The six paramitas — the six liberating actions — are the foundation of how a Bodhisattva moves through the world. Paramita comes from Sanskrit: param, meaning beyond, and ita, meaning gone. These are not virtues to accumulate or rules to follow. They are movements of mind that carry you across — from self-contraction toward genuine openness, from isolated self-interest toward the liberation of all beings. In Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, practising the six paramitas is the most direct way to develop Bodhicitta — the awakened heart-mind — and each of the six pages in this series pairs the traditional dharma teaching with what contemplative neuroscience has begun to confirm in the laboratory.
There is a Tibetan phrase I have always found quietly devastating: “beyond, gone beyond.” Gate gate pāragate. It appears at the end of the Heart Sutra and in some sense it names what the paramītas actually are. Param, from Sanskrit, means “beyond” or “the other shore.” Īta: “gone.” These are not virtues to accumulate, not boxes to check. They are movements of mind that carry you across.
The Karmapa has always lived Shantideva. Thaye Dorje, the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa, began teaching the Bodhicaryāvatāra — Shantideva’s eighth-century masterwork on the way of the Bodhisattvas — chapter by chapter at the Karmapa International Buddhist Institute in New Delhi in 2014, and the teaching continued for years. That is not an academic commitment. That is a practitioner’s relationship with a root text. In his own commentary on that work, the Karmapa uses a translation I prefer too: the six liberating actions. Generosity, meaningful behaviour, patience, joyful effort, meditation, and liberating wisdom. Six ways of moving through the world that open rather than close.
Shantideva had something precise to say about the relationship between the first five and the sixth. The entire Bodhicaryāvatāra, he tells us in Chapter 9, was taught for the sake of wisdom. The first five paramītas — generosity through meditation — generate merit. They are the accumulation of skilful means, the warmth and courage and steadiness of the path. But without the sixth, without prajñā, they remain blind. Wisdom is the eye of the path.
Gampopa makes the same structural point in the Jewel Ornament of Liberation, the great Kagyu manual of the Bodhisattva path. The first five paramītas constitute the accumulation of merit. The sixth constitutes the accumulation of pristine awareness. These two accumulations, developed together through the full sweep of practice, ripen into the realisation of the three bodies of a Buddha — the Dharmakāya, the Sambhogakāya, and the Nirmāṇakāya. The absolute, the subtle, the manifest. That is the horizon this path is pointing toward.
In a 2005 interview, the Karmapa was asked about ethics and benefiting others. His answer went immediately to practice:
Step by step we train the actions of generosity, ethics, patience, enthusiastic effort, and meditation, and with the sixth paramīta of wisdom the actions are perfected. This is how we combine compassion and wisdom.
Not a philosophical statement. A practice instruction.
In the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, the paramītas form the backbone of how a Bodhisattva moves through the world. The student practises them in order to develop Bodhicitta — the awakened heart-mind, the aspiration to reach enlightenment not for oneself alone but for the liberation of all beings. The paramītas are that aspiration made concrete. They are Bodhicitta with hands and feet.
What is remarkable is that contemplative neuroscience has begun to find these practices in the laboratory. Researchers including Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have spent decades studying what happens to the brain and body when people actually practise the qualities the paramītas describe. What they are finding is that these are not abstract virtues — they are measurable neural states, trainable capacities, biological realities. Each of the six liberating actions that follows has a study attached to it. The science does not explain the dharma. But it does confirm that something real is happening.
There are six of them, though in some explanations wisdom unfolds into four distinct aspects, giving us ten. We follow the classical six. Each one is its own page. Take your time with them.
QP
Continue Reading
1. The Paramita of Generosity→
2. The Paramita of Meaningful Behaviour→
4. The Paramita of Joyful Effort →
5. The Paramita of Meditation→
Source Notes
Thaye Dorje quote: Buddhism Today interview, September 2005. Buddhism Today
Thaye Dorje on six Paramitas or liberating actions: Bodhicaryavatara commentary series, Buddhism Today, 2014 onwards.
Shantideva / wisdom as eye of path: Bodhicaryavatara Ch. 9, opening verses. Verify “blind” wording against your copy — accurate in Padmakara Translation Group edition (Shambhala, 1997).
Gampopa / two accumulations and three kayas: Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Ch. 13–18. Recommended edition: Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen trans. (Snow Lion, 1998).
Davidson: for intro-level attribution, cite the lab generally or his book ‘The Emotional Life of Your Brain’ (Hudson Street Press, 2012). Specific studies are reserved for each of the six pages.