The Five Powers

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37 DHAMMĀ of ENLIGHTENMENT

			4 satipaṭṭhāna
	4 Efforts			4 Bases
5 Faculties				5 Powers
		7 Factors
	8 Path Factors

The Five Powers (Sanskrit, Pali: pañca bala) in Buddhism are faith, effort, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. They are one of the seven sets of "qualities conducive to enlightenment." They are parallel facets of the five "spiritual faculties."

1 Translation
2 Exegesis
3 Notes
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Translation

Pañca (Sanskrit, Pali) means "five."^[1] Bala (Sanskrit, Pali) means "power," "strength," "force."^[2]

[edit] Exegesis

Faith and Wisdom balance each other, as do Energy and Concentration. The Five Faculties are ‘controlling' faculties because they control or master their opposites. The faculties and powers are two aspects of the same thing.

Faith (saddha) - controls doubt
Energy/Effort/Persistence (viriya) – controls laziness
Mindfulness (sati); - controls heedlessness
Concentration (samādhi) - controls distraction
Wisdom/Discernment (pañña, prajña) – controls ignorance

[edit] Notes

^ See Rhys Davids & Stede (1921-25), p. 387, entry for "Pañca," retrieved 2008-03-11 from "U. of Chicago" at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2:1:971.pali; and, Monier-Williams (1964), e.g., p. 579, entry "Pañcaka," retrieved 2008-03-11 from "U. of Cologne" at http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/MWScanpdf/mw0578-paJcAGguri.pdf.
^ See Rhys Davids & Stede (1921-25), p. 482, entry for "Bala," retrieved 2008-03-11 from "U. of Chicago" at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2:1:3245.pali; and, Monier-Williams (1964), p. 722, entry "Bala," retrieved 2008-03-11 from "U. of Cologne" at http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/cgi-bin/serveimg.pl?file=/scans/MWScan/MWScanjpg/mw0722-barAsI.jpg.

[edit] References

Monier-Williams, Monier (1899, 1964). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press. An on-line search engine for the MWD is available from the "U. of Cologne" at http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/.

Rhys Davids, T.W. & William Stede (eds.) (1921-5). The Pali Text Society’s Pali–English Dictionary. Chipstead: Pali Text Society. An on-line search engine for the PED is available from "Chicago U." at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/pali/.

[edit] See also

Bodhipakkhiyadhamma - lists the 32 qualities conducive to Enlightenment, which includes the Five Powers.
Indriya - "faculty," includes extended discussion of the Five Spiritual Faculties.
Five Wisdoms