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cattasallaBuddhism is often called "the religion of lists". If you've spent much time reading Buddhist teachings, you know why: There are a lot of lists! The very foundation of the religion is two lists: The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. It can indeed be quite overwhelming! But these lists can, in fact, be very useful, and supportive to practice.
One of the earliest lists in Buddhism is often referred to as "the 37 wings to awakening". It's not really a list, but a meta-list, containing seven other lists: The Four Right Exertions, the Four Bases of Power, the Four Establishings of Mindfulness, the Five Spiritual Faculties, the Five Spiritual Powers, the Seven Factors of Awakening, and the Noble Eightfold Path. What's interesting about this meta-list is that the individual list items of these various lists are interconnected in all kinds of ways. Really, by choosing to work with any one of the lists, you'll end up working on all of them at once. Indeed, even just choosing a single item to work on from one of these lists entails working on all of the rest of everything in all the lists! Buddhism is like that. It's an integrated, holistic practice that can be broken down into individual elements, but those elements are interpenetrating and mutually supportive. So I'm going to pick one and talk about it for a few posts.
I'm going to pick the Five Spiritual Faculties. Five is a nice number...the Discordians believe that everything in our experience can be related to the number five if you try hard enough. The first thing worth noting is that it doubles the Five Spiritual Powers! They are actually identical lists, but are considered two different lists...possibly because of an ancient clerical error that got invested with meaning upon later exegesis...
Part of why I'm picking this one is, a few weeks ago, I was just looking through suttas, trying to assemble a small collection that would cover all the basics of the 37 wings, and came across Saṃyutta Nikāya 48.10. It's a very short piece, like most of the suttas in the SN, but also very dense, as one of the "analysis" (vibhaṅga) suttas. And within it, it actually contains the formulae (or pericopes) for the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Four Right Exertions, the Four Bases of Power, and thus also three different factors from the Noble Eightfold Path! What a deal! So it seemed like it'd be fun to dig into it and use it as a scaffolding for a few posts.
Before getting into it, a few words on the Saṃyutta Nikāya. The collection of the Buddha's discourses, the Sutta Piṭaka, contains five smaller collections, the Nikāyas. The SN is the third, but there's some very good arguments out there that is, in fact, the oldest. Here's a possible story for how it came to be:
The Buddha wandered around a pretty significant chunk of central India, teachings lots of people who then established local communities. His sangha was designed to be self-governing, autonomous, and decentralized, and it was. Which ended up meaning all these different monks had slightly different collections of the teaching.
While dying, the Buddha refused to appoint a successor, instead saying that his teachings were all the leader the monks would need. So, naturally, after his death, all of the monks got together to try to remember as best they could. This is the First Council. The traditional accounts of the First Council recorded by the various early schools of Buddhism are almost certainly not historical, and heavily mythologized, but it's likely that something like it happened, where all the monks got together to try to collect and then standardize what would be regarded as the Buddha's teaching.
The SN is probably the oldest of these. A big reason this is thought is because both the overall structure of the collection as well as the individual discourses within that structure are conserved across the various early schools of Buddhism for which we now still have canons.
The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of Buddhism. And a popular hypothesis is that the Four Noble Truths also provided the scaffolding for the SN in its original form, which then began collecting and organizing related brief discourses under that rubric. There are now five volumes in the SN, but one of them is very different in theme, tone, and style from the others, so it's arguably been transplanted from elsewhere, or grafted onto an older framework. The other four volumes correspond to the Four Truths, and in the arrangement of the schools preserved in the Chinese canon, even correspond to the order of the truths.
So. The discourse of interest here, SN 48.10, is in the final volume, the Mahā Vagga, which corresponds to the Fourth Noble Truth, the one on the path to liberation.
The first three lines, then, which I can even translate with my limited Pāli knowledge (because they are very simple):
Ack! Already we have problems, and I've gone with some traditional Buddhist Hybrid English translations. "Mindfulness" and "concentration" are incredibly tricky, the former because it's become confused by its recent popularity, the latter because it's a poor attempt at a word for which we really don't have a good translation. But we'll get into those later. I went with "discernment" rather than "wisdom" for paññā because I think that gets at what it's about better, even though the discernment is guided by wise understanding. It's wise discernment, maybe.
First, though, "faculties". The word is indriya, and they come from a Sanskrit adjuctive that means "belonging to Indra, King of the Gods". So in some sense they are capacities, or capabilities, but they are also governing or controling principles that partake of the nature of the divine. These are five capacities that are part of our human consitution that can be developed, in the same way you would develop a muscle or a skill. Indeed, to some extent, they all come into play when you develop any skill at all: If you want to learn to play the piano, you first have to have faith that you can do it and that the method being taught by your teacher will cultivate that skill, you have to put in the effort, you have to keep in mind your lessons and apply them, you have to be focused and centered on the skill, and you have to discern what is helpful for developing the skill and what is a hindrance, and what is skilled and what is unskilled. So, yeah, basically, all these things, but for the skill of liberating the heart and mind!
Enough for today...we'll go through each of those and talk about them and the formulae they're connected to in this sutta.
One of the earliest lists in Buddhism is often referred to as "the 37 wings to awakening". It's not really a list, but a meta-list, containing seven other lists: The Four Right Exertions, the Four Bases of Power, the Four Establishings of Mindfulness, the Five Spiritual Faculties, the Five Spiritual Powers, the Seven Factors of Awakening, and the Noble Eightfold Path. What's interesting about this meta-list is that the individual list items of these various lists are interconnected in all kinds of ways. Really, by choosing to work with any one of the lists, you'll end up working on all of them at once. Indeed, even just choosing a single item to work on from one of these lists entails working on all of the rest of everything in all the lists! Buddhism is like that. It's an integrated, holistic practice that can be broken down into individual elements, but those elements are interpenetrating and mutually supportive. So I'm going to pick one and talk about it for a few posts.
I'm going to pick the Five Spiritual Faculties. Five is a nice number...the Discordians believe that everything in our experience can be related to the number five if you try hard enough. The first thing worth noting is that it doubles the Five Spiritual Powers! They are actually identical lists, but are considered two different lists...possibly because of an ancient clerical error that got invested with meaning upon later exegesis...
Part of why I'm picking this one is, a few weeks ago, I was just looking through suttas, trying to assemble a small collection that would cover all the basics of the 37 wings, and came across Saṃyutta Nikāya 48.10. It's a very short piece, like most of the suttas in the SN, but also very dense, as one of the "analysis" (vibhaṅga) suttas. And within it, it actually contains the formulae (or pericopes) for the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Four Right Exertions, the Four Bases of Power, and thus also three different factors from the Noble Eightfold Path! What a deal! So it seemed like it'd be fun to dig into it and use it as a scaffolding for a few posts.
Before getting into it, a few words on the Saṃyutta Nikāya. The collection of the Buddha's discourses, the Sutta Piṭaka, contains five smaller collections, the Nikāyas. The SN is the third, but there's some very good arguments out there that is, in fact, the oldest. Here's a possible story for how it came to be:
The Buddha wandered around a pretty significant chunk of central India, teachings lots of people who then established local communities. His sangha was designed to be self-governing, autonomous, and decentralized, and it was. Which ended up meaning all these different monks had slightly different collections of the teaching.
While dying, the Buddha refused to appoint a successor, instead saying that his teachings were all the leader the monks would need. So, naturally, after his death, all of the monks got together to try to remember as best they could. This is the First Council. The traditional accounts of the First Council recorded by the various early schools of Buddhism are almost certainly not historical, and heavily mythologized, but it's likely that something like it happened, where all the monks got together to try to collect and then standardize what would be regarded as the Buddha's teaching.
The SN is probably the oldest of these. A big reason this is thought is because both the overall structure of the collection as well as the individual discourses within that structure are conserved across the various early schools of Buddhism for which we now still have canons.
The Four Noble Truths are the foundation of Buddhism. And a popular hypothesis is that the Four Noble Truths also provided the scaffolding for the SN in its original form, which then began collecting and organizing related brief discourses under that rubric. There are now five volumes in the SN, but one of them is very different in theme, tone, and style from the others, so it's arguably been transplanted from elsewhere, or grafted onto an older framework. The other four volumes correspond to the Four Truths, and in the arrangement of the schools preserved in the Chinese canon, even correspond to the order of the truths.
So. The discourse of interest here, SN 48.10, is in the final volume, the Mahā Vagga, which corresponds to the Fourth Noble Truth, the one on the path to liberation.
The first three lines, then, which I can even translate with my limited Pāli knowledge (because they are very simple):
There are these five spiritual faculties, O monks.
What five?
The spiritual faculty of faith, the faculty of vigor, the faculty of mindfulness, the faculty of concentration, the factor of discernment.
Ack! Already we have problems, and I've gone with some traditional Buddhist Hybrid English translations. "Mindfulness" and "concentration" are incredibly tricky, the former because it's become confused by its recent popularity, the latter because it's a poor attempt at a word for which we really don't have a good translation. But we'll get into those later. I went with "discernment" rather than "wisdom" for paññā because I think that gets at what it's about better, even though the discernment is guided by wise understanding. It's wise discernment, maybe.
First, though, "faculties". The word is indriya, and they come from a Sanskrit adjuctive that means "belonging to Indra, King of the Gods". So in some sense they are capacities, or capabilities, but they are also governing or controling principles that partake of the nature of the divine. These are five capacities that are part of our human consitution that can be developed, in the same way you would develop a muscle or a skill. Indeed, to some extent, they all come into play when you develop any skill at all: If you want to learn to play the piano, you first have to have faith that you can do it and that the method being taught by your teacher will cultivate that skill, you have to put in the effort, you have to keep in mind your lessons and apply them, you have to be focused and centered on the skill, and you have to discern what is helpful for developing the skill and what is a hindrance, and what is skilled and what is unskilled. So, yeah, basically, all these things, but for the skill of liberating the heart and mind!
Enough for today...we'll go through each of those and talk about them and the formulae they're connected to in this sutta.