There is a tale in which a princess sets her suitors a riddle; she will marry the one who can solve it.

Nothing is more valuable than this, yet nothing is less valued, goes the riddle. Nothing so lights up the world, yet nothing is so obscure. Nothing knows so much, yet nothing is so unknown. What is it?

One by one, the princess’s suitors come forward with their answers, some of which more or less fit her description of this unknown quantity and some of which don’t, but all of which have something to be said for them. There are worldly answers such as wealth, power and fame, and there are subtler ones such as freedom, love, truth, and enlightenment. But only one of the suitors solves the riddle.

The answer is wisdom.

Naturally, the princess would like her husband to be handsome, intelligent and kind…but all the same, what is kindness, what is intelligence, and what are good looks without the wisdom to go with them? Obviously, she would like him to be loving, too. But what is love? We hear the word all the time; we hear it being used in religion at one end of the spectrum and in popular culture at the other; we hear of carnal love, romantic love, ‘true love’, spiritual love, and even something called ‘unconditional love’. Yet what are these loves without wisdom? Are they actually love at all, in the most meaningful sense of the term?

And as for truth—yes, of course, the princess would like her spouse to be truthful: in fact, to exemplify truth. She would also like him to be truthful in the spiritual sense. But what is spirituality without wisdom? What is the point of practicing meditation, for example, if the kind of meditation we practice and the way we practice it and the spiritual sensations we experience when meditating are failing to make us any the wiser? What is the point of seeing visions if our wisdom is insufficient to interpret them correctly, or to recognize their origin, or to realise that their lack of commensuration with our everyday lives, if such is the case, suggests that there is something strange about them? After all, not only do mystics have visions; acidheads and schizophrenics have them too.

What, indeed, is the point of enlightenment itself if the light it brings is not the light of wisdom? Here, the locus classicus is the tale of Ravana, the villain of that ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana. He was said to have attained a state of yoga through the practice of austerities, yet this achievement did not give him pause when—from the thought that such a beauty should belong to him and him alone, or because of a need to assert his superiority, or out of infatuation, or simply out of lust, but at any rate out of vanity, not out of wisdom—he abducted Sita, the wife of Rama, thereby setting in motion the train of events that led to his destruction. He might have achieved a degree of self-realisation, but his fatal error was that he did not care or was not able to achieve sufficient wisdom in the process.

So, from the princess’s point of view, it is wisdom that has the highest value, it is wisdom that lights up the world, it is wisdom that is the purest, most perceptive, and most immediate form of knowledge. Wisdom is that which allows us to discriminate. It helps us differentiate between alternatives. It is savoir vivre in the deepest sense, since it lets us know best how to live, to what to give priority, how most effectively to love and how to avail ourselves of freedom without our falling into licence or licentiousness. It sees the Spirit clearly; it can tell it apart from all the fakery and negativity that passes for ‘the spiritual’. It knows how best to endure the twists and turns of fate, the blows of ill-fortune and the shocks of defeat—and, equally, it knows how to use authority, success and good fortune with the most munificence.

And if all this is so, and wisdom represents the key to dealing with all eventualities; if it is relevant in every situation, both in private life and public life, not only in the vita contemplativa, where we might expect it, but in the vita activa too—if, in sum, it can be said to constitute the know-how of living, then: how good it would be to be wise! And how transforming it would be if, not simply in the way we think and decisions we take, but in every aspect of our individual and collective lives, in our manners, speech, dress, and behaviour, in our art and architecture and town and country planning, in our science and the uses to which it is put, in our conception of education, in our politics and economics, in the way that we bring up our children, in the way that we govern our societies and in the way that we govern ourselves, we could be wise as well.