the five spiritual faculties: introduction

Buddhism 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...

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