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Developing the Faculties

So again, a really warm welcome to everybody. Whether you're listening to this at the same time I'm speaking, or if it's sometime later, a really warm welcome. Tonight I wanted to talk a little bit more about the five faculties. I talked about this some last week; I shared a little bit about my delight in the five faculties. Last week I spoke a little bit about how there's a sutta^[1] passage that talks about how cultivating and developing the five faculties helps a person slant, slope, and incline towards Nibbāna^[2]. It sends them on the way, just one way towards Nibbāna.

Last week I also talked about how, of all the five faculties—faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom, and I'll say a little bit about those in just a moment—there is another sutta passage that says that wisdom is the chief. That is, it's the one that leads to awakening. So one way we can consider cultivating the five faculties is to cultivate faith, energy, mindfulness, and concentration in such a way that they help develop or cultivate wisdom. These other four faculties help develop the fifth.

Tonight I'd like to talk about some other ways to cultivate the faculties. It seems like a worthwhile endeavor if it's going to lead towards Nibbāna. What does it mean to develop and cultivate these, and what are some different approaches we might think about? I'm going to unpack just a little bit what each of these faculties are. Many of you will be familiar with these; there are plenty of dharma talks about all of them. Gil Fronsdal^[3] did a lovely series on the 7 a.m. series where he did five talks on each faculty, so 25 total talks. For those of you who are listening now and later, I believe these started at the end of March 2020, right as the pandemic was starting. It's a beautiful thing that he did, so I can point you in that direction for some richness about what each of these faculties are. But for now, I'll just provide a few words about each one and then talk a little bit more about what it means to develop and cultivate these.

As many of you know, when we encounter some of these Buddhist lists—I'm fond of the lists, I know not everybody is, of course, but I'm fond of them—they're given in a particular order. It's not like they're scrambled up, where there are five of these things and we just say them in any order that comes to mind. With these lists, there's one, two, three, four, and five.

The Five Faculties

The five faculties begin with faith. We might understand that faith is the belief that finding less dukkha^[4]—less suffering and stress—and more freedom is possible. And not only that it's possible for us, that we have the capacity for this, but that this is a practice that can help us find more freedom, more peace, and more ease, all the way to awakening. Less and less dukkha, all the way to the end of dukkha. We have faith because we don't have this direct experience ourselves; we're not completely awakened ourselves, we still have some dukkha. But it seems reasonable to us. It makes a certain amount of sense to us, so we're willing to begin the practice. We are willing to take on some of these practices of meditation or ethics, or listen to some of the teachings. So that's faith.

With energy, it's a way in which we put forth our efforts. The way that it gets described in this context is to put forth our efforts towards noticing which mental states, thoughts, actions, and behaviors lead to more suffering, and which lead to less. And then to put our energy towards those that are wholesome, skillful, or helpful for having more freedom and less dukkha. It's one thing to believe that it's possible; then, of course, it requires a little bit of energy to do something about it, to test the faith. It also takes some effort to choose that we're going to do what's wholesome or skillful and not take up what's unwholesome and unskillful. So that's the second element: energy. It is also called effort; sometimes these terms get used synonymously.

Mindfulness is the third one. It's a simple capacity to track what is happening in the present without resistance, without conflict. Without too much pushing things away or pulling them closer, clinging, and grabbing on to them. It is simply the capacity to notice what is happening right now.

The fourth is concentration, where our attention becomes more stable, where the forces of distraction become less powerful, and the mind is less fragmented. There is a certain amount of collectedness, composure, unification, or focus.

And then the fifth one is wisdom. It's a faculty we all have, and we can think of wisdom as the capacity to have some discernment. It is the ability to distinguish between what is helpful and what isn't helpful, in such a way that we're willing to not do things that are pleasant, knowing that they're not really skillful in the long term. An expression of wisdom is to know that, yes, I might love chocolate chip cookies, but I'm not going to eat this whole batch of them. It is maybe a silly example, but it's a certain amount of wisdom to recognize and distinguish the big picture for our benefit, and to be able to act in a way that supports the big picture. It is a certain type of seeing and understanding that doesn't rely on book learning or study.

Heedfulness (Appamāda)

One way to develop or cultivate these five faculties—if we're to follow, believe, or even experiment with the sutta that says cultivating these leads to awakening—is to look at another sutta passage. It says, "When a person is grounded in one thing, the five faculties become well developed." And what is that one thing? Heedfulness. Appamāda^[5] in Pali, the language that the ancient teachings are preserved in.

The sutta goes on to ask, what is heedfulness? It's when a person looks after their mind when it comes to defilements and things that stimulate defilements. So it's taking care, but also noticing. Appamāda sometimes also gets translated as diligence, vigilance, or even conscientiousness. It's the way that we are paying attention to that which fills up the mind, or creates the conditions in which there can be a lot of clinging, or a lot of turning away, ignoring, or pushing away. We notice when we're filling our mind in these ways, or when we notice that our behavior is motivated by this. Maybe we don't even notice it in our minds, but we notice that the way we're acting or the things we're saying are coming from places of greed, hatred, and delusion.

Appamāda is a way that we keep coming back. It's this type of diligence of not only noticing once and saying, "Okay, I noticed that there was some greed there," and then ending there. That's a little bit silly. We keep on looking, being aware of, and tuning into the quality of the mind at this moment, and then in this moment. In just the same way, we keep coming back to the breath, if that's our object of meditation. We find ourselves completely lost in thought, maybe lost in fantasies about chocolate chip cookies—maybe I should have had dinner before I sat down to give this talk, I have cookies on my mind! [Laughter] But it's the way that we keep on coming back, not just while we're meditating, but the way we also just come back to the meditation practice itself. Or maybe we're working with ethical practices, and we commit to some of those restraints again and again. It's not that we have to be perfect. It's not that we have to get it on the first try. I appreciate this appamāda very much. It is this recognition that we just apply ourselves in some kind of way, and of course it's not perfect, so we apply ourselves again and again.

We could say it's kind of like faith, in the sense that without faith, we wouldn't come back to the meditation cushion, or we wouldn't come back to the breath during meditation. There has to be some type of understanding, some belief. Maybe we don't know this completely yet, but it seems reasonable that it would be helpful, beneficial, and skillful to keep on coming back. So in some ways, appamāda has a flavor of faith as part of it. But it also might have a flavor of wisdom, because it requires some wisdom to recognize, "Is this a skillful thing to be doing? Do I have defilements in my mind? Should I continue doing this?" In this way, appamāda is one of these qualities that allows the five faculties to be developed. We can imagine that it allows everything to be developed. Everything that's worthwhile doing requires practice. Musicians practice, athletes practice, meditators practice.

In fact, there's another sutta passage that says, "Just as the light of the constellations does not equal one-sixteenth of the light of the moon"—they're just saying that stars don't have as much light as the moon. Of course, they're a fraction of the size if you're here on the earth, and this idea of one-sixteenth in Pali just means really small. "Just as all the light of the constellations does not equal one-sixteenth of the light of the moon, and the light of the moon is reckoned their chief... in the same way, all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness, gather in heedfulness, and heedfulness is reckoned their chief." So not only the five faculties but all skillful qualities are developed and cultivated with heedfulness. Maybe that's not surprising, but there's a way in which we can consider the five faculties as a group that can support our cultivating them.

Transforming Faith into Wisdom

If we're going to apply some heedfulness, is there a direction? Is there a way that we can consider this cultivation? For this, I'd like to bring in a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer^[6]. It's called "Finding Faith," and it goes like this:

While pulling the beets it's impossible to lose faith in the world. Those tiny seeds that once fit in the palm are now large red globes dense with dark sweetness and heavy in the hand. They are like promises kept, like small proofs in patience, confirmations that sometimes the good that's growing can't be seen. They are like hard truths: not everyone will want them, but some will, some will.

This idea of beets, these bulbous red plants—not everybody likes them. But they start as little seeds that are just lightweight and small in the hand, weighing next to nothing, and then they really grow into something that has some heft to them, that can be felt in the hand. And they are like hard truths: not everyone will want them, but some will. We might consider this poem as a representation of faith growing into wisdom. There's a lot of faith required to just put seeds in the ground. A seed doesn't look like a beet, but I'm going to create the conditions, and then this seed flowers and blossoms into a beet.

This is one way we can consider the five faculties. It starts with faith. Ideas, beliefs—things seem reasonable, this practice will bring benefits, these teachings are true. It seems like it's a worthwhile endeavor to explore, but we don't have the experience yet. We can consider that cultivating the faculties is a practice of gaining the experience in which faith can become verified faith, which then can become wisdom—things that we actually know and understand in our bones. We know it not just intellectually, but with an embodied wisdom.

I appreciate very much here that Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is saying, "They are like hard truths: not everyone will want them, but some will." As I was saying earlier, wisdom sometimes is a hard truth. Sometimes it's recognizing that, yes, what I like to do is pleasant, but it doesn't really make sense in the bigger picture of our life to be holding on to this idea of myself. For example, holding onto the idea of myself as a person who has lots of energy, who can exercise, and yet still have energy and time at the end of the day to do all these other things. Maybe the hard truth is to recognize, "Oh, you know, I'm aging. I don't have the same amount of energy that I did." The hard truth is to let go of this idea about ourselves that we hold.

Or maybe a hard truth is to recognize that sometimes we think things, in subtle and obvious ways, are going to be stable and always be there for us. When we learn that things are, of course, impermanent and inconstant, we rediscover more and more that things don't have that stability or permanence. And of course, we notice that things often have some unsatisfactoriness to them; they're not quite completely satisfying. It's one thing to hear this, but it's another thing to really have this experience: "Well, I went and achieved this goal, and yet I still feel like I'm not as satisfied as I wanted to be. The satisfaction lasted for a short amount of time." Maybe I gained a position in my professional life, finished an educational goal, or got a relationship or family that I really wanted. These are all beautiful and meaningful, and can be an important part of our lives, but we might not notice how much we were assuming that they would quench or satisfy us. Then we discover the hard truth that there's a certain amount of dissatisfaction, a way in which they don't provide what we were hoping or believing they would.

And then, of course, there's the hard truth of our ideas and concepts being just that: ideas and concepts. Ideas about ourselves, ideas about how things should be and how we want them to be, turn out to just be thoughts—ephemeral and not substantial. There are lots of repercussions of this; they don't have the substantiality and stability that we were hoping they do. So these beets in Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poem, that come from seeds that are like faith, grow into some hard truths that not everyone will want, but some will.

We might inquire a little bit deeper. If we consider cultivating the five faculties by moving through them in a linear way from faith to wisdom—and I'd like to emphasize this is just one way we can practice with them; that's part of why I appreciate the five faculties so much—we can notice the three in the middle: energy, mindfulness, and concentration. We can consider that these have an alignment with the three practices or factors in the Eightfold Path: Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. I'm equating energy and effort here, and there are plenty of definitions in the suttas that make this equation.

Many of you will know that the Eightfold Path, or even the whole Buddhist path of practice, can be summarized in three categories of practice: sīla, samādhi, and paññā^[7]. Sīla is practicing with our ethical behavior, how we show up in the world and in our relationships with others. Samādhi is mental development, and paññā is wisdom. We could consider that mental development—this middle category of practices—is a way in which we can transform faith into wisdom. That is, to apply some energy and effort to a mindfulness practice and a concentration practice. We apply some mindfulness to be present for what's actually happening in our lives, and to allow some concentration and settling of the mind. This allows us to see in deeper and deeper levels, in more subtle ways, how some of the teachings might be true. We see in a way where there might be less dukkha and more freedom and ease, so that we can work with the really obvious things and the really subtle ones.

To see the subtle ones requires a quiet mind, and then the effort and energy to move in the direction of greater peace, freedom, and skillfulness. When we find ourselves lost in the unhelpful and unskillful, we put them down as best we can. In this way, things that we had faith in and believed were true, we'll start having more experiences of for ourselves. We don't just have to believe they're true; we can know that they're true. We can know them from our experience rather than just intellectually or through book learning, but with an embodied understanding. We can transform faith into wisdom and know for ourselves the freedom that's possible for all of us, applying heedfulness, diligence, and vigilance to cultivate those skillful qualities that lead to greater and greater freedom.

Thank you.