Panna · Pāli: paññā; Skt: prajñā

In the Cūḷavedalla Sutta (MN 44) the nun Dhammadinnā sorts the eight path factors under three headings: “Right speech, right action, & right livelihood come under the aggregate of virtue. Right effort, right mindfulness, & right concentration come under the aggregate of concentration. Right view & right resolve come under the aggregate of discernment.” Paññā is that third heading, the wisdom side of the three trainings, and what falls under it is view and intention rather than technique.

It is not information. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls prajñā, the Sanskrit form, “difficult to define” and says it “varies subtly in meaning among different Buddhist lineages”, but describes it as the quality that “allows those who have it to make distinctions between phenomena and to understand things as they actually are”. That is the flavour of the word: seeing clearly, rather than knowing more.

Traditions differ in how much weight the word carries. In the Pali discourses paññā is one of three trainings, learned alongside virtue and concentration. In Mahayana it becomes a perfection in its own right, prajñāpāramitā, the sixth of the six perfections after generosity, moral discipline, patient endurance, perseverance and meditative stability. The scale of that emphasis shows in the canon itself: 84000 notes that the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras fill “twenty-three volumes of the Degé and Narthang Kangyurs”, roughly “one fifth of the entire collection”, and stand first among the sūtra divisions, “reflecting the high prestige of the Perfection of Wisdom within Mahāyāna Buddhism as a whole”.