Prajñā: Deciding Before Thinking

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When somebody tries to explain the teachings of the Buddha, usually we feel we want to be able to understand everything just from one explanation. But it's not possible, because what we're trying to describe can't be explained from one viewpoint. You need many viewpoints. This reminds me of my experiences climbing mountains when I was young. If you look at the mountain just from one viewpoint, you can't know anything about the mountain.

If you're walking up a mountain and you look up, you think, ‘Okay, I go up there, and after only a short distance I'll be on the top.’ Then you walk for 30 minutes and you look again: ‘Oh, there's a big valley here which I didn't see.’ Then you walk for another 30 minutes and you see: ‘Oh, the highest point is there, not there.’ And then you walk for another 30 minutes and it changes again. So that's something I learned in my days of mountaineering, a kind of lesson for me, for life: you can't understand something from one viewpoint.

Of course, everybody thinks they can understand from one viewpoint. And we want to understand from one viewpoint. But it's impossible, actually. The other thing I learned — so the first thing I learned was that in the mountains you stop and you look, and then you decide which is the best way to go. Then you have to stop and look again and change your mind, change your plan. Then you make another plan, and you do it, and you stop and you look, and it has changed, so you make another plan.

So it's like constantly revising, revising, revising. And I think life is like that. However, what we often want to do is to hold on to the first view. And then, when everything changes, we say, ‘Oh, something's wrong. It wasn't supposed to be like this.’ So we have a tendency, as human beings, to hold on to our viewpoint. But in the mountains you have to drop it. You have to let go of it, because it's an actual situation. But in understanding, especially understanding what life is about, it's sometimes difficult to let go of our viewpoint. And our viewpoint becomes fixed.

Then somebody else shares our viewpoint, and they fix it too. And then a few more people share and fix the same viewpoint. Then we call it a belief. Now, the second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, in the last verse of his famous work, the Mulamadhyamakakarika, which is about the Middle Way, says, ‘I praise the Buddha because out of his compassion he advised us to let go of all viewpoints.’ Well, that doesn't mean ‘I don't have a viewpoint, I have no opinion, I have nothing.’ Let go of them all.

It means: every moment, let go, because the next moment the mountain will look different. Let go again; the next moment the mountain will look different. Somebody who does this may appear to be quite strange, because it doesn't seem to be normal. Normally we're expected to have a viewpoint which we can argue about, even fight about, and defend against other viewpoints. So to be able to change our viewpoint at every moment sounds a little bit weak. However, in reality, it may not be weak.

The other thing I learned in the mountains was that the decision on which way to go has to be made by a kind of intuition. Several of you know that I've talked about this intuition before: prajñā. The Buddhist word is rather nice, because pra means before and jñā means thought or thinking. So pra-jñā: before thinking. So the teachings of the Buddha insist that there is something which is before thinking, which is very important. It's often translated as wisdom.

For me, wisdom suggests lots of knowledge, but the meaning of prajñā for me is not knowledge, but something that comes before thinking, and because it comes before thinking, we don't know what it is. Waiting for Robert to say something. Okay, later. So, in the mountains, this prajñā — mountaineers don't call it prajñā, but it's very important, because if you go this way, you may live. If you go that way, you may die. If you go this way, you may die. If you go this way, you may live.

And how do you decide? Look at the map, read a book? Who do you ask? ‘God, please help me’? There's nobody to ask in the high mountains which way to go. A couple of days ago I watched a video about a very famous mountaineer called Reinhold Messner, maybe the most famous mountaineer ever. He has the same birthday as me.

Participant: Yes.

Mike: He is.

Participant: Year? You?

Mike: The same year? Yeah, the same age: 76. The reason he's still alive is because he has excellent prajñā. But if you ask him what it is — ‘Why are you alive?’ — he says, ‘Luck.’ Well, what is luck? Sometimes luck seems to be something given to us, but it may be something that the Buddhist teachings call prajñā. So in the mountains we can use it. Maybe in life we can use it.

I mentioned this morning the fact that neuroscientists have discovered that it may be that we make decisions before we think clearly and logically about something, that the decision is made before that, and that the thinking is kind of creating a story or creating some kind of — what's the word —

Participant: Antonyms? Antonyms?

Mike: argument for our decision. Of course, nobody clearly knows, but the evidence is becoming bigger, because neuroscientists are really interested in the brain and human behaviour, and there are some excellent people out there. But they don't talk about what it is that we decide. How do we decide before we think? They look at the mechanical side, the physical side, which is very useful. But in the Buddhist teachings it's talked about as some kind of skill or ability called prajñā. And where does prajñā come from? According to Dogen, prajñā is developed by practising zazen and other activities that make us balanced.

If we practise zazen or practise balance and develop our prajñā, then we are making decisions before we think about them. Are those decisions right or wrong? There's no way to know. But according to Dogen's teachings, at that level, if we are balanced, then we have prajñā. If we have prajñā, then the decision we make is balanced. So the whole of his morality is based on that: not on abstract morality, not on thinking, not on saying something is good and we do it, something is bad and we don't do it, and so on. It sounds too easy.

How can we ignore the whole development of human ethics and morality? Well, we don't need to ignore it. We can still think about it, talk about it, write about it, discuss it, agree, disagree. But the fact may be different. Our actions, the morality of our actions, may not be related to our understanding of morality. Certainly there are some religious people who have taught a morality or a moral code, and then we find out that actually their actions are not so moral. This happens again and again. So in the teachings that come through Dogen, there are two things.

One is to let go of our viewpoints at every moment, and the second is that our decisions are made by prajñā, and prajñā can be developed or strengthened or even uncovered by practising balance or practising zazen. Now, I didn't know any of this before I met my teacher Nishijima, but in another way I realised I did know it. I had realised it in my mountaineering. I had realised the need to change viewpoint. I realised the need, the importance, of prajñā. I didn't know these words. I never thought about it.

But when I met Nishijima, what he said somehow matched something in me which I didn't know about. I knew about it in my experience, but I didn't know about it in my brain. So I was very fortunate to meet this man, who gave me words and theories to talk about something I knew already. I didn't go to Japan to look for Buddhism. I wasn't interested in Buddhism. I hadn't studied with other teachers. I hadn't done anything like that.

I was just looking for something to do at the weekend in a foreign country, and I met this little man, and what he said was like, ‘Oh, okay, wait a minute. Sitting on a cushion and crossing your legs? I'll try it.’ Something matched. So that's the way I came to the teachings. Other people appear to have different experiences. When they were young, they thought, ‘Oh, what's the world about?’ and then they read some books — ‘Oh, this sounds interesting’ — and then they want to pursue it more, and they look for where they can go to find out more, and so on.

So there are many ways to approach seeking the truth. My way is only one. For me it's a happy situation, because without having any intention to study Buddhism, I ended up doing it. If you have a strong intention to study Buddhism, that can also be a problem, because you want so much. If you read books and they talk about enlightenment and all that, you want to get it, and so many people come with that kind of feeling. But I was very lucky. I came with no feeling like that.

There's also a third kind of person who comes to the Buddhist teachings because they have experiences in their life which they have unconsciously valued. Then they meet a teacher, and what the teacher says matches something which they experienced in their life, which they didn't understand and didn't talk about before. So those are three ways. The first way, number one, is that you think about Buddhism, you read about it, you want to get something, you come in and study and look for a teacher. The second way is the way I came, from my physical experiences.

I had unconsciously worked out some values from my experiences, and then I met somebody who put into words something which I already valued; that's the second way. And the third way is a mixture of the two.

So there we are. To live a life based on prajñā takes a long time, because society doesn't teach us to value something which is beyond, before thinking. In fact, it tells us to do the opposite: think before you act. I don't know whether people say that in Czech.

Participant: Yeah.

Mike: When I was a child, I heard it again and again, especially if I did something stupid: ‘You have to think before you act, Michael.’ So it takes a long time to realise, ‘Huh, okay, I don't believe that, so I'm going to do it another way.’ But to do it another way takes some kind of confidence. It's a kind of trial. So to live a life which is a trial: ‘Okay, I'm going to live where all my decisions are not based on thinking.’ Of course, it's a dream. We can't do that. But to affirm that we can live in that way.

Of course we think; of course we need to think about our decisions, to give ourselves an explanation, a reason why we decided it, to tell other people, and to have some kind of confidence for ourselves. But to realise that we can decide without all that takes a long time, because it feels stupid. And because it feels stupid, my teacher took the name Stupid as his Buddhist name: Gudo, Gudo Nishijima. Gudo means stupid way.

Participant: Really?

Mike: Yes.

Participant: That's amazing.

Mike: But what he meant by stupid way was a way of prajñā, a life where we follow something before our thinking. And to do that, you need to build some kind of confidence, trial and error, if you want. Many people would find it too much. Sports people often develop it. In my case, I noticed it in mountaineering; it's what happens in the mountains. If you don't develop that way of being in the mountains, you may be dead very quickly. So I'd like to recommend this way of life to everybody: following prajñā. That's all I've got to say on it. So what do you think?

Ask me some questions, or tell me some things that you disagree with. Tell me your opinions. What do you think, what are your viewpoints?

Participant: Everyone has opinions.

Mike: Everyone?

Participant: Yeah.

Mike: Oh no.

Participant: There are so many opinions in the world now.

Štepán: I have one burning question in me. I'm not denying there is something important before the thoughts, because when we sit zazen, the thoughts come and go. They are just like... I don't know how to describe it, but there is something. At the same time, you know, when I come to my rational mind, there is a super famous book called Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Mike: Yes.

Štepán: And it speaks about, you know, two systems. One is rational, and the other one is this daily intuition, like we just go into the room and, ‘Oh, I like this guy. I don't like this one. This one is intimidating.’ But there is nothing super special about this second one.

Mike: No, it's not special.

Štepán: So it couldn't be this, or at least it couldn't entirely be this prajñā. We have this system before thinking, but everybody is just using it constantly. It's... I don't know. There are some examples in the book of amazing situations when someone is highly trained and it looks like a miracle. The book tries to explain it rationally. You can take it or leave it. It's like...

Mike: Yeah, that is a very good book. I don't like the title, because he says thinking fast or slow. So he can't leave thinking out; he has to put thinking in there. He could title it Thinking and Not Thinking, but nobody would.

Participant: Actually, he's calling it system one and system two.

Mike: System one and system two, yes. Okay, but system one we know all about. System two he just tries to describe, but actually system two is unknown. It's ineffable. How can we know about something which is before our thinking? Only through our experience.

Robert: System one, this prajñā-like one, is the one which...

Mike: System one is intuition, is it?

Robert: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: Okay.

Robert: I forgot what I wanted to say. We can't explain it. It's automatic. So it's just a good feeling. But regarding this mountaineering, I think you can develop some kind of mountaineering prajñā by hiking, by going to the mountains.

Mike: Yes, you can, yes.

Robert: But you can't cross domains. So if you just sit in the dojo for, I don't know, twenty years and then go to the mountains, you will not have this mountaineering prajñā. You will have the dojo prajñā.

Mike: Is this your conclusion? After long experiments and your own...

Robert: Many people are doing experiments, yes. It's also from my life, but of course I didn't do them. From my life, I see that you can't cross domains. You learn one domain: someone is playing the violin, he learns very well and he develops something which is just not rational thinking, maybe below it. But then the violinist can go and play tennis without this skill, because the skill only works with the violin.

Mike: Okay. Is this a theory that you're putting forward, or is it a proven fact?

Participant: There seems to be something transferable, even in this system. If someone has had some serious experience, like some crisis or, you know, mountaineering or a dangerous situation, and then some crisis comes, like here, they seem to react better. So even without the thinking there is something transferable, right?

Mike: The skill is not transferable. The skill of zazen is not transferable to playing the violin, or the skill of playing the violin can't be transferred to tennis. That's a physical skill, isn't it?

Robert: It's not just a physical skill, it's...

Mike: It's an activity.

Robert: It's the body-mind. It's not just the body. If you play tennis or if you play the violin, it's not just the body, it's the whole body-mind.

Mike: When we're playing, it's the whole body-mind, yes.

Participant: Because you should train it.

Robert: Yes. Regarding whether it's a proven fact, that is difficult. There are a lot of experiments which have been made. I didn't do them, I did read about them, and of course I experience my life and things in my life, and some of them make sense. But I can't say it's a proven fact. This is a very...

Mike: I don't really understand what it is that's not transferable. You seem to be saying there is something, and that something can't be transferred from violin to tennis. But that something doesn't exist. It's only my word. It's a concept which I have talked about to describe something that happens, an event that happens before thinking. It doesn't have an existence on its own. There's not something called prajñā — I've got it, you haven't got it, you have got it — and that something can be transferred or not transferred.

It's only what I'm talking about in words. By talking in words, I'm creating a non-existent thing. And of course that non-existent thing cannot be transferred anywhere, because it doesn't exist. But what the word prajñā points towards, which we can't understand with words because it's before our thinking, that's something we can develop. And when we develop it, it becomes part of our body-mind, if you like, whether we're eating, shitting, playing tennis or playing the violin.

So you're right, there's nothing that can be transferred. And the reason is that it's not something. And the area in which things don't exist is called emptiness. We take things out of emptiness and make objects of them and then discuss them, which is what I'm doing. So I'm misleading you. If you look at the Buddhist teachings, there are many words: samadhi, prajñā, satori. I only know the Japanese and a few Sanskrit ones, but there are hundreds more: paramita, on and on and on. None of these exist. They're not things. They're ways that we delude ourselves in order to understand.

Robert: They are a rough description, also a non-precise description, but they do exist. Some... not some.

Mike: Descriptions exist, yes.

Robert: Yes, but you describe something which is real. So...

Mike: Yes, but what is real is not the description.

Robert: You did some inference with the description, but you describe something which is real. And, okay.

Mike: Yes, at one level that's true. That's how we believe the world is.

Robert: Maybe what you mean is that even if there is...

Roman: Prajñā, which we cannot think about — you can learn about that. Prajñā, which is something we cannot describe, some kind of precondition, doesn't contradict that you can learn different things, cooking or mountaineering. So maybe here it doesn't contradict. There is the original state in which we cannot make decisions, but we just do something, and then we can use this for learning, maybe more effectively, because we are free from thinking. An example: when I was learning to ride a motorcycle, it was very difficult. But because of my experience with zazen... You know, it's a heavy motorbike, and I think I'm a thin, sensitive guy, and I was quite scared. And the instructor says, ‘Just ride the motorbike. We're going from Veleslavín to Dejvice.’ And my thinking was, ‘This is crazy. I cannot do this. We will get killed.’ But my prajñā said, ‘Don't think, just do it.’ Without that prajñā, I would still be without a driving licence. I would have run away. And I was riding this bike, and the thinking was, ‘This is crazy,’ but the prajñā part said, ‘Don't worry, just do it, just go.’ And then, with this attitude, you can slowly learn the skills. But without prajñā it's very difficult to learn anything, because you think, ‘No, this is impossible, this is too difficult.’ So I don't think it's contrary. What Robert says doesn't contradict what Mike says.

Mike: No, it doesn't contradict.

Roman: Yeah. So, of course, in the mountains you learn skills or habits, but the prajñā helps you to learn and to be flexible.

Robert: But are you saying that if you just sit zazen and just be in a room, and then you go to the mountains, you will have this mountaineering prajñā?

Mike: No. If you sit in zazen for a long time and you go to the mountains, you have to learn how to be in the mountains. But you can learn how to be in the mountains more easily, because it's easier just to do it. But you have to learn the skill.

Participant: Just a stupid question, but how do we differentiate it? What's the difference between prajñā and, you know, the basic urges? They are also... without the basic urges we have, like—

Roman: Urges? Urge, like some tendencies?

Mike: You mean like—

Roman: Oh, impulse.

Participant: ‘This looks nice, I want to eat it.’ ‘I hate him.’ You know, we have this.

Mike: Like, people call it intuition, but normally people say, you know, intuition. But it may be just a sudden feeling which you want to act on. Not that.

Participant: Yeah, because Buddha obviously didn't advise people, ‘If you see something you like, just take it.’

Mike: No. So it's different, isn't it?

Participant: It is, but... you know, it's karma.

Mike: Well, if you want to, you have to, as Dogen says, find out in your experience. You can't find out by asking me questions, or anybody questions. If you want to find out the difference between your urges and what I call prajñā, then you have to keep living and watching yourself and see where you come to. It's up to you. It's an experiential lesson. You can't learn about everything first and then live. You have to live, and then, after living, you start to think about the way you live, and then you look for reasons why you're like you are, why your life is like it is. And then you start to construct theory and teachings and opinions. But the experience itself must be the starting point for everything.

If we talk about things which we didn't experience, then we're just discussing at an intellectual level, which may be important, but it's very different. To discuss swimming with somebody who never swam but read a book about swimming: if you swam yourself, and the person who read the book about swimming says, ‘You put your arm in the water like this first,’ and you say, ‘No, no, no, it's not really like that.’ ‘Then you put your head to one side.’ ‘Well, you do, but it's not really like that,’ because you have the experience. So without experience it's better to keep quiet. But we can't.

We watch a programme on the television about Haiti, and then we tell people, ‘Oh, you know, in Haiti it's like this, and the president was murdered,’ and so on. We've never been there. We don't know anything other than pictures on a piece of glass and noises coming from behind it. But we believe that we know, because that's the way our society is constructed. So ‘we know’, in society's sense, means we have knowledge. But ‘we know’, in the sense of the Buddhist teachings, means to have real experience.

And you can find in the many Chinese koan stories, stories between a master and a student, or between two masters, where one says to the other, ‘You shouldn't say that, because you've never experienced it.’ And this is quite important. However, we live in a world where we talk about things we haven't experienced all the time. So as long as we notice that fact, we can shut up sometimes.

Boris: So, if I may make a joke: experience of prajñā should help us to manage our relationships. Maybe.

Mike: Yes.

Boris: But it's quite difficult, I think.

Mike: Life is quite difficult, and we all have our own characters. Our history is in our body, okay? We were children, we experienced different things. All that history is in our body now, and in our mind now. So all that history in our body and mind at the present pulls us away from making a balanced prajnic decision. So we end up with lots of problems, and those problems are our life itself. So we can't escape them.

Yeah, because we all have our history built into us, into the way we speak, the way we look, the way we are.

Boris: It's like mountaineering. You have experience of mountaineering, maybe ten years, twenty years, thirty years, and we all have experience with relationships. But maybe with mountaineering it gets easier after twenty years than with relationships. Most of the time it's maybe worse after twenty years than before. Okay. I don't have any answer, I don't have any explanation, but it's curious.

Mike: Well, it is,

Boris: It's not like a Reinhold Messner story.

Mike: It is actually, yeah. He had many failures, many, many problems in his life, climbing mountains. Many, many. Yes, he did: many failures, many people with him died, lots of things like that. So it's not different.

Boris: But he looks happy, fulfilled.

Mike: He looks fulfilled, yes.

Boris: On TV. Okay. Awesome. But I think...

Mike: There's one other thing — I'm going to mislead you again — which is helpful: affirming what we do. Often we worry about what we did: ‘Oh, shit, I shouldn't have done that.’ Well, what we do or what we did, as soon as we've done it, it's impossible to change it. We can't reverse cause and effect. But if we affirm what we do, it's very helpful.

Participant: What do you mean by affirm what we do?

Mike: ‘I did it. It's me. I did it. I take responsibility for it. I did it, and I hope, because I practise zazen, that there is some unknown intelligence in my decision, which I don't know about, but I believe. So that's fine. I did it.’ And that's very helpful. That kind of affirming we can develop by sitting, by practising balance; sitting is just one way. Because what happens to us in life isn't only the result of our own actions. It's the result of all the rest of the world and us.

It's a complicated interaction of many bodies. And we can't ever determine the exact cause-and-effect relationships that are going on. But we can affirm what we do. So: practise balance, live by prajñā, affirm our actions, keep changing our viewpoint. Four things. That's what I can recommend to you from my own experience. They're worth buying. I recommend them highly. I can give you all a reduction. I'm selling something.

Participant: I think you've already paid for this.

Mike: Pardon?

Participant: You already paid for this.

Mike: If you can't afford it, you can pay little by little.

Participant: I think it's a very good time to stop.

Mike: Time to stop, yes.