The Seven Factors of Awakening

The previous essay followed Buddhaghosa’s seven purifications, a map of the whole Buddhist path as a sequence of stages. This one goes back behind the great commentator to the Buddha himself, and to a shorter list that he gave again and again, in the forest, in the city, at the bedside of the sick: the seven factors of awakening.

They are mindfulness (sati), investigation of states (dhamma-vicaya), energy (viriya), joy (pīti), tranquillity (passaddhi), concentration (samādhi) and equanimity (upekkhā). The Pali word for them, bojjhaṅga, joins bodhi, awakening, with aṅga, a limb or member: they are the limbs of awakening, or the limbs of one who is awakening. The early scriptures give them a whole collection of discourses to themselves. And they make a different kind of map from any in this series so far. The castle, the valleys, the stages of knowledge and the purifications describe a territory to be crossed. The seven factors describe the condition of the traveller: what a mind is like when it is ready to see.

A teaching for the community§

In the account of the Buddha’s last months, the Book of the Great Decease, he gathers the monks and gives them a series of conditions for the welfare of the community. One of them is this: so long as the brethren develop the seven factors of awakening, mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration and equanimity, the community may be expected not to decline but to prosper (The Buddha 1881, Mahā-parinibbāna Suttanta I.9). Later in the same account, when he sums up the teaching he has given over his life, the seven factors are among the things he names (The Buddha 1881, Mahā-parinibbāna Suttanta III.65).

It is worth noticing where this list is placed. It is not a secret doctrine for advanced practitioners. It is part of what the Buddha thought every member of the community needed, and part of what he thought would keep the community alive after his death. Rhys Davids, translating it in 1881, called the factors the sevenfold higher wisdom. They are the qualities the whole path is meant to bring to maturity.

How the factors arise§

In the Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing the Buddha describes how the seven factors arise one from another, and the order is itself a teaching.

Mindfulness§

It begins with mindfulness: the steady, clear, unforgetting presence of mind that knows what is happening as it happens. In the discourse it is developed through attention to the breath, and to the body, feelings, mind and mental states that the breath reveals. Mindfulness is the root of the list because nothing can be seen that is not first noticed. It is not yet analysis or effort; it is simply being there.

The Buddhist tradition never tires of praising this quality. The Dhammapada calls heedfulness the path to the deathless and heedlessness the path of death: the heedful do not die, while the heedless are as if already dead (The Buddha 1881, II.21). Mindfulness is the practice of that heedfulness, moment by moment.

Investigation§

From mindfulness comes investigation of states (dhamma-vicaya). Abiding mindful, the meditator examines and explores what is present: is this wholesome or unwholesome, skilful or unskilful? Is it arising or passing? Is it pleasant, painful, neither? The word vicaya means sifting or sorting. It is the discriminating intelligence that does not merely observe experience but understands it, sorting the qualities that lead to suffering from those that lead away from it. Later Buddhist writers identified it with wisdom itself.

Energy§

From investigation comes energy (viriya): the effort that the work of understanding calls up. The Buddha describes it as energy that does not flag. It is not strain or anxious striving. It is the vigour of a mind that has seen what is worth doing and goes on doing it, like a fire that has caught.

Joy§

From energy comes joy (pīti), and the discourse specifies its kind: joy that is not of the flesh, unworldly joy. It is the gladness that rises in a mind that is clear and engaged, the delight of practice going well. The tradition describes it in many intensities, from a slight thrill that raises the hair to a joy that fills the whole body like water soaking through a lump of soap powder. It is not the goal; but its presence is a sign that the mind is coming alive.

Tranquillity§

From joy comes tranquillity (passaddhi): the calming of body and mind. Joy, at first, can be agitating; as it matures, it settles. The body relaxes, the mind grows quiet. This is the turning point of the list, the moment at which the rising, energetic factors give way to the calm ones.

Concentration§

From tranquillity comes concentration (samādhi): the unified mind, gathered on its object. The Buddha says simply that for one whose body is tranquil and who is happy, the mind becomes concentrated. Concentration here is not forced fixation. It is the natural composure of a mind that is calm and glad.

Equanimity§

And from concentration comes equanimity (upekkhā): the mind looks on closely at what it has become, evenly, without leaning towards or away. Equanimity is often misunderstood as indifference. In the Buddha’s sense it is the opposite: it is a balance so complete that the mind can attend to anything, pleasant or painful, without being pulled. It is the factor in which the others come to rest, and the one that, in the discourse, leads on to true knowledge and liberation.

A balance, not a staircase§

The order of arising suggests a ladder. But the Buddha’s most practical teaching on the factors treats them as a balance, and it is here that this map becomes most unlike the others.

In one discourse in the Bojjhaṅga-saṃyutta he takes the image of fire. When the mind is sluggish, he says, it is the wrong time to develop tranquillity, concentration and equanimity, just as a man who wanted to make a small fire blaze up would be foolish to throw wet grass on it. It is the right time to develop investigation, energy and joy, like adding dry grass and blowing on the flames. But when the mind is restless, the reverse is true. Then investigation, energy and joy only stoke it, and what is needed is tranquillity, concentration and equanimity, which are like wet grass on a fire that is too high. Mindfulness, he adds, is useful always.

This is a teaching for practice, not a description of stages. The seven factors fall into three groups: three that rouse, three that calm, and mindfulness, which watches both and knows which is needed. The commentators compared mindfulness to salt, which is wanted in every dish. The art is not to climb from one factor to the next but to read the state of the mind and supply what it lacks, as a rider keeps a horse at an even pace, or a musician tunes a string neither too slack nor too tight.

Every serious contemplative tradition knows this problem, and most give some version of the answer. The early Christian monks warned against both sloth and excessive zeal. Teresa told her nuns not to strain in prayer, and also not to let their fear of effort become an excuse. The Bhagavad Gītā describes yoga as neither for one who eats too much nor for one who starves. What is distinctive about the Buddha’s teaching is its precision: he names the factors on each side and says exactly when each is called for.

Not afraid of joy§

It may seem strange that joy is a factor of awakening at all. Much religious practice, Buddhist and otherwise, has been suspicious of pleasure, and the Buddha himself spent years in severe asceticism before his awakening. The discourses tell how he gave it up. Emaciated and no nearer his goal, he remembered a day in his childhood when, sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree while his father worked, he had entered of his own accord a state of joy and happiness born of seclusion, apart from any sensual pleasure. Could that be the way? And he asked himself why he should be afraid of a happiness that had nothing to do with sensual desire or unwholesome things.

That question stands behind the place of joy among the seven factors. There is a joy that binds and a joy that frees; the first comes from getting what one craves, the second from the mind’s own clarity and composure. The Buddha does not ask his followers to suppress the second. He asks them to recognize it, let it ripen into tranquillity, and not cling to it. Joy is a factor of awakening precisely because it is not the end: it carries the mind on, as it carried the young Siddhattha from the edge of exhaustion to the seat under the tree where he awoke.

Knowing the factors as they come and go§

In the Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness the seven factors appear once more, as something to be watched. Among the contemplations of mental states, the meditator is told to know, for each factor, whether it is present or absent; how an absent factor comes to arise; and how a present one comes to fulfilment through development. When mindfulness is there, one knows that it is there; when it is not, one knows that it is not. The same for investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration and equanimity.

This is a quiet but radical instruction. It means that the factors of awakening are not only to be cultivated but to be known, as they come and go, without pretending to have them when one does not. A meditator who notices that equanimity is absent has already exercised mindfulness and investigation. The map is used from inside, in the moment, as an honest account of what is and is not there. There is nothing to fake and nothing to wait for: only the present state of the mind, seen clearly, and the next right step.

The opposite of the hindrances§

The seven factors are paired, in the discourses, with the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and doubt. The hindrances are what keep the mind from seeing; the factors are what allow it to. The Buddha speaks of each as having its nourishment. Wrong attention feeds the hindrances, as fuel feeds a fire; wise attention feeds the factors. Repeatedly giving careful attention to what is wholesome nourishes mindfulness; to the difference between skilful and unskilful states, investigation; to the elements of effort and persistence, energy; and so on through the list.

This turns the map inside out. The seven factors are not distant achievements but qualities that are fed or starved by what one attends to, all the time. Each moment of attention is a choice of nourishment. The practitioner does not wait for awakening to arrive; they keep feeding the qualities from which it comes.

The factors at the bedside§

One group of discourses tells a story that has shaped Buddhist practice ever since. The great disciple Mahākassapa falls seriously ill, and the Buddha visits him. He asks whether Kassapa is bearing up, and then recites to him the seven factors of awakening, which, he says, when developed and cultivated lead to direct knowledge, to awakening, to nibbāna. Kassapa, delighted, recovers from his illness. The same happens with Mahāmoggallāna. And then, the discourses say, the Buddha himself falls ill, and the monk Mahācunda recites the seven factors to him, and he too recovers.

In the Theravāda countries the discourses on the factors are still chanted for the sick, as a protective recitation. It is easy to treat this as folk belief. But the stories say something about what the factors are. They are not technical terms in a manual. They are the qualities of a healthy mind, and to be reminded of them, by a friend at one’s bedside, is to be reminded of what one is capable of. Mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, equanimity: hearing the list, a sick person is called back to themselves.

Where the factors lead§

The Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing ends with a chain. Mindfulness of breathing, developed and cultivated, fulfils the four foundations of mindfulness. The four foundations fulfil the seven factors of awakening. The seven factors fulfil true knowledge and liberation. In another discourse the Buddha says that the factors are called factors of awakening because they lead to awakening.

What that awakening is, the factors themselves do not say. That is their particular discretion. They describe the mind that is ready, not what it sees. Buddhaghosa’s map went on to describe the path moment in which the mind takes the unconditioned as its object. The seven factors stop at the threshold: a mind mindful, discerning, energetic, glad, calm, collected and even, open to whatever is there.

What this map teaches§

Set beside the other maps in this series, the seven factors make a distinctive contribution. They describe the qualities of the traveller rather than the stages of the road. And they show that the path is not only a sequence but a balance: that the same seven qualities are needed at every stage, in different proportions, and that the skill of the path lies in knowing which is called for now.

In this they complement the maps of stages. Teresa’s dwellings, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha’s stages and Buddhaghosa’s purifications all describe where a traveller has reached; the seven factors describe what a traveller needs to go on, wherever they are. A person in the third dwelling who has grown careful and cautious lacks energy and joy; a person carried away by the raptures of the sixth lacks equanimity. Read this way, the seven factors are a diagnostic that can be applied to any map.

They also share something with the others that is easy to overlook: they end in a calm that is not passivity. Teresa’s soul in the seventh dwelling works more than ever. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha’s liberated sage goes back to his duties. Equanimity, the last of the factors, is not withdrawal but the balance from which clear seeing and right action become possible.

The next essay goes back to the Christian West, and to the earliest of all these maps: the seven levels of the soul that Augustine of Hippo described in a dialogue written soon after his conversion, rising from the mere fact of being alive to the vision of truth.