Saturday, January 28, 2017

Our wisdom includes foolishness and ignorance

In today's Patheos blog post "Zen & the Bodhisattva Way: A Meditation on the Three Pure Precepts", James Ford mentions Thomas Moore when he discusses the path of not knowing after quoting the English poet John Keats:
"And it is here that a new kind of wisdom begins to appear. It is something other than the weighing of various factors, the first not knowing wisdom found in hesitation. But it is this wisdom, this not knowing that is the real gold, the path of depth, the Buddha way.

Commenting on Keat’s perspective which is the relentless letting go that takes us to this place, the contemporary spiritual psychologist Thomas Moore, who also has some insight into our Zen way, writes how 'Knowledge is not always the adding on of information and skill; sometimes it involves the loss of both. (This) knowledge (that is wisdom) is not always a matter of becoming smart and intelligent; it could be the discovery of one’s foolishness and ignorance.'"