Great Faith
or trust or confidence, if faith gives you the ick
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“Faith is the F word in Buddhism,” I once heard Thanissaro Bikkhu say during a talk, to great laughter from the audience. It’s true. Often, refugees from theistic religions are dismayed when they find out that faith also operates in Buddhism. They express disappointment or even mistrust that this wisdom tradition they’d turned to—in part to get away from beliefs—isn’t free of the need for faith. Buddhism seems so rational, so “reasonable,” as one of my friends says. Except faith here has little to do with belief and everything to do with experience. It’s both confidence and conviction borne out of direct contact with the truth. Don’t rely on tradition, scripture, or the status of the teacher, the Buddha counseled his students. Don’t place your trust on personal preferences, views, hearsay, or even reasoning and unquestioned faith. Only personal practice and verification should be used to evaluate a teaching’s truth, its effectiveness. Listening to it, reflecting on it, and putting it into practice, we should ask ourselves, Does it work? Is it true? If it does and if it is, then and only then should we place our trust in it. Or on it, if we want it to go deep.
A student once asked Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, “Why does it say in the Shema: ‘These words shall be on your heart’? Why ‘on’ and not ‘in’?” The Rebbe answered: “The heart is not always open. Therefore the Torah says: ‘Lay these words on your heart, so that when your heart breaks, the words can fall in.’” Great doubt is the heart breaking with the demands of the world and the need to answer those demands in a way that satisfies. Great faith is trusting that the heart won’t stay broken. That when the words of the teachings and the spirit of the teachings and the body of the teachings fall in, they’ll mend what needs to be mended. To be reliable, our faith can’t buckle under the weight of our doubt. It must match it, perfectly.
My first teacher used to say, “Trust yourself. Give yourself permission to really be yourself.” But how do we do that, we’d ask, when we’re not clear about who we are? How do we rely on what we haven’t seen, what we’re confused about? Faith, by definition, is aspirational. Like doubt, it asks us to stretch, to reach beyond where we are toward a place we haven’t been. Yet, unlike doubt, it rests on the confidence that we can do that—that we’re capable of bridging the distance between what we know and what we don’t. If faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” in the Old Testament, in Buddhism it’s “the evidence of things realized, the assurance of things not yet seen.” That’s what my teacher was saying: You already know. You just have to trust that knowledge and grow into the person you’re trying to become.
We all have some degree of faith, because without it, we’d never set off on the path or do anything that truly challenges us. The tension and instability that doubt brings up would be too hard to face, and so we wouldn’t. To do the kind of work that growing into ourselves requires, we must consider that work both possible and worthwhile, and we must know, however tenuously, that we’re the right people to do it. We have to trust that part of us that already knows, and then trust that knowledge enough to try and confirm it.
But because of the nature of doubt and faith, their relationship can be a constant dance: will I, can I? Yes, yes I can. Am I sure? Not at all, but others just like me have done it, so I must be able to also. Most human endeavors are more easily done in the company of others. When our own doubt threatens to crowd our faith, it’s useful to see another’s faith in action and draw strength from it.
Faith is like a river overflowing, the sage Nagasena said to King Milinda. Standing along the banks of this river is a great crowd of people, all spread out along the bank and staring at the water, too scared to cross. Up and down the line, one person or another leans forward and peers into the river, trying to gauge its depth to see if it’s safe to go in, but no one’s willing to take the chance—until one man decides he has the power and strength necessary. Tightly binding his loincloth (the sutra’s words, not mine), the man jumps into the water and wades across, and seeing him, the rest of the crowd follows.
But sometimes doubt does step on faith’s toes one too many times, and we fall into a type of “crisis of faith.” I’m using quotes because the crisis can only materialize if our faith isn’t based on experience. Beliefs can change, teachers can disappoint, texts can contradict, traditions can grow stiff and inapposite with age. Our own experience, on the other hand, can never deceive us. (Although we can and do deceive ourselves, but that’s not the same thing.) There’s a clear, foolproof way to discern whether a teaching is trustworthy, whether it’s deserving of our trust and attention. If it harms, drop it. If it helps, do it. And the only way to know which is which, is to investigate it for yourself, examine it carefully, and whenever possible, put it into practice.
If every last religious teaching in the world was uncontrovertibly proven to be false, this one yardstick would never fail us. Whether Jesus rose from the death or not doesn’t diminish the power of his enduring words: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” It’s a shame we’re so bad at following them. Or if, as my teacher would often say, some archaeologist unearthed evidence that the Buddha never lived, that he was a product of someone’s imagination, it still wouldn’t change the effectiveness of his advice: “Refrain from harm, practice good, and master your mind.” Isn’t this a teaching to put our faith in? Don’t do bad things because even though you might enjoy them in the moment, their effects will eventually catch up with you. This is a universal law, though we go to great pains to ignore it. Do good things because it will make you happy and it’ll make others happy with the kind of happiness that lasts and multiplies. Edith Wharton said there are two ways of spreading light: to be a candle or the mirror that reflects it. And, to live well, learn to tell the difference between what helps and what harms. Spend your entire life getting really clear about it, because all of us depend on this clarity.
It’s interesting that the root of the word “dogma,” dek, means “to take or accept,” while the root of “faith,” bheidh, means “to trust or confide.” We can only fully accept what we trust and, in Buddhism at least, we can only fully trust what we’ve lived—or enough of what we’ve lived to ascertain that the direction we’re headed in is the right one. That’s the dance of doubt and faith. We don’t have to have each step down pat, but watching others and watching ourselves, we can set one foot down and see if the ground under it holds. If it does, we try the other foot and keep going, slowly building a choreography for life based on these three failsafe steps in which to put our faith. Don’t do harm. Do good. Know your mind.
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Beautiful! That is life itself. The only thing I’d add is someone to take the poor little guy/girl by the hand and help them with the first few steps.
Sending metta.