed description of how to develop this mental factor of samadhi. In Gen Lamrimpa’s book it goes into this very well. And if you read Gen Lamrimpa’s book then you’ll see all these mental factors scattered around.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: We don’t have a real standard translation of terms. Because there’s another term called samten. That’s the fifth far-reaching attitude. That’s often translated as concentration. Sometimes it’s translated as meditative stabilization.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, that’s samadhi in the three there. So, there’s a lot of overlap in these. But they are different Tibetan terms. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: I don’t think so. They’re definitely related. But I don’t know if they’re synonyms. I wouldn’t think so. I could be wrong, but they definitely are related. Because again, each of these words can be used in different ways in different contexts. When we’re talking about stages of meditative concentration, samadhi means one thing. When we’re talking about the mind and mental factors, samadhi means a different thing. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Here, we’re working with different translations. The Tibetan term drenpa can be translated as mindfulness. It can also be translated as memory. But when we translate it as memory, it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as the English word memory does. Because the English word memory usually means something after the fact, looking back. Whereas here, we’re using memory to mean you’re right on the object, you’re remembering the object that’s right there in the present, in the sense that you’re not distracted to something else. 

In all these things, so much because we’re the first generation of American Buddhists, we can’t just rely on terms and associate our English meanings with them. And that’s why I’m trying to really explain all these mental factors, the meanings and the definitions. Because the English terms don’t always match. 

Audience: [Inaudible] 

VTC: No, you’re remembering the object. The intentions are there and the mindfulness is there at the same time. The mindfulness is focused on the object. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Yes, sherab is something that’s associated with vipassana. 

The meaning of Sherab

The fifth of the object-ascertaining mental factors in the Tibetan is sherab. And it’s alternatively translated as wisdom or as intelligence. Again, it has a meaning that’s halfway between the two. It’s not totally intelligence because we think of intelligence meaning IQ, and this doesn’t mean IQ. And it’s not completely wisdom because it also has some connotation of being intelligent mixed in with it.     

It’s a distinct mental factor which has the function of discriminating precisely with analysis the qualities, faults, or characteristics of an object held by memory.  

So, it’s held by mindfulness. You have an object and you’re mindful of that object, and this one of wisdom or intelligence is able to discriminate using analysis the qualities, the faults, the characteristics of whatever your mind is focused upon. In that way, this one of wisdom or intelligence functions to cut through indecision and doubt. 

Therefore, it maintains the root of all virtuous qualities in this and future lives.

This one is really important. Because without wisdom, without intelligence, we get everything all completely upside down and backwards. Doubt fluctuates between two points; when we have doubt, they say it’s like a two-pointed needle: you don’t get anywhere because your mind’s going back and forth and back and forth. Wisdom is what enables us to cut through the doubt. It’s able to discriminate very clearly, with correct ascertainment, the qualities or faults of something, and then it steers us in the right direction.

Wisdom is checking, “Is this thing this? Is it that? Does it exist this way? Does it exist that way? Is it beneficial? Is it harmful?” Wisdom works together with discrimination, but it’s quite a positive kind of functioning. We can apply our intelligence or our wisdom to virtuous and to nonvirtuous things. When we use our intelligence, let’s say, to build bigger and better atom bombs, when we use our intelligence to plan ways to harm people, when we use our intelligence to develop different abilities so that we can be more famous and well-known, then we’re abusing our intelligence. What we really want to do is develop intelligence or wisdom that’s going to be useful to us.

Classifications of wisdom/intelligence

We want to especially direct it towards first of all realizing emptiness, gaining an inferential and then a direct perception of emptiness. And we also want to use it to function on dependent arising and cause and effect. In that way there are two types of classification of wisdom or intelligence. One is the intelligence or wisdom that analyzes conventional existence. The other is the wisdom and intelligence that analyzes emptiness. To go back to the first one, when you’re analyzing conventional existence, this is what you’re doing. 

The one on relative existence, conventional existence, that’s all the lamrim meditations except the one on emptiness. And here especially, it’s like when you’re meditating on cause and effect, all the meditations on karma, when you’re meditating on dependent arising, when you’re just looking at the conventional nature of the path and how things function to develop your intelligence regarding them so that that enables you to develop positive aspirations to develop your mind. 

Then the second kind of intelligence is on emptiness. Here what we’re looking at is the mode of existence, how things exist, the way of existence. And we’re using that analytical wisdom to see if things inherently exist the way they appear to us or not. This kind of wisdom has an element of analysis to it. Now, analysis doesn’t mean what analysis means in college, where you sit there and scrunch your face up. That’s not what analysis means in Buddhism. It’s more the sense of investigation. But you’re being very clear and you’re analyzing the wisdom.

To generate this wisdom analyzing the ultimate, you have to first have the object of refutation appearing to your mind, the truly existent object appearing to your mind. And then you use your intelligence, your investigative ability, to investigate, “If such a thing existed, how would it exist? It has to be either one with its parts or separate from its parts. Is it either one of them?” And so in that way you analyze, you develop your wisdom, and that’s what the Vipassana meditation is like in the Tibetan tradition until you finally get to a point where you ascertain that there’s no such thing as inherent existence. And then you focus on that single-pointedly. 

When you’re developing this wisdom of the ultimate, first we want to try and develop an inferential understanding that can cognize emptiness. And again, this inferential understanding doesn’t have to be boring logic and dry facts and syllogism. It’s something that really gets to your mind and causes quite an impact. But still, there’s some veil of concept. You’re not seeing emptiness directly. There’s some concept of what emptiness is. So, that’s an inferential cognition of emptiness. And then by developing the wisdom more and more, it actually breaks through that concept until you get the direct perception of emptiness. That’s how we’re going to be developing it in there. 

There’s another way to classify wisdom or intelligence, and here it has three: One is a kind of intelligence developed through logical reasoning. A second is a kind of intelligence not developed through logical reasoning. And a third is neither, which is worldly intelligence. And that also includes intelligence of wrong views. Remember, intelligence has this discriminative ability when we misuse it. We can generate a kind of intelligence, but it’s completely inaccurate because it has wrong logic. That’s like when you go, “Da-da-da-da-da-da-da,” and you wind up with something that you know can’t possibly be right, but it seems logical. 

Then there’s another way to divide intelligence, and this one I find very fascinating. The first kind here is called inborn intelligence. This is what we’re born with. It’s the intelligence or wisdom that we’re born with, that’s a natural acuity of the mind, and we have it due to karma from previous lives. This is, for example, if we meditated on emptiness in a previous life, then we’re going to have more of an inborn wisdom concerning emptiness in this lifetime. If we contemplated engineering in a previous life, we’re going to have more intelligence regarding engineering in this life. We have a certain amount of inborn intelligence or wisdom, and it can be about many, many different kinds of things.

But that isn’t the only kind of intelligence or wisdom. There are three more, and the rest of the three are ones developed in this lifetime. Here, the second one is the intelligence developed from hearing. This is when you hear teachings. When you come here on Monday nights and you’re hearing teachings, a certain kind of intelligence, a certain kind of wisdom, is arising in your mind while you’re here listening to the teachings. That is, unless you’re thinking about something else. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Right. Exactly. [laughter] 

If you can keep your mind on what we’re talking about here, you’re generating that kind of intelligence during hearing. And with hearing, it could also include reading and studying, but somehow the intelligence arises from first getting the information into you. In the tradition, they really seem to emphasize hearing. I think that’s because the Buddhist teachings have always been passed down in an oral way. They didn’t write them down until several centuries after the Buddha. It’s always been an oral transmission. And I think that’s very important. Even now, in the Tibetan tradition, you get oral transmissions of somebody reading the text to you, so that you have a kind of blessing from it being passed down. So, this is the wisdom that arises while you’re listening to something. 

The third one is the wisdom arising when you contemplate it. This is when you go home and you start remembering what you listened to and you think about it. When you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, how does that mental factor work, and what is that really, and does this make sense, and do I have this one, and do I want it, and how am I going to develop it?” As you’re contemplating all these things, and as you’re looking at your own mind, then there’s a wisdom that arises through contemplation. This wisdom can also arise like when you’re discussing with other people. Sometimes you do a group kind of contemplation. And one of my teachers said we learn 25% from our teachers and 75% from discussing with other people and contemplating ourselves. So, that discussion is really important. We learn a lot from that.

Then the fourth kind of wisdom is the wisdom of meditation. And this is the one that is conjoined with calm abiding. So, this is real high-level here. It’s that wisdom that arises when you’re able, let’s say, to remain single-pointedly on emptiness or single-pointedly on bodhicitta. There’s a certain wisdom that arises. So, these latter three are wisdoms of hearing, contemplation, and meditation. And you hear these three a lot. You’re always hearing these things. And sometimes contemplation is translated as thinking or reflection. And then meditation is mentioned a lot in the teachings. These are all developed in this lifetime, and so they’re quite important. This comes through our effort in our own practice, coming to teachings, going home, thinking about them, putting them into practice. 

Also, we need to remember that worldly intelligence and Dharma intelligence are two completely different ballgames. Here, you can really see the difference because of the inborn intelligence, this first one. Some people can have fantastic inborn intelligence about worldly matters. They can have fifteen Ph.D.s. But you talk to them about Dharma, and they don’t get it. It’s like, in terms of Dharma wisdom, they have zero intelligence. They can’t get it. They aren’t interested. In a Buddhist way, we would say that person has lots of worldly intelligence but not much Dharma intelligence, not much real wisdom. Whereas you can have other people who maybe are completely illiterate and they don’t have much worldly intelligence, but they have a lot of great Dharma intelligence. They are very highly realized beings. Then you can get people who have both kinds of intelligence, which is really great, and people who have neither. And I volunteer for that one. [laughter]

So, that’s something about these five object-ascertaining mental factors. And one way of looking at them is that in and of themselves, they are indifferent in terms of being positive, negative, or neutral. But depending upon whether their mental factors arise at the same time as they do, they can be positive or negative. You can develop mindfulness and samadhi on black magic. I mean, that’s what Milarepa did, how he killed all those people. He had some kind of samadhi. But it was completely nonvirtuous. Because of the attendant mental factors then it made that samadhi, that mindfulness, negative. 

If you meditate, let’s say, on the figure of the Buddha or on bodhicitta or something like that, then those same mental factors, because they have other attendant mental factors which are positive, get colored positive. It’s the same thing with intelligence. Depending upon the other mental factors that arise at the same time as it, it can be either something constructive or something destructive. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: I get what you mean. But as you’re saying, if you have some level of wisdom, how can you not be wise enough to see that this thing is garbage? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: I think because sometimes the mind, because of karmic obscurations, can be very, very obscured and not really comprehend the objects very well. It uses a wrong kind of logic. So, we use incorrect logic and get to weird conclusions because the mind’s obscured. We’re still using some kind of the factor of intelligence, but it’s going totally haywire, like Robert McNamara’s. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It could be some of that, or it could be just wrong motivation coming in. So, you’re seeing something clearly, but because the mind has wrong motivation, it distorts the whole thing. For example, a scientist who is working on developing nuclear bombs: there’s a lot of wisdom and intelligence there, but if they’re not careful with their motivation, they create a lot of negative karma.

We’ll wait until next week to go on to the Eleven Virtuous Mental Factors.