04. The Five Faculties

Saddhā cannot be understood correctly outside the context of the Five Faculties, which are essential for becoming a dhammanusari or saddhanusari ~ in fact, essential for success in general, both on the Path and in lay life generally. mundane and supramundane As 🎯 Ṭhānissaro says in The Five Faculties:

The Buddha taught these qualities as among the most important for attaining awakening. Not only that, he also noticed in his own practice that they would lead to success in whatever he would put his mind to. So they’re qualities useful in any attempt to do anything of importance in your life.

One becomes a dhammanusari or saddhanusari by bringing these five faculties to an unspecified maturity, and by doing so is considered a sort of pre-noble noble one, or *ariyasāvaka*.

In brief, the Five Faculties are:

• conviction or faith;
• persistence or energy;
• mindfulness;
• concentration; and
• wisdom.

Expanded further, we have:

• sadhindriya faith in the Triple Gem;

  • confidence in the Buddha
    • his enlightenment
    • his qualities (see, buddhānusati)
  • confidence in the Dhamma
    • in the four factors of stream-entry
    • skilful View
      • kamma
      • rebirth,
      • dependent origination
    • its qualities (see, dhammānusati)
  • confidence in the Sangha
    • its qualities (see, sangānusati)

• viriyindriya energy for and persistence in abandoning unwholesome states and cultivating wholesome states, analogous with Skilful Effort; bhāvana

• satindriya mindfulness of the present as often as possible; in particular, ‘possessing supreme mindfulness and discretion, one who remembers and recollects what was done and said long ago’ (Bodhi)

• samādhindriya concentration is the capacity to hold one’s attention still while the Earth spins around the sun without getting your hair ruffled; thus collected,

  • quite secluded from kāma and unwholesome states, one enters and dwells in the first jhāna … and onward

• paññindriya wisdom is the capacity to correctly discern whether our actions will cause either suffering or the cessation of suffering, up to you - specifically,

  • (SN48:50) discerning/understanding that saṁsara is beginningless, with beings wandering, hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, but that cessation is possible

Thus expanded, how do we apply them? As far as the faculties required for spiritual development, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom are easy to understand, and no one gets anywhere meaningful without a good whack of energetic persistence ~ even just mundane tasks like getting one’s banking done require a lot of perseverance sometimes, so what sort of superhuman faculties are we going to need for the realisation of something as apparently ephemeral as spiritual truth?

That’s why faith (saddhā) is indispensable, although it may need some more explaining. It’s enough to say for now that one would never even start a journey if they weren’t convinced they could make it and that doing so would be worthwhile. We also need to believe it’s possible and feel confident the Buddha’s directions are reliable.

Ṭhānissaro 🎯 continues, saying conviction ‘deals with how you view the world and how you live in the world’, where the former begets the latter: if one thinks that the world is not characterised by rebirth, they might behave as though this is their one and only life. morality Attitudes might arise like, ‘We’re here for a good time, not a long time’, leading to a focus on the pursuit of pleasure at any expense (one’s own, or at the expense of another’s liberty, rights, property, etc.), or ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’, caused by and reinforcing a fundamental pessimism that precludes joy and may lead to a cranky kind of narcissism. Buddha explicitly taught that we should walk the middle path between the extremes annihilationism and eternalism , so a correct faith in the dhamma will dispel such attitudes.

The Faculties ‘are listed in the order in which they ordinarily develop’, which casts a light on my question of whether wisdom or faith develops first. I could still say with my own confidence, that each may lead at different times: we need mundane wisdom to recognise suffering and to understand that the teachings point to a way out; but faith in our capacity to apply the teachings needs to lead in meditation, when we can’t directly access the teachings and before profound insight appears to motivate yet more faith.

The Āpaṇa Sutta (SN 48.50) shows the Five Faculties to be cyclical or graduated/gradual, and beginning with faith: faith begets energy, which begets mindfulness … concentration … wisdom, and I get from reading this sutta that: a) one can expect insight to arise somewhat naturally from samādhi, though of course we shouldn’t neglect wisdom practices, and b) the cycle returns to faith after wisdom, completing (and re-starting) the cycle as one’s faith inspires effort, again and again, etc, so the Faculties are gradual in that one conditions the next/others, and cyclical in that the ‘fifth’ faculty, wisdom, inspires faith, the ‘first’ faculty, although like all of these things they are not as linear as ‘first’ and ‘fifth’ would suggest.

Ṭhānissaro’s agrees, saying the faculties can be seen as developing ‘in a spiral fashion’, where on the basis of ‘conviction, one develops the remaining faculties’ and ‘then, through discernment, one’s conviction turns into a faculty as well, thus providing the basis for the other faculties to be even further strengthened’.

He also says the sutta could be read as ‘describing the practice of the conviction-follower mentioned in MN 70’, perhaps because here saddhā is foregrounded, whereas at other places in SN 48 we have paññā foregrounded – there being both conviction-followers and dhamma-followers, saddhanusari and dhammanusari.