The Five Faculties PUTTING WISDOM IN CHARGE OF THE MIND Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) 2 “The faculty of conviction, the faculty of persistence, the faculty of mindfulness, the faculty of concentration, the faculty of discernment: When a disciple of the noble ones discerns, as they have come to be, the origination, the passing away, the allure, the drawbacks, and the escape from these five faculties, he is called a disciple of the noble ones who has attained the stream—never again destined for the lower realms, certain, headed for self-awakening.… “When—having discerned, as they have come to be, the origination, the passing away, the allure, the drawbacks, and the escape from these five faculties—a monk is released from lack of clinging/sustenance, he is called an arahant whose effluents are ended, who has reached fulfillment, done the task, laid down the burden, attained the true goal, laid to waste the fetter of becoming, and who is released through right gnosis.” — SN 48:3–4 3 copyright 2017 ṭhānissaro bhikkhu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. To see a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. “Commercial” shall mean any sale, whether for commercial or non-profit purposes or entities. questions about this book may be addressed to Metta Forest Monastery Valley Center, CA 92082-1409 U.S.A. additional resources More Dhamma talks, books and translations by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu are available to download in digital audio and various ebook formats at dhammatalks.org. printed copy A paperback copy of this book is available free of charge. To request one, write to: Book Request, Metta Forest Monastery, PO Box 1409, Valley Center, CA 92082 USA. 4 Preface In May of this year, members of Le Refuge, a Buddhist group located near Marseilles, invited me to lead an nine-day retreat on the topic of the five faculties (indrīya): conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are a set of qualities that the Buddha numbered among his most important teachings. When put in charge of the mind, they lead all the way to awakening. Taken together, they deal primarily with the practice of meditation, which makes them a good framework for a meditation retreat. However, the first faculty— conviction—focuses on questions of self and world: what kinds of happiness you believe you are capable of attaining, along with what kind of happiness you believe can be found in the world. This means that the five faculties also provide an excellent framework for covering the entire practice of the Buddha’s teachings, both on retreat and in the world at large. The talks of the retreat were presented in two series: a series of evening talks on the five faculties, and a series of morning talks on practical issues arising in meditation, treating them in light of the five faculties. Every afternoon, there was a period for questions and answers concerning issues arising from the talks and from the retreatants’ experiences in meditation. The present book is based on both series of talks along with some of the questions and answers taken from the Q&A periods, presented chronologically. In a few cases, questions have been taken out of order and placed immediately after the talks to which they seem most clearly related. The talks, questions, and answers have been edited and expanded so as to make their coverage of the main topics of the retreat more complete than I was able to manage on the spot. The talks draw on suttas, or discourses, from the Pāli Canon and on the writings and talks of the ajaans, or teachers, of the Thai forest tradition, in which I was trained. For people unfamiliar with the Canon, I have added passages from the discourses at the back of the book to flesh out some of the points made in the talks. These are followed by a glossary of Pāli terms. For people unfamiliar with the Thai forest tradition, you should know that it is a meditation tradition founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by Ajaan Sao Kantasīlo and Ajaan Mun Bhūridatto. The ajaans mentioned in the talks trained under Ajaan Mun. Of these, Ajaan Fuang Jotiko and Ajaan Suwat Suvaco were my teachers. Ajaan Fuang, although he spent some time training directly under Ajaan 5 Mun, spent more time training under one of Ajaan Mun’s students, Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo. Many people have helped with the preparation of this book. In particular, I would like to thank the people of Le Refuge who made the retreat possible; my interpreter, Khamaṇo Bhikkhu (Than Lionel); and Philippe and Watthani Cortey-Dumont, who hosted my entire stay in France. Here at Metta, the monks at the monastery helped in preparing the manuscript, as did Addie Onsanit, Nathaniel Osgood, and Isabella Trauttmansdorff. Any mistakes in the book, of course, are my own responsibility. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) M e t t a F o r e s t M o n a s t e r y O c t o b e r , 2 0 1 7 6 Abbreviations AN Aṅguttara Nikāya DN Dīgha Nikāya MN Majjhima Nikāya SN Saṁyutta Nikāya References to DN and MN are to discourse (sutta); those to AN and SN are to section (nipāta, saṁyutta) and discourse. Numbering for AN and SN follows the Thai Edition of the Pāli Canon. All translations from these texts are by the author and are based on the Royal Thai Edition of the Pāli Canon (Bangkok: Mahāmakut Rājavidyālaya, 1982). 7 DAY ONE : EVENING Introduction April 22, 2017 Good evening and welcome to our retreat. It’s always a pleasure to be here meditating together with you. I hope the retreat is beneficial for everyone. The theme of the retreat will be the five faculties: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. 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. Their primary focus is on the practice of meditation, but the first faculty, conviction, deals with how you view the world and how you live within the world. For that reason, it’s an aid in training your mind in all the aspects of the practice that surround meditation. The five faculties are listed in the order in which they ordinarily develop. You begin with conviction because conviction deals with your views about what’s possible in terms of your self and of your world. In terms of the world, you’re convinced about what is possible and desirable to strive for. In terms of your self, conviction deals with what you believe you are capable of doing. In the Buddha’s teachings, we’re looking for a happiness that goes beyond anything we’ve known before, and so it’s important to have a sense of the world that allows for that happiness, and a sense of yourself as capable of finding it. Because this happiness is beyond the ordinary, you can’t know whether it’s possible until you’ve reached it, which means that the beliefs that help you reach it have to rank as a matter of conviction, and not of true knowledge. They become knowledge only when they’ve produced the desired results. Building on conviction, you then put forth the persistent effort to develop within yourself whatever’s going to be skillful on the path and to abandon anything unskillful that will get in the way of the path. Mindfulness is what remembers what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. It also remembers what to do with skillful qualities and unskillful qualities when they are present in the mind—and how to develop skillful qualities when they aren’t. Concentration builds on persistence and mindfulness in that, when skillful 8 qualities are fully developed, they lead the mind to a state of stillness and peace, together with a sense of deep inner well-being. The stillness then allows you to detect things in the mind that you can’t notice when it’s running around. The sense of well-being gives you the strength needed to nourish the mind in order to keep on the path. Supported and nourished in this way, discernment then checks the results of what you’re doing to see how they can be improved. In this way, it then feeds back into the other qualities as well, strengthening your conviction, persistence, mindfulness, and concentration. In the Buddha’s image, the first four qualities are like the rafters you put up to support a roof, while discernment is the ridgepole that connects them all and makes them firm. The ridgepole relies on the rafters but it also ties them together so that they’re solid and tight. These five qualities are also called strengths. The difference between “faculty” and “strength” lies in the intensity. The Pāli word for faculty, indrīya, is related to Indra, the king of the gods. When something is a faculty in the mind, it’s in charge. You can think of the mind as being like a committee. A strength is a strong member of the committee, whereas a faculty is someone who has taken over the committee and runs it. When you think of the mind as a committee, it’s important to realize that each member of the committee consists of what the Buddha calls a bhava, or becoming.