Making the Dharma your own
The Dharma cannot transform our lives until we’ve made it our own. We have to breath life into the teachings, bring them alive with our own breath. This is the art of living a dharma life.
Traditionally this process is talked about as the 3 wisdoms, wisdom through hearing, wisdom through reflecting and wisdom through meditating. I was on a retreat with Vajradevi over New Year and she was telling us how one of her teachers, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, described the three levels of wisdom as ‘borrowed wisdom’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘insight’.
I love these translations so I’m using them here to unpack my own thoughts on the 3 wisdoms.
Borrowed Wisdom
You borrow this wisdom from someone else. Perhaps you read a book, I’m reading James Low’s ‘Mirror of Clear Meaning’ at the moment. A certain passage grabs your attention, maybe you note it down, it resonates. Or you’re on retreat and someone’s explaining the ‘ten fetters’, you make a note of them. Or now reading this newsletter, you think ‘that’s good, borrowed wisdom, intelligence, insight’, you copy and paste them into your digital notebook.
Now you ‘have’ this wisdom, but it’s not yet yours, you’ve borrowed it from someone or somewhere else.
Intelligence
We’ve borrowed the Dharma, now we have to make it our own. Make it real.
This is our very own process of translation. The Dharma has been translated for thousands of years. From from Indian culture to Chinese, to Tibetan, each time taking on a different form and expression.The essential Dharma teachings merge with the new culture and create something unique.
It’s the same on an individual level. I have to translate the dharma into me, into Vajradarshini, that merging is going to take a unique form and expression. The same for you, you have to translate the dharma into you.
How do we do this? By bringing ourselves into a dynamic relationship with the teaching. We relate it to our everyday lives, we figure out how to put it into practice in relation to our work, our kids, our relationships. The nitty gritty of life.
We make connections between the Dharma and other things that are meaningful to us, art, poetry, films, the plants we are nurturing in our garden.
We learn to inhabit the Dharma. It ceases to be a place we’ve read about, or seen on the map, and becomes the place where we live.
“You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.”
Insight
Finally insight happens, or it doesn’t! There’s a shift in our being whereby everything changes, that shift is subtle and monumental. Subtle, because life goes on pretty much the same as it ever did. Monumental because the ‘struggle’ we so often experience is over.
Insight cannot be manufactured, it’s out of our hands, it’s like a happy accident. All we can do is to make ourselves more accident prone! That’s the work of the previous stage, learning to inhabit the Dharma, set up home there. I say work, sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s play. This is where the Dharma Bundle comes in.
Thinking about these three levels of wisdom gave me a new angle on what the Dharma Bundle is all about. It’s about making the Dharma our own, making it real and relevant.
A ‘bundle’ of dharma resources, thoughtfully made and beautifully packaged.
