The Buddha's Encounter with Darkness: Aṅgulimāla...
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Sorely Needed in the West, Especially the USA...
The Buddha taught that to realize enlightenment, a person must develop two qualities: wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion are sometimes compared to two wings that work together to enable flying or two eyes that work together to see deeply. In the West, we're taught to think of "wisdom" as something that is primarily intellectual and "compassion" as something that is primarily emotional, and that these two things are separate and even incompatible. We're led to believe that fuzzy, sappy emotion gets in the way of clear, logical wisdom. But this is not the Buddhist understanding . The Sanskrit word usually translated as "wisdom" is prajna (in Pali, panna ), which can also be translated as "consciousness," "discernment," or "insight." Each of the many schools of Buddhism understands prajna somewhat differently, but generally, we can say that prajna is understanding or discernment of the Buddha's teachin...
