Don’t Believe What I Think: Essaying on having saddhā in faith
🎯 Perhaps my first encounter with Buddhist faith (saddhā) was at a Tibetan centre in Adelaide, inquiring about how to hold skilful view when I had not yet had direct experience of the truth myself – and being told I needed to take it on faith. This didn’t exactly inspire confidence in me at the time, but there are seven other Path factors to consider and so I focused on those. In fact, I think that is part of the advice I got: focus on the other Path factors, and faith in skilful view will naturally develop.
However, a wheel with a single untended spoke is bound to yield a bumpy ride at best, and so it was: not looking into right view because I thought it could wait until later in my development, I left untended a wide range of half-(un)conscious doubts that would rear their head from time to time. And by ‘wide’ I mean ‘cosmological’: is enlightenment in this lifetime within the range of my worldview? If not, then doubt. If so, then striving1. But I’m getting ahead of myself. cosmology
My interest was aroused again when I was at Bodhivana2, where I found Bhikkhu Bodhi’s essay about dependent liberation, and it was faith again that I got stuck on. All I could find about cultivating faith was contemplation of the Triple Gem, which just felt a bit circular for my tastes - like reading the Bible for evidence it is God’s word.
When I was at Dhammagiri after Bodhivana, I started hearing about the idea of the dhammanusari and saddhanusari, the wisdom- or faith-follower - one who has developed the the five faculties to an unspecified degree of maturity. It is said that such a practitioner was destined at least for stream-entry at the time of death - and, fancifully, that a world-system could not end while one remained a dhammanusari or saddhanusari. As well as these guarantees, it is in the suttas that developing the faculties to this extent was considered by the Buddha to be a kind of pre-noble noble one, or or pre-*ariyasāvaka*.
I love it when I find new stones on the Path, and ones that might even be within reach. So I was intrigued, and this was perhaps the tipping point, after which I could hardly prevent myself from looking more into faith. Starting with the five faculties, it soon became clear that faith is central to progress on the Path in general, but specifically for these early stages: one must fully develop faith among the faculties to become a -nusari, and from there one may progress to the path of stream-entry, the fruit of which dispels all doubt about the Path - along with the other first three fetters.
The same as I wasn’t keen on faith at the Tibetan centre in Adelaide, I knew that I would need to do some work on understanding saddhā if I wanted to cultivate it. I needed to know more about what faith actually means in Buddhism, and what it doesn’t mean.
So if saddhābhāvanā is a genuine Pali word, I can say this garden is an exercise in saddhābhāvanā - in cultivating faith. I am building the essay for this garden because even though my saddhā is generally sufficiently robust, I understand it may wane at any time3, so having a resource such as this - and having gone through such a process to build it - will come in handy.
My understanding of faith began to feel increasingly pressing as my study developed, because I began to see how compromised faith was impacting the amount and type of effort 👉🏻 that I was applying.
faith skilfulview theeightfoldpath
Footnotes
-
and striving is the most supportive in moving from faith to realisation, as described in the Caṅkī Sutta ↩
-
which is interesting when I come to think of it because the faith-heavy culture is part of what deterred me from ordaining there, but I see now that faith in a single authoritative teacher is different from the saddhā I have come to understand through this essaying ↩
-
faith wavers in all practitioners until stream-entry, after which it becomes ‘unshakeable ↩