--- ai_generation_date: '2026-11-06' ai_model: gemini-3.1-pro-preview ai_prompt_hash: 2d625dd6 audiodharma: talks: - date: '2020-03-23' is_meditation: false mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/11089/20200323-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-viriya_1_of_5_initiating_effort.mp3 section_slug: viriya-1-of-5-initiating-effort speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: Viriya (1 of 5) Initiating Effort url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11089 video_unavailable: false collapsed_sections: [] location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: ulJ9EWpQPc0 imprecise_upload_date: '2020-05-04' title: 'Dharmette: Viriya (1 of 5) -Initiating Effort' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulJ9EWpQPc0 --- # Viriya (1 of 5) Initiating Effort - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1) _This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._ ## [Viriya (1 of 5) Initiating Effort](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/11089) So, good morning again to those who are sitting. Good morning for the first time to those of you who might be joining us now. For these mornings that I'm sitting here and teaching—for the last week, this week, and the next three weeks—the theme is the five faculties, or the five _indriyas_[^1]. Last week I talked about the first: faith. This week I'll talk about the second: effort. ## The Five Divine Faculties I want to say something about this word _indriya_, or faculties. Sometimes in English, it's called the five spiritual faculties. Occasionally I've seen it translated as the five controlling faculties. The name of these five qualities comes from the name of the Indian god Indra[^2]. So, _indriya_ means something like "of the god Indra." Indra, in the time of the Buddha, was the ruler of the gods. And he was considered to be a friend of human beings, and a friend of the Buddha. To some degree, this ruler of the gods had dominion over the gods or controlled the celestial world. To call these five faculties, capacities, or abilities that we have, and to associate them with the god Indra—the great god, ruler of the gods—is to give them a fairly high regard. Maybe it would be appropriate in English to translate them as the five divine faculties. What I like about this language of divine faculties is the great respect it offers to something that's found within us. That the human abilities we have to engage and be present for things are somehow very special. They are celebrated. They are valued to a great degree. We find treasures within ourselves, something that is considered divine. These divine faculties or abilities we have can be our friend in almost anything we do. They come along with us. They also have some kind of supportive—I don't know if we want to say controlling—quality, helping things to unfold or supporting the activities we're involved in. To have faith or confidence in what we do. To make effort. To be attentive or mindful as we do it. To be focused and steady or concentrated as we do something. And to be wise or discerning. These are the five divine faculties we have. Today's faculty—and the theme for this week—is effort, or _viriya_[^3]. Effort is a very important quality of practice. One way of understanding the course of Buddhist practice is that it's a continual effort, or continually finding Right Effort[^4]. What the right effort is, and how we make effort, changes day to day, hour to hour, and sometimes minute to minute. Being attuned to that, and knowing how to flow and move in and out of what effort is needed, is part of the art of practice. For some people, the word "effort" can make them immediately reactive or feel like it's a burden. It has associations with hard work, needing to prove oneself, or needing to be something different than what we are. But hopefully, as people develop in the practice, the effort becomes a delight. It becomes second nature. It becomes easy. It becomes something that we're well-attuned to, and we understand all the ins and outs of it. We appreciate it as something divine and as something valuable that we have. ## Initiating Effort During this week, I'll talk about five different qualities of effort, because how effort manifests changes over the course of time and practice. The first form of effort for today is what I think of as _initiating effort_. It is the effort it takes to initiate and begin doing Buddhist practice, or doing meditation. Without some effort, we won't sit down to meditate. Without some effort, we won't go on a retreat. Without some effort, we don't bring up the mindfulness to pay attention to what's going on. There has to be some initiating effort. That initiating effort is sometimes easy. We have a tremendous inspiration, we are really excited about the opportunity to sit and meditate, and we are very wholeheartedly involved. We feel so lucky that we get to do this. Other times, it's really hard. There can be a lot of inertia. There can be a lot of resistance. There can be fear around settling down. There could be a lot of laziness. There could be a lot of momentum to do other things—almost anything else but to sit quietly and meditate. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort. It might be like manual labor to kind of get oneself to sit down to do nothing, or to do very little and be quiet. To do it regularly takes extra effort: to get up in the morning and decide, "I'm going to sit." And to be mindful through the day, when so many other things are compelling and want our attention. To initiate: "Okay, this is what I want to do. I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to engage in it." ## Starting Over So, the initiating effort is one that gets done over and over again. We can see that clearly in meditation. Especially when people are relatively new to this, or the mind is somewhat agitated after a busy day, a lot of meditation is just starting over. Initiating again and again and again. The mind wanders off, and we come back. The mind wanders off, we start again. I like the language of "starting again" because every time we start, it is its own wonderful thing. If we have some idea that we're trying to maintain continuity and then feel discouraged when the mind goes off, that becomes kind of a burden for meditation. But whenever we notice we have wandered off in thought and we're no longer mindful, to have this very open, generous idea that we're going to sit now as if it's the very first time. We don't have to carry with us the burden of what has just happened. We're allowed to start fresh as if this is the newest thing we're doing. "Okay, I'll start again." It might be in a session of meditation that starting again is done a hundred times. It's done over and over again. And that's not wrong, it's not a mistake. A tremendous amount of good comes from all those little moments of starting over, of initiating the practice, and making the effort to show up and be present again, to be here. Every moment of doing that is a redirecting, retraining, and reconditioning of the mind. It is weakening the forces of distraction and preoccupation that have sometimes been strengthened over a lifetime of uncontrolled engagement. It is actually a powerful thing to stop and step away from the habitual, compulsive way the mind operates. To be present, to be here with the present moment, with what's going on, and with what's obvious. If you can do that over time, great. But don't underestimate the power of this initiating effort. Sometimes when I've meditated, it feels like meditation is just a lot of manual labor. Like when I'm sleepy and my mind is kind of busy and distractible, it's really hard to be present and I have to keep coming back, keep coming back, keep coming back. Start again, start again, start again. Depending on the circumstances in our lives, it might be a lot of effort to start again, to keep doing it, to keep showing up, and to keep letting go. So the initiating effort—the effort it takes to get to the cushion or to go on a retreat—is part of the practice itself. We have to make a lot of effort to go on a retreat, to organize our lives, to get bus tickets, and to take the bus to wherever we're going to go. Some of that effort to get to the cushion and show up is part of the practice itself, especially if you give care and attention to how you sit down to meditate. Hopefully, you don't do it as a burden or as a heavy duty. Maybe you make your meditation place kind of beautiful. Maybe the few minutes before you meditate are quite important. You don't rush to finish everything you possibly can so you can meditate, only to sit down out of breath. Perhaps the meditation can begin five minutes before you sit down, just as you begin to take care of subtle things around your home. Be a little bit calmer in what you do, so that when you come to sit, that effort to slow down, to be calm, to be here, and to prepare yourself makes the effort to sit a little bit easier. The effort to sit is a little bit more harmonious. ## Who Is Making the Effort? A lot of effort is in initiating effort. Eventually, we don't have to initiate so much. Eventually, we start being in the flow of effort. We're able to sustain it. We're able to stay awake more continuously in our experience and stay here. As we begin to stay more fully in the experience and are able to maintain that to some degree, then effort begins to take different shapes. Different kinds of efforts are needed. We can ask ourselves the question—which was the first question I asked my first Zen teacher—"What is Right Effort?" Finding our way to the right effort when we're able to engage and stay engaged is a really wise question, and how to answer that question is the discussion for tomorrow. But for now, I want to tell you a little story about that first question I asked my first Zen teacher. I'd just been introduced to Zen and to Zen meditation. I was attracted to doing it, and I felt this is something I wanted to do. The teacher had just given a Dharma[^5] talk and had left the Dharma hall. I walked up to him. I was twenty years old, so this is forty-five years ago. I asked him, "What's the right effort for doing Zen meditation?" I don't remember much about why I was asking yet, or what I understood effort to be, or even what the phrase "right effort" meant, but I remember asking him the question. And he gave me what would be, for some people, a wonderful answer. But it wasn't wonderful for me because I was so new to Buddhism, and I just didn't know how to understand the question or make any sense of it at all. I probably internally just shrugged my shoulders, let it be, and it really made no impression on me. But still, it was a kind of a wonderful answer. I asked him, "What's the right effort for doing meditation?" And he looked at me and he said, "Who's making the effort?" That's all he said. "Who's making the effort?" So as we go through this week looking at effort, we'll look at different aspects and what the nature of right effort is. And perhaps there's a way in which the question "Who's making the effort?" can free you. It can free your effort so that it doesn't carry the burden of self through it. May you enjoy your effort this week. Thank you. --- [^1]: **Indriya:** A Pali and Sanskrit term often translated as "faculty," "ability," or "sense." In this context, it refers to the five spiritual faculties (faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom). [^2]: **Indra:** An ancient Vedic deity, considered the king of the gods and associated with the sky, lightning, and storms. [^3]: **Viriya:** A Pali word typically translated as "energy," "diligence," "enthusiasm," or "effort." It is the second of the five spiritual faculties. [^4]: **Right Effort:** (Sammā-vāyāma in Pali) The sixth element of the Noble Eightfold Path, which involves generating the effort to prevent and abandon unwholesome states, and to arouse and maintain wholesome states. [^5]: **Dharma:** (or _Dhamma_ in Pali) A multifaceted term in Buddhism that generally refers to the teachings of the Buddha, the truth, or the fundamental laws of nature.