The five forces – part one
by Martin Horan
The five forces are five simple practices that we can use to bring Dharma into our daily life. If we use them as a focus for our practice day by day, we can also adapt them at the end of our life (see Part two). They are also sometimes known as the five powers.
What is special about them?
The scope of the Buddhadharma is vast. Its goal is to utterly and permanently eliminate our individual suffering and perfect our happiness. It aims to achieve this result for every living being without exception.
When we perfect the practice of Dharma our perspectives and experience are thoroughly transformed. Our most positive qualities, such as our compassion and love become literally limitless. We see the ultimate nature of every phenomenon in every moment. At the same time, we have effortless capacity to connect and communicate with our fellow living beings in whatever way is most meaningful and helpful for them.
These transcendent goals of liberation and enlightenment can feel almost inconceivably remote from our own experience of life.
So, what can we do in a practical way to bring this path of vast scope and profound insight into the activities, issues and relationships we deal with day by day? The five forces give an answer to this question.
Where do they come from?
The five forces are taught in a text called Mind Training in Seven Points. This text was composed by the renowned Tibetan master Geshe Chekawa in the 12th century.
The main subject of the text is how to train the mind. Its special focus is development of the precious mind of bodhichitta – the altruistic aspiration, based on great love and great compassion, to attain enlightenment in order to best benefit all our fellow living beings.
As we will see below, the first of the five forces is setting an intention to act with bodhichitta motivation. Geshe Chekawa taught a special method for developing this great intention – the method of equalising and exchanging self with others.
This special lineage of the bodhichitta teachings was regarded for many generations as secret and was only transmitted by oral instruction from teacher to student. One of its most beautiful and well-known meditation techniques, that of tong.len or taking and giving, is worth taking the time to outline briefly now.
Taking and giving
Using simple breathing meditation as the basis, we can train in compassion – reflecting on the suffering of our fellow living beings, imagine drawing it into ourselves with the breath and dissolving it into emptiness at our heart.
We can train in love by recalling how all our fellow living beings wish for happiness and imagine all our happiness in the form of pure white light radiating out with the out breath and bringing perfect happiness to others.
To become familiar with this meditation we can start by reflecting on our own suffering and those of the people who are dearest to us. It is not so difficult to generate a heartfelt wish that our dear family members or friends could be free of all their problems.
We can do the same in cultivating our wish for their happiness. Then as we become more skilled, we can progressively expand the scope of the meditation to encompass more and more living beings whether they are close to us or not.
Practicing in this way, we can develop the heartfelt foundation of a bodhichitta motivation.
Using the five forces in our daily life
The five forces are taught in a single verse of Geshe Chekawa’s mind training text. It appears in a section of the text titled, “How to do a lifetime’s practice on a daily basis”. The verse, as translated by Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden, is found in Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism p 585.
The brief essential instruction is:
Blend the practice of one life with the five forces.
Of the instructions on mahayana transference
the five forces are the most important practice.
The first two lines mean that the five forces contain the essence of the bodhisattva path. If we wish to travel the path to enlightenment, they give us the essential instructions we need. We use them by “blending” our life with these five forces. That means, we bring them into our ordinary daily activities.
The second two lines also show how we can adapt these five trainings at the end of life – ensuring that when we leave this life we can do so with a positive, peaceful and happy mind (see Part two of this blog).
The five forces explained
By way of a brief summary, the five are as follows
1. force of beneficial intention – we set the positive intention to benefit others and work on expanding its scope. The most positive intention we can possibly develop is that of bodhichitta. We bring it to mind to the best of our ability every morning, whenever we sit down to meditate or before we begin important activities.
2. force of familiarity –through mindfulness we bring this beneficial intention to more and more of our activities. If we are skilful, we can see the connection between everything we do, even activities that seem insignificant, and our goal of enlightenment. Any activities that sustain our wellbeing, our health and our life also support our ability to traverse the path to enlightenment for the benefit of others.
3. force of the white seed -we nourish the development of our realisations on the path to enlightenment by continuously finding opportunities to accumulate positive energy or merit. Any actions of body, speech and mind that are positively motivated – e.g. by kindness, consideration and compassion – accumulate merit. Throughout our day there will always be opportunities to practise generosity, kindness and patience. If we are familiar with practices such as the seven limbs1 that will also help us to use meditation to accumulate merit quickly.
4. force of destruction – we need to overcome obstacles to our practice. The biggest obstacles to our progress are our own tendencies to negative minds and accumulated negative karma. We overcome our negative minds by being mindful of them as they arise in the moment and applying opponents to them. For example, by choosing to practice patience when anger arises. We overcome accumulated negative karma by purification practices such as the four opponent powers.2
5. force of dedication – every time we do, say or even think something positive we should recall our ultimate objective: enlightenment. Doing this dedicates and protects the energy or merit of our actions so that they continue to empower our progress all the way until we realise the ultimate objective of enlightenment.
If we incorporate the five forces into our daily life, we will reshape our way of thinking and acting. We will create new, positive habits. In a practical way we thereby bring the Dharma’s path of vast scope and profound insights into the activities, issues and relationships that we deal with day by day.
And, if our life has been shaped by the effort to become kinder, more compassionate and more purposeful day by day, that will definitely affect how we approach the end of our life (see Part two).
For further reading please see pages 585 – 590, Chapter 19 of Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism.
[1] The seven limbs are explained in Chapter 6 of Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism from page 157
[2] The four opponent powers are explained in chapter 6 of Path to Enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism from page 170