Later too after His enlightenment, the Buddha continued to display this quality, as for instance in the famous episode in which the Buddha nursed the sick Tissa whose illness was such that the other members of the Order shunned him. Let us look at wisdom which is the third of the three qualities. Wisdom is the most important of the three qualities because after all it is wisdom that opens the door to enlightenment. It is wisdom that uproots ignorance, the underlying cause of suffering. It is said that just as one can cut off the branches and trunk of a tree and yet if the root of the tree is not taken out the branches and trunk will grow again.
Wisdom is achieved primarily through meditation.
We have an episode again early in the life of the Buddha in which we see His early development of skill in concentrating the mind and this episode in fact occurred at the same time as the incident we considered a moment ago involving the bird and the worm. We are told that after having witnessed the bird devouring the worm, having recognized the unhappy nature of life, the young prince sat under a tree and began to meditate spontaneously. So we have this experience of meditation in the early life of the Buddha, and later when He renounced the household life and went forth to seek the truth, one of the first disciplines which He tried was again the discipline of mental concentration. We are told that He studied with two foremost teachers of the time, Arada Kalama and Udraka Ramaputra and He learned from these teachers the methods of mental concentration. Last week we said that amongst the discoveries made at Mohenjodaro and Harappa were images of the figures sitting in postures of meditation.