Wisdom: The Fourth Parami

This essay is the fourth in a series on The Ten Paramis, taken from a talk given by Carol Russell on February 3, 2026


We’re offering a series of talks on the ten paramis, the ten perfections, positive aspects of our character that support our individual practice and our living in the world. We’ve been inviting you to take one each week and apply it in your life, practice it in your life, maybe be challenged, maybe be transformed by it. 

So far we’ve covered dana, generosity, sila, ethical living, and nekkhamma, renunciation.

If you recall from the intro to this series, we talked about two wings of the paramis: these ten qualities are rooted in both compassion and liberation, compassion and care for the world, and liberation from the greed, aversion, and ignorance of the unawakened mind.

Tonight, I’m talking about the fourth parami – wisdom, pañña in Pali, prajña in Sanskrit. Some teachers like to translate pañña as insight, which helps to broaden the meaning for me. 

One way to think of this unfolding of the ten perfections is that, in the first three paramis, we’ve laid a foundation with opening our hearts with generosity, awakened skill for living in a way that doesn’t cause harm, and we’ve developed our capacity to let go in a wholesome way. Now, wisdom will be our guide in developing all of the paramis.


Wisdom is a big topic in Buddhism. Buddhism is sometimes called a wisdom tradition or the path of wisdom. Wisdom has a superstar status in Buddhism. 

How to talk about the lofty subject of wisdom? Wisdom shows up uncountable times in the Pali Canon. It often comes up as references to being a wise person. I find it interesting to reflect on the difference between wisdom and being a wise person.

Commonly, wisdom in our culture is seen as more than simple knowledge. Knowledge is important. We might think of knowledge as one ingredient in a recipe that also includes experience and understanding such that we are able to make good and beneficial decisions. Wisdom is the practical application of all we have learned and experienced about well-being, ethical living, and the long-term consequences of our actions. We can be wise about many things in life.

In the Buddhist teachings, wisdom is more than the combination of knowledge, experience, and understanding. Wisdom brings insight into what is going on. Wisdom supports our liberation and teaches us how to engage in the world with compassion.

We can gain wisdom in many aspects of the path. There’s certainly wisdom from study. For instance is there wisdom that comes from reflecting or talking to others about our ideas and experiences? There’s wisdom that come from our practice. Is there wisdom that comes from being settled, from touching into calmness? Does that shift what we consider important?

Gil Fronsdal describes wisdom or insight as something with immediacy; it is accessed right now. ‘We can carry around a lot of knowledge, but insight is something you’re actively doing now. You’re seeing in a deep, clear, penetrating way…It’s not applying some understanding on a situation, but rather the situation reveals what’s there and the truth that’s there.’ 

Another translation of pañña is discernment, which also has this immediacy to it, the moment-to-to moment discernment of what is wholesome and healthy and what is not. Life unfolds and we see clearly what is going on and what is skillful. 

We can see how essential mindfulness practice is to the development of this kind of wisdom, this kind of immediate discernment. Wisdom and mindfulness are linked.  Mindfulness helps us see clearly and wisdom helps us differentiate.

As Gil Fronsdal says: ‘One of the things we see clearly … is to see in much more minute details the choices we have, the choices we’re making. If you don’t see the choices you make, then you don’t have a choice. Then you’re kind of like on automatic pilot or other forces are taking over. But if you can actually slow down enough and be mindful enough to see how your mind is choosing different options as you go forward, then if you see it, then maybe you have greater capacity to choose something different, to be wiser about it.’ 

We had a taste of that slowing down, seeing clearly, and discerning choice in the meditation tonight. Taking the time to see what is going on with the anchor, the breath, and in the mind, pausing there and then making a deliberate choice. It is very powerful mind training.

And we can slow down in that way with mind-states, moods, thought patterns. We can see clearly what’s there and make a wise choice.

We can have wisdom about all kinds of things in life, but wisdom as a perfection, as a parami, is a quality that it is necessary to cultivate for our dharma practice.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, a Mahayana teacher, has a lovely and powerful analogy: ‘If delusion is walking around in a darkened room, wisdom is turning on the light. People and things, and the room itself, are all the same, but now we can see them clearly. On a deeper level, [wisdom] prajna shows us the impermanent and interdependent nature of things…’

I find this analogy of the light coming on in a dark room very helpful. Wisdom dispels ignorance. Over time in practice, what seems solid and reliable and certainly ‘me’ and ‘mine’ is seen through and with this insight we begin to lessen our grasping and clinging.  This is liberating the heart/mind. Last week, Brenda spoke in depth about letting go of clinging as a way to free ourselves from suffering. These teachings demonstrate that the most painful part of being a human is not about what we have, it’s about how we hold it, whether it’s our ideas and views, our possessions, our plans, our sense of who we are, our health and even our very life. 

This is the liberating possibility of insight. Now we turn to compassion. 

The Buddha said: 

A wise person of great wisdom does not intend harm to self or to others.
A wise person of great wisdom intends benefit for self, for others, and for the whole world.
In this way one is a wise person of great wisdom.

To be a wise person is to be considerate of oneself, others, and the whole world. We may have had an assumption about wisdom being a quality of the mind, but now we see it becomes a heart quality. To be a wise person is relational. Deep practice, as Gil Fronsdal says, isn’t limited to our own liberation. Deep practice turns us inside out. The focus becomes: how do I care for myself, others, and the world?

We often talk here about how to compassionately engage with the world. Buddhism has a long history of this, beginning with the Buddha himself – this weaving together of contemplation and action. 

How might wisdom serve us in this regard? To me it seems utterly essential to be guided by wisdom in my actions. For instance: How should I view others with whom I disagree? How can I know when to engage and when to step back?

As Sebene Selassie wrote recently: 
‘I trust in the paradox that we belong to everyone and everything despite the confusion and division, while including the harm and cruelty. It is extremely challenging to hold the truth of our belonging to all of this right now, to take a stand rather than a side, to dissolve the delusion of separation while holding firm to our values of caring for the most vulnerable. To not other anyone or anything while blocking violence and oppression means living inside the paradox that we are not separate and we are not the same.’

Do you hear the compassionate wisdom in this? We can act from our understanding of our shared humanity. We can be kind. And at the same time, we can stand in our commitment to reduce harm, to block violence and oppression. To take a stand rather than a side.

There’s no formula for when and how to engage. Our mindfulness practice trains us to be nimble and responsive in life. Sometimes I move forward, sometimes I stay back. On a recent retreat, the teacher, Catherine McGee, addressed this with a powerful metaphor of a fire. Imagine you have sticks that you can add to a fire. There are times when I will be called to build the fire up, to burn, to contribute – I can add my stick, my effort and participation - to what is needed. 

There will be times when I am called to cool the fire. The Buddha often used this simile of cooling the fire of passion. I can place my stick outside the fire, allow the fire to settle. 

There will be times when I am called to simply hold the fire – be present – neither building up nor cooling the fire. 

All of this is guided by our inner wisdom. This allows us to have the discernment and clarity to act with freedom of choice and compassion. 

When I say it like this, it sounds so clear, doesn’t it? Just develop wisdom and I’ll know what to do. No problem. In my experience, there can be doubt and confusion. And that’s the thing about wisdom, with our efforts, whether in our quietude or our engagement, we slow down, we gain experience - this worked and that didn’t - and that informs our wisdom. As a wise person says: Trust your experience and keep refining your view.

Wisdom gives us a sensitivity to care, to well-being, to goodness. As we open our hearts to care for ourselves and others, wisdom supports generosity, dana, what Mark talked about in the first talk. The actions of care, generosity and the sensitivity we develop, this deepens our practice of ethical conduct, sila, as Kenn shared in the second talk. We’re more sensitive to what might cause harm to others, to our relationships, and we’re sensitive to the joy of not causing harm, of being generous. 

As we see how our actions may be causing distress in ourselves, in others, we might ask the question hidden in the Four Noble Truths: why be stressed? Can I not go along with the energy inside that is causing stress? (I know - many of us have some very convincing arguments in favor of stress.) As our practice deepens, as the sense of care strengthens, we may realize, there is something better than stress, something onward leading. And so, we practice letting go, renunciation, nekkhamma, the third parami that Brenda talked about last week. Not as a deprivation, but as a way of deepening our unshakable sense of well-being.

Wisdom. Liberation and compassion. To be a wise person.
What a gift to the world this is!

May we each be on the way to becoming a wise person with great wisdom for the benefit of all beings.