Vajrapani The Senior Engineer

I came across a story in Buddhist literature that has been on my mind ever since. Vajrapani, known for raw power, went to Buddha (the enlightened being) and asked for wisdom. Vajrapani already had the strength to get things done by sheer force and power, but he wanted to know what makes effort truly meaningful.

It reminded me of engineers I know who can go deep into the codebase, fix tricky bugs, and ship features, but often only see their piece of the puzzle. What they miss is how it connects with everything else , marketing trying to explain the product, customer service handling frustrated users, finance keeping the lights on, or founders shifting direction after talking to customers and the changing dynamics of the market.

I remember one sprint retro where the team had spent two weeks refactoring part of the system. The code was clean, tests were written correctly, and everyone was proud. But while that was happening, users were still stuck on a broken checkout flow. Customer service was flooded with complaints that kept piling up, and sales had no answer when people asked what was going on. The team had done good engineering work, but in the bigger picture the company had missed the mark of actually helping customers, not just doing engineering. I have seen this happen many times in my own projects.

That was Vajrapani’s realization too. Buddha’s response, later called the Prajnaparamita teachings, was simple: nothing stands on its own. Everything depends on something else. You can think of it like a distributed system. Your app does not just run on the code you write, it depends on servers, networks, users, electricity, and the frameworks built by people you will never meet. Change one piece and the whole thing shifts.

For Vajrapani this was not just theory or philosophy, and because he was the embodiment of raw power and action he needed more than words alone. It gave him a different way to act, not by simply adding more force but by stepping back to see how his actions affected the larger system and where his effort would truly make a difference. Instead of pushing harder in one direction, he learned to see how the parts fit together. His strength was still there, but now it worked with the whole picture rather than against it.

And maybe that is what we miss sometimes. We have endless tools, frameworks, and the ability to build almost anything, but without wisdom it feels like we are running after nothing. More code, more features, more load, but not always more clarity.

Force can move mountains, but wisdom decides which mountain is worth moving.

Painting by Samundra Man Singh Shrestha