You guys missed it yesterday in the regular retreat, where I mention that a 100% practice is to have a good, kind, wise spiritual friend. But I think it was also mentioned a few days ago here (see 03.04.05.10.S, suitable conditions). OK, how much does Wisdom contribute to Equanimity? OK, 100% Equanimity has Wisdom in it!
Never underestimate Wisdom! It's got to be in everything, we just don't grow unless we've got some Wisdom. So we can't be equanimous unless we actually know the right way of thinking. When you think of Equanimity and Patience, it's nice to reflect on these two because often they look very similar. But Patience can be just sheer endurance, no Wisdom. Not thinking about anything smart at all, just enduring, enduring. And a person with Patience can look just like a person next to them who has Equanimity towards the situation because they understand the whole situation and they're just not going to react to it. This is where the difference between Equanimity and Patience can sometimes be seen, in the Wisdom factor. That's not to negate that with a good type of Patience, we'll want the Wisdom there. But it's clear that we can see people being patient just through sheer willpower and actually hating the whole situation. When a person has Equanimity towards a situation, they may be acting in the same way, but they're always going to have Wisdom as a base. They just simply understand what's going on. Also, when Wisdom disappears from Equanimity, it'll just slide into indifference, we just don't care. We may look exactly the same as the person with Equanimity, but we don't care, but those with Wisdom do care. They simply know they can't do much at that time.
When you think of the Ten Paramis, we actually have another Paramis reflection but we don't teach it in this retreat, it's in the 20 day retreat. But I'll briefly say it to you because you may want to experiment with it on your own. With the Ten Paramis, you take them in pairs and you try to more or less compare them. You look at them and see whether one fits in with the other, whether one contributes to the other, whether one needs the other even to exist, whether because of one the other automatically arises, whether they continually feed each other back and forth. You simply go through them as pairs, and spend as much time as you want just examining the Ten Paramis. There are 45 pairs in case you want to know exactly, so it will take more than one hour to do! But it's a very good exercise we teach in 20 day retreats and you may experiment with it in the future.
Now a sideline to that, I'll just mention that we talked about the Buddha vowing to become a Bodhisattva earlier. When the Buddha made the vow in front of the living Buddha of that time, the living Buddha went away and the Buddha was left alone. As the story goes, he then went to the woods and he was meditating, "Right! Now I'm a Bodhisattva, what do I have to do?" That's how they describe it in the commentaries. Basically he went into the woods and thought, "What am I supposed to do now?" He'd just passed up the chance to become fully enlightened and he'd taken the Bodhisattva vow. So supposedly as the commentaries explain it, he said, "Righty-o, right, I have to perfect the Ten Paramis. That's my job." A Buddha perfects all ten, other enlightened people get them high, but he has to perfect them.
So they say that for days, all he did was reflect on the Ten Paramis. He would reflect on them this way, he'd reflect on them that way, he would probably look at them in pairs and in triplets and all sorts of things, trying to figure out what he had to do as a job, and also trying to figure out, "How am I going to do it?" like we did with the Paramis reflection the other day. What is something in our life that we can do to make that Generosity increase, what can we do to make Patience increase, etc.? So he thought about the Ten Paramis for days, trying to figure them out and understand them fully. Then he knew what he was supposed to do. So if you want more Patience in your life, you've got to understand what Patience really is. You got to understand: where does Patience come from? How can I make Patience stronger? So you've got to examine them more and more and more, so that you actually know what you're working with.