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Cultivating the Faculties

So again, a really warm welcome to everybody. It's a delight to practice with others. And even if I have little mishaps here, of the bell falling or whatever it might be, it's all good. It's all good.

Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the five faculties. I'm inspired to do this for a few reasons, but one is this quote that we find in the suttas that reads: the Ganges river—you know, of course, this major river in Northern India—the Ganges river slants, slopes, and inclines to the east. In the same way, a person developing and cultivating the five faculties slants, slopes, and inclines to Nibbana^[1].

I like this idea, this use of the river simile. Rivers, of course, are natural and they flow in one direction. It's not like some days they go one direction and other days another direction; they always go the same direction. Even though they are always going, in this case to the east, it doesn't mean that they have the same character all the time. There may be times in which there are rapids, or there might be times in which it's a really slow, languid river that has just a soft gurgling sound. Sometimes it might be a really loud, roaring rapid, or there are even parts of rivers that are eddies, just going around and around in circles. Rivers also, of course, are meeting boulders, and the riverbank, and maybe bridges too. So the river comes into contact with all these things and then finds a way around. Sometimes it's beautiful and graceful, and sometimes it's splashing. I feel really touched by this: The Ganges river slants, slopes, and inclines to the east. In the same way, a person developing and cultivating the five faculties slants, slopes, and inclines to awakening, Nibbana.

In the same way, the Buddhist teachings often follow this progressive path of practice that slants, slopes, and inclines a certain way. It doesn't mean it goes linearly all the time. It doesn't mean that we always go clearly from step A to step B to step C, of course. Sometimes we jump around, or we find ourselves going backwards a little bit, or in a spiral. But still, our practice can become stronger and have more depth, even though it might be clearly inclined in this particular way towards Nibbana.

The Buddha used this expression as a way to teach, and I'm using it as a way to teach, too. But we can get into trouble if we think that what's being used for teaching purposes means that things have to be exactly that way. Of course, things don't go cleanly and straightforwardly. Nothing in our lives unfolds precisely the way that we imagine it might, and I don't think anything unfolds exactly clearly in a linear way. But we might consider that the unfolding of practice, whether it's the five faculties, which I'll talk about a little bit, or maybe even just the bigger trajectory of the unfolding of practice of life, is kind of like gravity. If you put water at the top of a slope, it flows downhill. In the same way, there's a way that our system wants to flow towards greater and greater freedom, greater ease. For a river, that's flowing to the ocean. For us, it's flowing to awakening, to some really deep peace and ease. As we get a sense of freedom, as we get a sense of some openness or some peace and ease in practice, then of course our hearts, our minds, our whole system, our bodies—they want to flow downhill and keep opening towards this greater peace and freedom.

The quote that I read includes this expression: A person developing and cultivating the five faculties slants, slopes, and inclines to Nibbana. What does this mean, "developing and cultivating"? One way that I'm thinking about it is it's the opposite of inertia. Inertia is just sitting there without any vitality, without any movement, without any sense of possibility. I'm using this word "movement" to point towards something that's possible. Maybe our mind is all over the place and we're not feeling particularly settled, but there's still this movement of intention to be mindful, to be present. Or maybe it is that we are very mindful, and then there's a movement to seeing more and more subtle things, subtle phenomena, with our mindfulness. This idea of developing and cultivating is not just going through the motions, but instead being engaged.

If our practice has some sincerity, and we're really engaged, and we feel encouraged with it, there is a sense that, "Yeah, this is a good thing, I'm going the right direction." Then we don't necessarily need to be concerned with developing and cultivating, or assessing, "Is this cultivating or is this developing?" But in those times when we might feel like we're stuck, or those times in which we might feel lost or not even sure if we're on the path, then it might be worthwhile to consider some of the things that I'm going to offer about developing and cultivating.

But you don't have to know exactly where you are or how far you've gotten, or be measuring yourself, asking, "Have I cultivated enough?" or "Have I developed enough?" The practice will unfold by itself. It will slant, slope, and incline towards awakening if we have a certain sincerity and engagement with it. However, I will say also that there can be some advantages to hearing about and learning about cultivation and development, and some of the stages that can unfold. One is to help us perhaps if we're feeling stuck, or to help us do a little bit of an assessment. We have to do this carefully; sometimes our inner critic just grabs onto that and goes to town with it, and that's not what we want. But there are some advantages to identifying where we are in practice, and where we are in cultivating or developing. If we understand that there's this movement, we can open to what we believe is the next phase. We can open to it a little more fully. Often, what's going to arise next in our practice, we get hints of it. There's a flickering of it, or an intuition of it, a feeling of it, a sense of whatever is going to happen next. If we know that that's a deepening or developing of practice, then we might align ourselves with that. Otherwise, we might be dismissive of this new thing that's arising.

But we have to be very careful. We don't want to create the conditions in which we are straining and striving, trying to make something happen, and then pouncing on whatever we think the next thing might be. We certainly don't want to spend a lot of time measuring ourselves, but instead to be patient and to allow our own practice to slant, slope, and incline towards awakening.

Tonight, as I mentioned, I'd like to talk a little bit about developing and cultivating the five faculties. But first, maybe I'll say that for me, the five faculties—I don't know, just the sound of them didn't seem quite so interesting before I had a real appreciation for how they really come alive in one's practice. I have to say now, I have a certain love and appreciation for them. There's tremendous beauty in the way that they come alive and interact. I feel very touched by them, and I use them to help guide my own practice, both in the big picture of slanting towards more and more freedom, as well as in moment-to-moment practice.

Maybe you're like me and the five faculties just don't sound so interesting. So what are they? They are faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. They sound like a nice thing; there's nothing off-putting about them, and many of the elements are in the Eightfold Path. Faith isn't there, and we don't have exactly wisdom there, but certainly energy, mindfulness, and concentration are in the Eightfold Path, and in that same order. Maybe it's the word faith that's there. Somehow, in my mind—maybe you're like me—I thought about the Seven Factors of Awakening. That somehow seemed more juicy, more exciting. It has the word "awakening" in it. Seven—clearly more is better, right? Seven has got to be more than five. And the Seven Factors of Awakening has joy and happiness in it. I mean, what's not to like?

Even though I kind of gave them short shrift earlier in my practice, I've grown to really appreciate them and have this real warm spot in my heart for them. So I offer that as a way to consider maybe revisiting the five faculties if you have earlier been dismissive of them. The five faculties: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. It ends with wisdom. There are so many ways that we can talk about the five faculties; that's part of why I love them. There are so many different avenues, or aspects, or ways to engage with them. I'm going to start with the last one: wisdom.

Partly why is because of this quote here that's also in the suttas: Just as the footprints of all living beings that walk fit into the footprint of the elephant, and the elephant's footprint is declared to be their chief by reason of its size... So they're saying that the elephant footprint is the chief footprint just because it's the biggest. (It's amazing the things you can find on Google these days. I Googled the size of an elephant footprint: 19 inches. They can get up to 19 inches. That is a big footprint, it's like a foot and a half!) So: Just as the footprints of all living beings that walk fit into the footprint of the elephant, and the elephant's footprint is declared to be their chief by reason of its size, so too among the steps that lead to enlightenment, the faculty of wisdom is declared to be their chief for the attainment of enlightenment.

There's a little bit of wordplay here between footprints and steps. I like this idea of these really large elephant footprints being the chief, and the faculty of wisdom being the chief. Somehow, comparing it to elephant footprints ties us back to ancient India. It ties us back to the time of the Buddha, when noticing elephant footprints was an ordinary thing to do. Living here in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2020, I don't see very many elephant footprints. But I like things like this that tie me back to the time when not only were there elephants, but also there was no pavement, of course. So every time an elephant walked, there was a footprint. In the same way, maybe every time there's some wisdom, there's a footprint; it has an impact.

So too among the steps that lead to enlightenment, the faculty of wisdom is declared to be their chief for the attainment of enlightenment. And what are the steps that lead to enlightenment? The faculty of faith, the faculty of energy, the faculty of mindfulness, and the faculty of concentration. One way that we might consider the five faculties is as a way to help create wisdom, how to cultivate wisdom to create the conditions in which wisdom might arise. In this tradition, wisdom is seen as the gateway to liberation. It is the way to greater peace, to awakening, to enlightenment.

Wisdom is a faculty that we all have. There are a number of ways that we can think about it, but one is the faculty to discern or to distinguish, to tell the difference between what's helpful and what's not helpful—helpful for awakening, helpful for finding greater ease. I'll say a little bit more about that, but I want to point out that wisdom doesn't require book learning or study. In that way, we would say it's different than just knowledge. A person who is really wise is not necessarily somebody who can spout off facts or sutta passages. Rather, it's the person that can find a way forward no matter what's arising, including when a way forward is just to recognize, "It's not clear to me what the way forward is."

(My phone... I am telling it to be on silent, but somehow me and my phone don't always agree, so my apologies for this.) Wisdom is this capacity to have a sense, even if it's not perfectly clear, of a way forward. It doesn't require a fountain of knowledge, but it's developing this natural capacity. This development of wisdom allows us to have a different type of seeing, a different type of seeing the way forward in which things are revealed, discovered, or maybe realized. When wisdom is cultivated, rather than figuring it out, probing deeply, or trying hard to understand what is there, we bring ourselves to a place where we allow experience to show its nature. It's more about creating the conditions in which the way forward is able to be seen, where it shows itself. It's less that we're out there trying to figure it out, and more that it becomes known.

With the development of wisdom, we start seeing the underlying building blocks. Not only do we start to see the way forward a little bit more clearly, but we start to see the underlying building blocks through which we build this conventional world we live in—this conventional sense of self that we have, the sense of who I am or who I need to be. We start to see the underlying roots of greed, hatred, and delusion. Of course, as long as those roots are still there, there will be the sprouting of plants that are born from them.

The cultivation of wisdom maybe starts with just seeing the obvious ways forward. Then we are helping to create the conditions in which there's less figuring it out, and more a way in which the way forward becomes known, revealed, or realized. Then we can start seeing even more. We can see the underlying building blocks of the way we're creating this conventional sense of self—the ideas of who I am, who I need to be, who I should be, all these ways in which we try to build a sense of self—as well as seeing these underlying roots of greed, hatred, and delusion. There's this movement of wisdom that's been cultivated and developed.

This seeing, this understanding that happens in this way, allows a deep letting go. It is seeing in a radical way the impermanent, inconstant nature of phenomena, of all of our experiences. It is seeing in a radical way that all our ideas and concepts, including ideas and concepts about ourselves, are just that: ideas and concepts. They're insubstantial; they're just thoughts, events in the mind. And then seeing in a radical way the suffering, the difficulty, the dukkha^[2]—and I'm using this word suffering in a really broad way to include even the most subtle sense of things not being quite right. It is seeing in a radical way the stressfulness or the suffering that's integrated or enmeshed in the very way in which we are interacting with our experience, interacting with our environment, and the way that we see, hear, and think.

When we see these things in this radical way—impermanence, not-self, suffering—then letting go just naturally happens. There's an understanding that it just doesn't make sense to be holding on. When this letting go is deep enough, it brings tremendous freedom. Even if it's not that deep, all letting go brings a little bit more freedom.

There can be a letting go that's really deep, where the attachments are all let go, there's a release of them. They might come back, but now things are different. Now we have a frame of reference. Having tasted a certain amount of letting go, knowing that it's possible, we don't hold on in quite the same way as before. This feeling, this experience of freedom becomes a reference point that throws everything else into highlight. We start to see the ways in which we are holding on in very subtle ways. It makes it possible to see that clinging isn't what we really want.

This idea of slanting, sloping, inclining towards awakening, and that the chief of the five faculties is wisdom—we can see how the cultivation of wisdom starts with just being able to distinguish or discern a way forward, and it grows and cultivates and develops until it supports a really radical letting go, which supports freedom.

We might consider, well, what is the cultivation and development of the four other faculties? "Diana, you've only talked about one!" What would it be like if we consider, or we have an inquiry: what would it be like if each of those other faculties were to support this cultivation of wisdom?

Is there a way in which faith—we could also use the word confidence, both confidence in the practice and confidence in ourselves—can support this seeing more and more clearly, in such a way that it supports letting go? Can we see that as a cultivation and development?

Energy, effort: of course we have to apply a certain amount of effort in order to do this practice. In the beginning, just to get ourselves to sit on the cushion. But is there a way in which the effort can be applied such that it supports letting go, such that it supports the development and cultivation of wisdom?

Mindfulness: in the beginning, mindfulness is just bringing our attention to the present moment, sitting and knowing that we're sitting in some way, just for a moment, and then maybe another moment, and then again another moment. But is there a way in which mindfulness can be cultivated such that it supports letting go, such that it supports the development of wisdom?

And concentration: this gathering together, getting settled, non-distraction. Is there a way that there can be a bit more gathering, a little bit more non-distraction? Not that we have to have a laser focus, but a way that we can feel integrated and combine all the different aspects of ourselves. Can we consider the development of that as a way that moves towards allowing more letting go, and more cultivation of wisdom, so that our practice can slant, slope, and incline towards awakening?

I don't want to give the impression that developing and cultivating has to be an active thing that requires striving and straining all the time. Of course, in the beginning, there needs to be a certain amount of effort. But this is the beauty of all five of these faculties: cultivating and developing requires some application, but then there's a way in which it just starts to slant, slope, and incline towards greater freedom. Part of the art of practice is to notice when there needs to be a little bit of intentional cultivation, and when we can just allow it to flow.

So the five faculties—maybe in a subsequent talk I'll develop them a little bit more. But may you find ways in which your practice, however you're practicing, supports letting go. This supports more freedom, which allows you to have more freedom in your life, but of course also more freedom in the lives of others. When you meet them from this place of greater freedom, I hope you support them in finding greater freedom. Thank you.