The Five Faculties and Five Powers

T1606 marks this cultivation sequence as strictly ordered, and the order itself carries the whole point: one must first simply accept the four truths as true (faith) before diligence has anything to attach itself to; diligence, once aroused, needs recollection to keep the truths continuously in view rather than losing them the moment attention wanders; recollection, once steady, becomes the very basis on which one-pointed concentration can be built; and only once the mind is genuinely concentrated can wisdom's own discerning activity actually operate with any precision. Each faculty, in other words, is the specific precondition the next one requires — faith enables diligence, diligence enables recollection, recollection enables concentration, and concentration enables wisdom — five capacities growing directly out of one another in a single unbroken chain, aimed squarely at the four stages (heat, summit, forbearance, the supreme mundane dharma) that make up the path of preparation immediately before the path of seeing itself.

The treatise itself is characteristically terse here, and T1606 explains exactly why so little needs to be added: the five powers share the very same object, the very same essence, the very same accompaniment, and the very same cultivation as the five faculties already just described — faith, diligence, recollection, concentration, and wisdom are not a second, different set of five qualities but the identical five, simply named again from a different angle. The distinction lies entirely in their fruit. As faculties, these five qualities are still capable of being overpowered by their opposing obstacles — faith by doubt, diligence by laziness, recollection by forgetfulness, concentration by distraction, wisdom by delusion — even while they are actively growing stronger. Once cultivation has advanced far enough that each quality can diminish its corresponding obstacle without itself being overturned in return, that same quality is no longer merely called a faculty but a power. The two terms thus mark two different points along a single continuous line of growth, not two different lists of qualities to memorize side by side.