..续本文上一页th it. Then automatically one will put lots and lots of effort into it to make it a very productive thing. One will become diligent thus increasing the preceding paramitas.

　　The fifth paramita is mental stability. The Tibetan word for this paramita is gom which is the word for “to meditate.” This is the active word and the word is derived from the root (Tib. khom) which means “to accustom oneself to something.” So to meditate means to commit and to accustom oneself to meditation. It really means to train to settle. Even though we say “my mind,” the mind which belongs to us is not under our control. Because we have not worked on it very much, our mind tends to be very distracted; it switches from one thing to another all the time. For instance, we may decide, “I am not going to get angry anymore.” Even though we decide that in one moment, we don”t have control over our mind and so we fall under the influence of anger a little later. We may promise not to be subject to desires any more and then we lose control and our mind is suddenly full of desires.

　　So, we think “my mind is under my control,” but when we look at it carefully there is not that much control there. It is not like our hand. If we want the hand to go somewhere, we can put it there. If we want it to come back, we can bring it back. But the mind is not nearly so tamed and doesn”t respond to those commands so well. This is mainly because we haven”t really done much work in bringing it under control. The word “meditation” has this implication of training or habituating our mind so that it does what we want. We habituate our mind by meditating again and again. This is the nature of meditation and the main point of the fifth paramita, mental stability.

　　The sixth paramita is wisdom or prajña in Sanskrit. How much happiness we get out of worldly things depends on how much understanding and wisdom we have. So wisdom is the very root of happiness and joy and determines the value of all other things. In the ultimate sense the benefit that we can get depends very much on our wisdom and understanding. Also the ability to help others depends on the degree of our wisdom. Developing ourselves also depends on the degree to which we have cultivated wisdom. For all these reasons wisdom and understanding are the very root of happiness and out of them joy emerges. How then does one cultivate this wisdom

　　 For a Buddhist it is cultivated by the three main approaches of studying, contemplating, and meditating.

《The Four Immeasurables and the Six Paramitas》全文阅读结束。