The Pali word for discernment, pañña, is often translated as “wisdom.” However, there are two connected reasons for translating it as “discernment” instead:
- Pañña is related to the verb pajanati, which refers to the mental act that discerns events and actions, detecting when they are distinct from one another and when they are connected as causes and effects. Pajanati also refers to the act of judging intentions by their effects and discerning subtle phenomena that are ordinarily hard to detect.
- The Buddha’s strategy for finding true happiness is to focus discernment on the processes of intentional action, to determine whether they are skillful, or not. Part of this strategy is to regard discernment itself as an intentional action. This helps you gauge when to foster it and when to abandon it for a higher purpose: total release. Because wisdom is hard to think of as an action, “discernment” seems to work better in practice as a translation for pañña.
The Buddha taught that discernment begins by seeking out knowledgeable contemplatives, people who have trained their minds to gain personal experience of the highest happiness, and asking them: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”
To do this demonstrates discernment in 4 important ways:
- It shows that you know to ask the advice of people more experienced than you
- You realize that happiness comes from your own actions
- You realize that long-term is better than short-term
- You realize that the search for true happiness is a noble pursuit and that you need discernment to do it right.
As the question makes clear, “doing it right” means searching for a happiness that lasts. The Buddha discovered that two kinds of happiness meet these qualifications: one that’s created by your intentional actions, and one that’s totally uncreated. His terms for these two types of experience are fabricated (sankhata) and unfabricated (asankhata).
The term “fabrication” refers both to intentional actions—mental or physical—as well as to the mental or physical conditions they shape. All experience at the senses, the 5 physical senses & the mind taken as a 6th sense, is fabricated through past and present intentional actions in thought, word, or deed. Past actions provide the raw material for present experience. From this raw material, your present intentions, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously, select and shape what you actually experience in the present. These present intentions also add to the range of raw material from which you will select and shape experiences in the future. Because no intentions are permanent, they can’t create permanent happiness. The best they can create is a happiness that’s relatively long-lasting and harmless.
The most skillful use of discernment, of course, is to pursue unfabricated happiness. But this doesn’t mean that fabricated happiness has no value on the path. The Buddha gave detailed instructions on how to use discernment in pursuing long-term happiness of both sorts. The skills needed for long-term fabricated happiness he taught under the term, “acts of merit” because they produce happiness while causing no one any harm. These acts include generosity, virtue, and the development of universal goodwill.
Developing Discernment
The mind’s first direct experience of the unfabricated is its first taste of awakening. This experience is the result of an act of discernment. Because the unfabricated neither arises nor passes away, it’s always potentially discernible. But because ordinary human discernment is weak and unreliable, it has to be trained and developed to discern for sure the subtlety of what’s always there. This is why the path of practice is gradual, and why there are stages in its development.
The Buddha lists three ways of developing discernment: through listening, through thinking, and through the development of the mind through meditation. The Buddha lists four factors that lead to the first experience of awakening: associating with people of integrity, listening to the Dhamma, applying appropriate attention to what you’ve heard, and then practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma.
People of integrity. The Buddha places a great deal of emphasis on finding a reliable person to teach you the Dhamma.
Listening to the true Dhamma. In addition to tailoring teachings for your immediate, specific needs, a good teacher will provide you with an overall perspective on the path of practice so that you can begin to judge where you are on the path and to anticipate your own needs yourself.
Appropriate attention. Once you have listened to the Dhamma, you have to think about it. This is the role of appropriate attention, which is the ability to frame your questions rightly. Applying appropriate attention to the Dhamma means asking questions about the Dhamma that focus on how to see things in terms of the four noble truths and to develop the duties appropriate to each. Applying appropriate attention also means avoiding any questions that would pull you away from actually practicing the path.
- The Canon contains long lists of these distracting questions, which cover many common philosophical and religious issues about the nature or existence of your true self, or the nature or origin of the world. The Buddha compared an interest in these questions to a man who, shot by an arrow, refuses to have it removed until he has learned who made the arrow, who shot it, and so forth. The man would die before finding an answer to his questions. To develop appropriate attention is to focus on removing the arrow as quickly as possible. This is an important exercise in focusing your discernment on detecting what really matters and ignoring issues that would get in the way.
Practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma means to practice for the sake of developing disenchantment for all fabrications. As we have already noted, this practice follows two simultaneous tracks. The first track is to sensitize your mind to the actual occurrence of fabrications in the present by developing right concentration. The second track is to apply negative perceptions to fabrications, as appropriate, and develop positive perceptions toward the unfabricated. The second track keeps your practice on course; the first track allows you to detect the act of fabrication in experiences where you otherwise might miss it.
~ Discernment, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, DhammaTalks.org