Coming to Understand Prajñā

In Mahāyāna Buddhism, Paul Williams writes about a concept called, prajñā. In it's simplist term, this can be understood as wisdom but I have been struggling to understand what this even means. In my naïve sense of what wisdom is, I think of learning, reading and gaining as much knowledge as one has the capacity to attain. This reading though, gave me a difference sense of how to understand wisdom. Williams explains that there might be two ways to look at what wisdom is. 

“In speaking of wisdom as understanding the way things really are there is correspondingly a distinction between knowing intellectually, through deep, even meditative, analysis, the way things must really be (knowing that ‘Aha – this is the way things really are!’), and the ‘paranormal’ experience of a meditative absorption directed towards the results of such analysis – dharmas or emptiness as the case may be. We thus face another understandable shift in the meaning of prajñā. Prajñā is sometimes a meditative absorption the content of which is the ultimate truth, the way things really are. Thus the Mahāyānasaṃgraha can refer to the perfection of wisdom as ‘nonconceptual awareness’ (nirvikalpakajñāna)” (Williams 50).

It is, in my opinion, this second definition of wisdom that I attach more with the many aspects of Buddhism. The meditative absorbtion which inevitably leads to ultimate truth reminds me of the final moments of enlightenments of the Buddha himself. I picture the satan-like figure, Mara, doing everything possible to distract and put down Siddhartha as he attempts to achieve nirvana. I see Mara calling him useless and in response, Buddha touching the earth and claiming the earth as his witness thus resulting in the earth standing up, giving witness, and defeating Mara. This is when the Buddha entered his final stage of meditation before reaching enlightenment. This is arguably when he gained all the wisdom that the Buddha is said to have because it was in this moments that he learned the ultimate truth of reality.