👈🏼 previous note, 00.01. Faith and Effort
| growth | epistemic status |
|---|---|
| seedling - needs some TLC | 🟠 mixed |
| As well as being concerned about how compromised faith was impacting my effort, there were other doubts that would surface now and then, and which I wanted to essay my through - so the essaying has been an exercise in surfacing those doubts to have a better look at them. |
The first that comes to mind is whether awakening is possible ✅, and I am going to give them each a little badge as I go, because this is my working manual more than anything. I choose to believe this, in a way that feels like the saying, ‘Aim for the stars - if you fail, you will still land on the moon.’
I worried sometimes that my inherited worldview was hindering my practice, but it turns out my worldview is a lot more Buddhist than I thought ✅ The only 🚩 major hurdle is the idea of ‘progress’ or linear history, and the fantasy-consolation of humans evolving consciousness to an increasingly refined state, which is a very Enlightenment thing for me to think I suppose, but not an idea I necessarily agree with.
Related to this soteriological fantasy is the bodhisattva ideal, which has been a major source of doubt for me over the last few years, since moving from the Mahayana tradition to the Theravada. It dove-tails so nicely with my perceived need to save the world: a bodhisattva is the ‘bleeding-hearted liberal’ par excellence, the ultimate social-justice warrior. These are terms I do not use disparagingly - they are self-descriptors.
There is a convincing case though anyway, that the idea of a multiple-lifetime ‘bodhisattva career’ is an interpretation of Buddhist cosmology that is not found in Early Buddhism - it was added to the cosmology later.
People are putting ‘Bodhisattva’ on their business cards while in the cosmology, such an aspirant needs to make the vow in the presence of living buddha, who then has to prophecy whether the aspirant will experience the right conditions. So it’s not going to happen until Matreya (the next buddha, not the hippy festival), and then it will be for one buddha only - there can be only one budda per world-system.
espite knowing all this, I still sometimes worry that the practice is selfish because I have these conditioned beliefs that I need to ‘help’ in a ‘more direct’ way or save the world. I can’t quite tick these because they are still quite gnarly sources of doubt for me 🚩👀 .
Despite a long-thickened skin against being perceived as idealistic, I was worried about feeling or being perceived as credulous, but I understand that saddhā is like water to the oil of credulity. As Soma says, ‘Study of a teaching through inquiring into it is unfavourable to credulity.’ ✅
Concerns about repression and bypassing have caused doubts in the past, but at least two suttas address this. At this level I have also had doubts about whether Buddhism is holistic, because of concerns it doesn’t operate on the level of the personality. I have sometimes felt disheartened by what I know now is just an understood limitation of Buddhism.
Along with surfacing some important doubts, the process of developing this garden essay has clarified a few ideas I might call fallbacks 👉🏻 because these are ideas I can always lean-in to if I am feeling general doubt.