Skrolli Party 2025

 This Saturday, I took part in Skrolli Party 2025.

I entered this piece into the Wild compo, as a graphics entry:

Perfection of Wisdom

I made it with vvvv, Gimp, and a photo I took. It placed #4/4. Prints on RedBubble.

The title of the work is "Perfection of Wisdom". And what is wisdom? A disciple of the Buddha has these answers:

"Just as, your majesty, a barley-reaper takes a sheaf of barley in the left hand, takes a sickle in the right hand, and cuts the barley, even so, your majesty, does the spiritual aspirant take hold of the mind with attention, and cut off the defilements with wisdom. Indeed thus, your majesty, examination is the distinguishing characteristic of attention, and severing is the distinguishing characteristic of wisdom."
- Miln II.1.8 

 "Wisdom arising, your majesty, dispels the darkness of ignorance, produces the illumination of insight, brings forth the light of knowledge, and makes manifest the noble truths; and further, the spiritual practitioner sees with complete understanding impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and corelessness."
[...]
"Just as, your majesty, a person might bring a lamp into a dark house, and with the lamp lit dispel the darkness, produce illumination, show the light, and make manifest forms, so too, your majesty, wisdom arising dispels the darkness of ignorance, produces the illumination of insight, brings forth the light of knowledge, and makes manifest the noble truths; and further, the spiritual practitioner sees with complete understanding impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and corelessness."
- Miln II.1.14

This is why it is spoken of as "enlightenment": the light of wisdom is lit, and "produces illumination" in the mind; the forms it makes manifest are the contents of the mind, such as the defilements (sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse, and doubt), which can then be let go of, relinquished, abandoned, uprooted. Through the development of wisdom (even unto perfection), one can be liberated: 

 “If one wishes: ‘May I, with the destruction of the taints, in this very life realize for myself with direct knowledge the taintless liberation of mind, liberation by wisdom, and having entered upon it, may I dwell in it,’ one is capable of realizing it, there being a suitable basis.”

- AN 5.23 Upakkilesasutta

By first recognizing the truth of what has come to be (the first noble truth, that there is suffering), one is revulsed by this very loathsome suffering, becomes dispassionate, disenchanted, and begins to deprive this very suffering of its nutriment, cutting it off at the source (the second noble truth: the cause of suffering). This eventually develops into the cessation of suffering (the 3rd noble truth), and thus, liberation:

"And how, O Lord, is one a comprehender of Dhamma? 'This has come to be' — that, O Lord, one sees with true wisdom, as it really is. And having seen with true wisdom, as it really is, that 'this has come to be,' then, through revulsion from what has come to be, through dispassion (concerning it) and the cessation (of it), one is liberated without any clinging.

- SN 12.31 Bhutamidam Sutta