Search results for: "The Five Faculties"
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- It’s All in What You’re Doing… They were able to cure their illnesses through developing the five strengths, the five faculties, the seven factors for awakening. So he keeps in mind their example. He says, “Even if they didn’t cure their illnesses, at least they were able to cure their minds from the suffering of the illness.” That’s what right mindfulness means: keeping in mind good examples. As …
- Discernment All Along… But then, there are the five faculties: You start with conviction. You have a general conviction in the principles of the Buddha’s awakening, but the discernment doesn’t come until the end—and that confirms your conviction. Then, the seven factors for awakening: You start out with mindfulness, and then you have what’s called analysis of qualities, which is the discernment faculty …
- Discernment… In some of his other explanations—say, in the five faculties or the five strengths—it’s virtue, concentration, discernment. In the seven factors for awakening, the factors themselves don’t contain virtue but there’s a passage where the Buddha says they build on virtue. So, in that case, you’ve got virtue, then discernment, then concentration. So, the order’s not fixed …
- How to Look, How to Listen… Of the five faculties, that’s the one you have to start out with, even though it’s not first in the list. The Buddha said that this is the one you use to measure how much you’re going to be acting on your conviction, how much you’re going to be expecting out of your mindfulness, your concentration, and discernment. He gives …
- Study to Practice… As he says, with the five faculties: You look for their origination, you look for their disappearance, you look for the allure, their drawbacks, and the escape—even from them. That’s an advanced stage, but this five-stage program is something you learn from reading, you learn from studying. And then you can put it to use, because that’s what all the …
- Heedfulness All the Way Through… You can see this most clearly in a set of dhammas the Buddha calls the five strengths, which are identical with the five faculties. You start with conviction. Formally, this is conviction in the Buddha’s awakening. But what does that mean in practice? One of the main things it means is that we have conviction in the power of our actions. After all …
- Heeding the Deva Messengers… The Buddha’s teaching that’s most connected with heedfulness is the teaching of the five strengths, or the five faculties: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are the qualities we need to develop as strengths within ourselves. We have to have them take charge in our minds so that we’ll have the strength to do what’s right, to do what …
- Take Heart… In the five faculties or the five strengths, the list starts with conviction. You’re convinced of the Buddha’s awakening. And what does that mean? One of the things you’re convinced of is that he did it through the power of his own actions. And as he said, it wasn’t the case that he had anything special that other people couldn …
- A Genius about Your own Mind… One of the ways he has of expressing the path is in the five strengths and the five faculties: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are all things we have to develop and in many cases they require a lot of work. Having conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is pretty demanding because it sets forth the possibility that human beings can find …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… So what do they do? They resolve to develop the factors for awakening, the five strengths, the five faculties, four bases of success, and to use those qualities as their medicine. There’s also a set of verses about a monk who doesn’t get any alms. He asks himself: “What are you going to do?” And his answer is, “I’m going to …
- Developing the Path… You see this in some of the other ways that the Buddha lines up the factors of the path, as when he talks about the five strengths and the five faculties. For discernment to become a faculty—in other words, a dominant factor in your mind—you have to actually develop conviction, persistence—which includes developing virtue—and then mindfulness and concentration. In other …
- The World of Conviction… This is one of the reasons why the Buddha talks about the five strengths or the five faculties. These are qualities that nourish the mind and nourish the kind of becoming that you want as a practitioner as you go through the world. Both lists—the strengths and the faculties—begin with conviction: conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, that he really was awakened …
- Cut the Currents… He says it’s the basis for all skillful qualities; it’s the basis for the five faculties, the five strengths. His very last statement to the monks before he passed away was to bring about consummation through heedfulness. Even though it’s a very important topic, though, there’s only one place where the Buddha defines what it means. It means you watch …
- Discernment on the Path… Discernment is the culminating factor in the five strengths and the five faculties. The other four—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, and concentration—are the rafters that you put up. But they’re not really secure until you put that top rafter at the peak of the roof. Once that’s in place, it holds everything else in position and makes it secure. In other words …
- A Larger Perspective… There are the four bases for success, the four establishings of mindfulness, the five powers, the five faculties. Each of them takes the factors of the path and arranges them and approaches them in a particular way. So it’s good to make note of the fact there are these variations. But it’s also good to remember that there’s a larger pattern …
- The Path to Stream Entry… And there is an element of choice as you practice, but in every case, the Buddha says, how do you develop, say, the seven factors for awakening? How do you develop the four bases for success, the four establishings of mindfulness, the five strengths, the five faculties? Through developing the noble eightfold path. You want to get all its factors to come together. In …
- Strength of Conviction… Sariputta, “Do you believe that the five faculties”—which are the same as the strengths—“lead to the deathless?” And Sariputta said “No, I don’t believe, I know.” This is something we can find for ourselves. The strengths begin with strength of conviction. Strength of discernment is the one that makes them all solid, but we have to remember: Discernment doesn’t come …
- The Skill of Letting Go… Eventually the same analysis gets applied to the five faculties—which is another way of saying that it’s applied to the path as a whole. You see the allure of the path and what it’s done to get you past many forms of suffering. But you also see its drawbacks—it, too, is fabricated. At that point, you can let go safely …
- The Triple Training… In the five faculties or the five strengths, virtue comes first, then concentration, then discernment. In the seven factors of awakening, you start with mindfulness, which is aiming the mind toward concentration, and then you bring in your discernment before you get to concentration, while all of the factors are based on virtue. There’s plenty in the Canon to indicate that all these …
- As They’ve Come to Be… There are passages where the Buddha talks about applying the same five-step program to the five faculties. Conviction: It’s a good thing, but even it has its limitations. There comes a time when you have to see its allure and see its drawbacks and let it go, develop dispassion for it. The same with persistence, the same with mindfulness, the same with …
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