Experience of Prajna | There Is No Suffering

A bodhisattva who “courses in the deep prajnaparamita” has attained perfection and liberation, has crossed the ocean of suffering to the other shore. Is there deep prajna and shallow prajna? Why should wisdom have different levels? We can explain it in two ways. On the level of experience, there is a difference in the wisdom attained by an ordinary person, a bodhisattva at the first bhumi, and a bodhisattva beyond the eighth bhumi.

To refine our understanding, Buddhism regards consciousness as consisting of eight levels, or functions. The first five derive from our sense faculties of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The sixth is our ordinary discriminative and cognitive mind; it is the coarsest level of consciousness because it arises from the interaction of external sense data with our internal sense faculties. The seventh consciousness is the deeply rooted and ever-present clinging to an idea of self. It is so subtle and so imbedded that, without our being aware, it operates and filters all of our experiences. This seventh consciouseness also links our sense experiences to our repository of past actions—the eighth consciousness ( alaya vijnana). All actions we have ever performed through body, speech, and thought leave imprints in the depth of our being. The eighth consciousness stores all of this energy of past actions, and conditions our present and future, keeping us bound to samsara, the cycle of existence.

At the first bhumi, a bodhisattva has transformed the sixth consciousness into the ‘wisdom of non-arising’—where afflictions no longer manifest outwardly, or arise. The cultivation of a bodhisattva at and above the eighth bhumi completely dissolves all grasping to self, the seventh consciousness, leaving only residues of the subtlest karmic propensities that obscure complete enlightenment. At the tenth bhumi, a bodhisattva is at the threshold of buddhahood. This is the meaning of ‘deep.’ It is the level of deep prajnaparamita through which Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva courses.

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