viriya
Energy, effort
[ VEER-ee-ya ]
Seeing it in life
Viriya is the heroic effort to abandon the unwholesome and develop the wholesome — a spiritual faculty, power, and factor of enlightenment.
In short
Vigor that supports and sustains associated states.
The analysis
Viriya is sustained energy directed at abandoning the unwholesome and developing the wholesome — the texts describe it with the image of someone who, having fallen, doesn't merely lie there but gathers effort to rise again. It's not raw intensity or busyness; a mind can be highly active and still lack viriya in this specific sense if the activity isn't oriented toward wholesome cultivation. It's one of the four bases of success (iddhipāda) when it becomes the dominant factor driving an effort.
Where it sits
Viriya is one of the five spiritual faculties, paired against samādhi for balance — too much energy without settling produces restlessness, too much settling without energy produces sloth. It's also the sixth factor of the noble eightfold path (right effort) and a factor of enlightenment.
Not the frantic effort of checking the account for the fifth time in an hour — that's closer to restlessness recruiting energy for an unhelpful end. Viriya is the different, quieter effort it takes to instead sit with the discomfort long enough to see what it actually is.
Commonly mistaken for
Hyperactivity or hustle. Viriya is specifically wholesome-directed energy; effort spent reinforcing an anxious pattern isn't viriya in the technical sense, whatever its intensity.
A fixed trait some people have and others lack. Like every cetasika, it arises and passes with specific cittas, and can be cultivated.
Abhidhammattha Saṅgaha II; Padhāna Sutta (SN 2.7).
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