The thirty-seven aids to awakening

The "thirty-seven aids to awakening" (bodhipakṣadharma, the qualities "on the side of" awakening) is an early, comprehensive summary of everything the mind needs to develop in order to wake up - to reach the liberating understanding the Buddha taught. Rather than one technique, it gathers thirty-seven qualities into seven familiar groups, like a complete toolkit assembled from sets that also appear on their own elsewhere in the teaching.

The seven groups are: 1) the four foundations of mindfulness - clear awareness of the body, of feelings, of the mind, and of mental phenomena; 2) the four right efforts - preventing unarisen harmful states, abandoning those that have arisen, arousing wholesome states not yet present, and sustaining those already arisen; 3) the four bases of spiritual power - desire, energy, mind, and investigation, the drives that carry practice forward; 4) the five faculties - faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom; 5) the five powers - those same five qualities again, now grown strong and unshakable; 6) the seven factors of awakening - mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration, and equanimity; and 7) the Noble Eightfold Path - right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. (Four plus four plus four plus five plus five plus seven plus eight come to thirty-seven.)

Notice how the same core qualities - mindfulness, energy, concentration, wisdom - recur across the groups; the list isn't thirty-seven unrelated items but a few essential capacities, viewed from several angles and developed at increasing strength. Shared across the Buddhist traditions, it serves as a kind of master map, reassuring practitioners that the many practices they meet are all parts of one coherent path leading to the same goal.