Five Spiritual Faculties

The Five Spiritual Faculties are key psychological qualities that support spiritual development. They are considered essential for balancing the mind and overcoming its defilements. Here's a breakdown of each faculty:

1. Faith: Taking the faculties as a linear map of practice, starting with faith recognizes that the discipline of practice requires an initial enthusiasm for the path and trust of the teachers and community we begin exploring with. This “bright faith” motivates us to dive into meditation, mindfulness, study, or other expressions of the path, and supports us to work with the conditions of our life to make ongoing practice possible. We may go for refuge, start to live by the precepts, commit to a daily meditation period, and begin to bring mindfulness into our activities. As practice develops, difficulties and hindrances naturally arise, but as mindfulness and the precepts start to bear fruit, we gradually experience “confirmed faith”—the direct experience that the path is good and leads to good results. The Pāli word saddhā is commonly translated as “faith,” but since inner confidence is the heart of the quality, “conviction” and “confidence” are also good translations.

2. Energy: Even with enthusiasm and dedication to our practice, it takes persistent, determined effort to develop on the path. Hindrances trouble our meditations, and the ever-changing winds of gain and loss, pleasure and pain, and the challenging conditions of our world continue to make things difficult. The faculty and power of energy is the inner determination to keep going even when we might previously have just given up. Energy is related to the “right/wise effort” aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path, and is defined as having energy “roused up for giving up unskillful qualities and embracing skillful qualities”. It is important as we cultivate energy to remember the Middle Way, and the advice the Buddha gave to the musician monk Soṇa, to practice with the same balanced effort as tuning a stringed instrument: neither too tight nor to loose. Excessive or unbalanced effort, the Buddha tells Soṇa, leads to restlessness, while not bringing enough effort leads to laziness. Many tools are offered in the practice to help balance our energy, from somatic tools like working with posture, breath, and movement, to emotional practices like lovingkindness and many kinds of concentration and tranquility training. The heart of viriya as a power is the unshakeability of our determination to find the liberation of the heart that is the culmination of the path.

3. Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the heart of the meditative limbs of Dharma practice, and here sits at the center of the list, grounding the faculties on either side of it. Buddhist mindfulness is a practice of directed inquiry, and it grows best when rooted in the soil of strong faith in the path and the energy to persist in addressing and subduing the hindrances as they arise. In the discourses that describe the five faculties, mindfulness is first defined as the ability to “remember and recall what was said and done long ago,” drawing on the literal definition of the Pāli word sati as “memory”. After that, it is defined as usual in the Eightfold Path as being the four foundations of mindfulness: bringing clarity and understanding to the body, feelings, states of mind and heart, and important aspects of our practice.

4. Concentration: Concentration, or immersion, follows mindfulness in the lists of the faculties and powers exactly as it does in the Eightfold Path, where these are the seventh and eighth limbs of the path. Samādhi refers to a varied set of extraordinary states in which the senses are drawn inward and the thinking mind is substantially settled and unified. Formally, the limb of samādhi and the spiritual faculty and power of samādhi all refer to the four states of meditative absorption known as the jhānas. These are embodied states of profound ease, energy, and happiness, based in the concentrated mind, and the Buddha praised them as a pleasure not to be feared because they are not dependent on sensual contact that would inspire craving. When the list of the five spiritual factors is taken as a linear map of how practice develops, just as in the Eightfold Path, we see that immersion grows in the fertile soil made ready by mindfulness and determined practice, and is the precursor to the insight and clarity of the wisdom faculty. Focused, stable attention brings an extraordinary depth and precision to the practice of inquiry, and the states of jhāna themselves are liberating as we realize that sensual pleasures and the temporary successes of life are not as fulfilling as we habitually think they will be, and that the mind at rest and the heart at peace is a far greater joy.

5. Wisdom: Wisdom in the list of the five faculties can be understood as both the quality of discernment and clear seeing that is developed all the way along the path, and as the culminating states of practice where insight and letting go of the causes of suffering unfold. As we move through our lives, we practice wisdom every time we pause to assess a situation and attempt to respond from our precepts and the heart of compassion rather than reactivity. The wisdom that grows gradually as we practice helps us bring discernment to difficult choices and heal from past unskillful conditions. In its mature form as a power, wisdom cuts through the illusions of permanence that inspire grasping and suffering through understanding that all experiences arise and pass.