Dawn Neal: Planting Seeds - The Five Faculties (pt 1)

Dharma Seed: dharma talks and meditation instruction - dharmaseed.org

Dawn Neal explores the Five Faculties—faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom—as essential supports for spiritual practice, using stories from the Buddha’s time to illustrate their interplay. She emphasizes

Key takeaways

• Faith develops through stages: borrowed, bright, and verified.

Transcript preview

Good morning everyone. So today I'm going to talk about teaching that is well known to some of you and perhaps new to others, which is the five faculties of mind that support drama practice, general development along a path. And they all interrelate. what they are we probably won't get through all of them today but I will talk about them more when I'm back in July they are confidence or faith sata veria energy or effort sati mindfulness samai settledness And I'd like to walk into this topic with a story from the Buddha's time. And in this story, the Buddha encounters a wealthy Brahmin, a wealthy man, a farmer, kind of not just someone tilling the soil himself, but someone who has owned property and has whole teams of people working with him. And they encounter each other during the sewing season. you know when the Brahmin's team is planting. And the Buddha was a mendicant, right? He went around with a bowl and like all other mendicants offered the opportunity for people to give generously in order for him to survive. So there's still a class of folks who are beggars today in India and other South Asian countries. This Brahmin takes one look at the Buddha and in a really kind of judgmental way says, you know, I work hard, I plow, I harvest to earn my food. Shouldn't you do the same thing? Kind of snippy. other than getting defensive or upset uses the farmer's own language to offer just a little bit of a teaching saying, I too am engaged in continuous cultivation. Conviction, faith, confidence, etc. is the seed. Those are the seeds I plant. Wisdom is my yoke and my plow and mindfulness is the cutting edge of the plow the plow share that which opens the earth to the possibility of the seeds taking root I thought this was a lovely little anecdote because it really points to how these qualities work together and cultivating our own internal ecology our own internal garden along the path. So in terms of faith, confidence, conviction, there are several important kinds from the perspective of Darma practice. There is, and they're kind of three tiers, they're developmental, borrowed faith, bright faith, and verified faith. And if you don't like the word faith, and if you don't like the word faith, trust or confidence in there, you know, borrowed, right, and verified. So borrowed faith is hearing or reading the teachings. Maybe, you know, you hear about it for the first time, maybe you just hear about secular, mindfulness, meditation even. And there's a trust that there's something there for you or at least a provisional trust and interest. a willingness to experiment. It can also, faith can be borrowed from trusting the teacher. So what they say may or may not make sense to you, but how they show up you just look at the person you're like, yeah, I want some of that, or want to be like that, just a little bit. More than one person has come to this path because a friend had been meditating for months or years. years, never proselytizing, but the person sees the transformation in their friend. The light goes on, oh, maybe it's time. So that's the borrowed level. And that can persist well into practice for a while, right? But eventually, bright faith, bright faith, bright, bright. confidence can emerge. This is tasting the possibilities of the practice. Something's going right. There can be a little bit of a tailwind or a sense of something beginning to shift. So for myself, the first year I meditated, I was in the Zen tradition at the time, and I didn't know any better, so I just kind of sat on a cushion on one of these mats. these times and I wasn't expecting anything particular to happen during my since which was good because nothing particular did. But what I did notice was in the rest of my life I was happier, calmer, a little bit more aware and definitely more patient and that was enough. but little incremental shifts like, oh, the days I meditate, more things go right. That's bright faith. Then there's verified faith, verified conviction, trust, confidence. And that is after something has really opened up, so it's a deep trust, confidence, and that is after something has really opened