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the five spiritual faculties: conclusion
Aug. 4th, 2019 07:16 amFor the last series of posts (outline at the bottom of this post), I've been exploring the five spiritual faculties: faith, vigor, mindfulness, stillness, and wisdom. I thought I'd wrap up by talking about how, like many lists in Buddhism, this one can be viewed sequentially but in reality all of these support each other.
The simple sequential formula has faith coming first, inspiring vigor in practice, enabling one to become established in mindfulness, which results in a stilling of the mind, and the clarity of a still mind enables the arising of wisdom. But each of these support the others, too.
Faith supports all of them simply because if you believe that this is a good thing to practice, and you believe in your ability to do the practice, you will practice it. Similarly, vigor supports the others. Vigor, in this context, includes right effort, which is the effort to abandon the unskillful and cultivate the skillful. The skills we wish to cultivate are mindfulness, stillness, and wisdom, and to a lesser extent faith, so once wisdom can identify what the unskillful is, vigor can work on abandoning it, and once wisdom can identify what the skillful is, vigor can work on cultivating it. The unskillful prevents us from obtaining mindfulness and stillness, while the skillful brings us to those states, so vigor supports those. Mindfulness, the awareness and clear understanding of what is happening, enables us to really see what wisdom is pointing to, and to keep it in mind, thus giving right effort targets to work on. Stillness supports everything by conferring the same clarity that allows wisdom to arise. So ultimately, working on one entails working on all of them.
So, that concludes my series of posts on these capacities, the abilities, that we all have.
The simple sequential formula has faith coming first, inspiring vigor in practice, enabling one to become established in mindfulness, which results in a stilling of the mind, and the clarity of a still mind enables the arising of wisdom. But each of these support the others, too.
Faith supports all of them simply because if you believe that this is a good thing to practice, and you believe in your ability to do the practice, you will practice it. Similarly, vigor supports the others. Vigor, in this context, includes right effort, which is the effort to abandon the unskillful and cultivate the skillful. The skills we wish to cultivate are mindfulness, stillness, and wisdom, and to a lesser extent faith, so once wisdom can identify what the unskillful is, vigor can work on abandoning it, and once wisdom can identify what the skillful is, vigor can work on cultivating it. The unskillful prevents us from obtaining mindfulness and stillness, while the skillful brings us to those states, so vigor supports those. Mindfulness, the awareness and clear understanding of what is happening, enables us to really see what wisdom is pointing to, and to keep it in mind, thus giving right effort targets to work on. Stillness supports everything by conferring the same clarity that allows wisdom to arise. So ultimately, working on one entails working on all of them.
So, that concludes my series of posts on these capacities, the abilities, that we all have.