👈🏼 previous note, 02. A Brief History of Faith
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| Let’s begin this chapter by pointing out the elephant in the room: ‘faith’ is almost a dirty word in the minds of many secular folk, especially modern Westerners like myself, and especially because it is tinged with religiosity. No rational person wants their credibility to be tainted by being perceived as faithful, where ‘faith’ is taken to mean ‘belief without evidence’. In dhamma practice, faith has a different function (more like ‘conviction’ or ‘confidence’), as denoted by the Pali, saddhā. [[What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula | Rahula]] (8) has a nice way of putting it: |
Almost all religions are built on faith—rather ‘blind’ faith it would seem. But in Buddhism emphasis is laid on ‘seeing’, knowing, understanding, and not on faith, or belief. In Buddhist texts there is a word saddhā (Skt. sraddha) which is usually translated as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. But saddha is not ‘faith’ as such, but rather ‘confidence’ born out of conviction.
Rahula says it is “‘confidence’ born out of conviction”, and I know this is better than blind faith because it requires considering the evidence or claims or arguments to discern whether they are reasonable, but conviction is still a kind of faith. It is certainly a step short of knowledge or direct experience, but such faith is more like a reasoned decision to trust or believe the Buddha’s teachings, with awareness that I need to check the claims for myself, which of course the Buddha encouraged.
Importantly, Buddha didn’t encourage us to just appraise the claims conceptually, but said ehi-passika, ‘come and see’, not come and believe. Rather than demanding blind belief, the Path is more like starting with lightly held belief, and seeing where it takes you. faith
The Buddha never asked us to commit the sort of blind belief that makes our local half-(un)conscious metaphysical materialist relatively okay with bleeding from the anus due to unknown causes, but never from the eyes. Forget about statues bleeding from the eyes! Just a hallucination. What the Buddha did ask of us ~ nay, demanded, sometimes with a stern admonishment ~ is that we hear the dhamma, reflect upon the dhamma, apply the dhamma, and see for oneself, ehipassiko, whether dhamma is true, or not.
“But that was India and twenty-five-hundred years ago ~ keep up, lad!”
“Sorry Dad, we can go back to talking about the weather forecast if you like.”
Because we place trust in so many things without even realising it and the weather forecast is just the beginning, because, not yet feeling sufficiently righteous about the right way to know, we1 proceed to scoff at others for having faith in the so-called supernatural or (‘Heaven forbid’, we say, apparently unaware of the irony) religion, only because our scientism hasn’t yet discovered that the super- becomes redundant upon direct experience of something like prophetic dreams or spontaneous astral travel during a near-death experience or Jesus/Mohammad/Gandalf at the end of the tunnel or … skies raining frogs.
‘Seeing is believing,’ we say, because we haven’t been with Buddhism for long enough as a culture to understand that the mind itself is also a sense faculty, and one that can ‘see’ things the eyes cannot. Considering the mind as a sense faculty in its own right though, requires a pivot: a sharp turn to avoid any quippyness about Bruce Willis telling bedtime stories and [his charge] whispering, “I see dead people.”
Because the point here is just that faith doesn’t have to be scary, anymore than ignorance has to be shameful: we’ve all got one (a mind), and I hope in this essay to deepen my own conviction, at least, that learning how to direct our attention with what I am now deciding to call ‘skilful faith’ might leaven our attachment to being afraid of feeling stupid for choosing to believe in something that might at least be liberative ~ considering we already do faith all, the, time, on the basis of many things we might never be able to know directly for ourselves. And in the Buddhist context, a human being ashamed of ignorance is like a fishing being ashamed of swimming.
Will the Earth get eaten by the sun, I don’t know. Will the bus arrive on time so I can not feel like a numpty for arriving sweaty and dishevelled at my friend’s place? 🤷 Is reality made of waves, or particles? Is there an afterlife? Who knows. Is history linear, or cyclical? Did something really come from nothing? What will I eat for dinner if I get home from work and the kids have eaten all the ice cream?
Do you get what I’m saying?
The assumptions we take for granted as the fundamentals of the science are just that, assumptions. Many of them can never be verified , because they are speculative (read: fictional2). Some of the discoveries that have knocked old-paradigm physics off the throne are so weird they may as well be legit science fiction.
And yet we place so much trust and faith in so many of the conclusions we arrive at from those fictions, without even realising it, and then we have the gaul to scoff at others for having faith in God without even asking, ‘Hey so, what is it you actually believe in? I’m curious.’ The modern religious faith I have encountered in others is often deeply metaphorical and literary, a kind of psychological mechanism that motivates good conduct, and has no actual relation to what the science zealots and militant atheists think they are scoffing at. It’s crazy, the hubris of declaring that one knows what is false in the domains of human experience and culture we are talking about here.
And I say this because I know that hubris personally: I’ve done my own bit of scoffing at the ‘Bible bashers’ and the ‘JoHos’ and the good-vibes-only hippies[^2]. Worse, I have scoffed at myself for entertaining the idea of hell realms and devas and the efficacy of imagining others being happy. And worst of all, the doubt that motivates all the scoffing is precisely what prevents us from accessing a way of being that might actually be liberative, which is a good place to pivot into Pascal’s Wager:
choosing to consciously, deliberately, after due consideration, believe in a worldview that might be liberative is categorically better than continuing to unconsciously, flailingly, after considering mostly what kind of infinite pleasure one can extract from the only finite planet they can see with their eyes, believe in a worldview that is flagrantly not liberative but scuttling the very same planet.[
[…] than continuing to unconsciously, flailingly, believe in a worldview that is flagrantly *not* liberative.
that faith doesn't have to be scary ~ we do it all the time, except our pre-dominant faith is in materialist hedonism, which keeps us trapped, at best, in dopamine loops that make us cranky when we don’t get our ice cream and, at worst, in samsara.
Faith in Buddhism
Faith in Buddhism is different from what we have come to understand about faith in the context of religion - looking at the word saddhā helps to clear this up, and and to see how confidence and conviction have a central place in Buddhist practice from the five hindrances through the five faculties and all the way to dependent liberation.
Without faith we wouldn’t have the motivation to strive - we would have no reason to apply effort or persist3 in the practice.
Protection of Truth
A function of faith in Buddhism is the protection of truth, as described in MN 95, the Caṅkī Sutta, but claiming one’s faith to be ‘the only truth, and everything else false’ merely creates a fetter.
Footnotes
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recovering materialists ↩
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I provide support for this claim from Wendell Berry’s essay 🏹 “Two Minds” for now, until I can uncover my other research into the philosophy of science and document it somewhere here. ↩
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Thānissaro translates viriya as ‘persistence’, which I prefer to ‘energy’ … it is easy to apply effort when one has energy, but the importance is in applying effort even when one doesn’t have the energy or motivation: that is persistence. ↩