This
talk was given in El Centro
Budista Triratna de Barcelona,
Sangha Night, March 10th
2020 and again at Mid-Essex Centre, Sangha Night, Jan 20th 2021
There are many different ways to talk about what faith means in Buddhism. The word in Sanskrit is Shraddha or Saddha in Pali. This word comes from a similar root to the Latin 'cor', meaning heart. To have faith in something is to have a heart response. In other words faith is primarily emotional.
The Buddhist scholar Dr. Conze talks about faith as having four elements Emotional, Volitional, Intellectual and Social. Elsewhere faith is spoken of as consisting of intuition, reason and experience and traditionally it is talked about under the headings of Deep Conviction, Lucidity and Longing. (Way to Wisdom seminar and Know Your Mind) It would take far too long for me to go into all of these. What I am going to do is talk about faith as I have experienced it in my own life and try to relate my own experience to some of these aspects or elements I have mentioned.
But first I should perhaps say that faith in the Buddhist sense has nothing to do with blind belief. I grew up in Ireland in the 1950's and 60's. Almost everyone was Catholic and Catholicism was often referred to simply as The Faith. The three principal virtues in Christianity are faith, hope and charity. This already tells us something about the difference between Christian faith and Buddhist faith. Buddhist faith is primarily faith in the law of karma. Because the law of karma, actions have consequences, operates without any outside agency such as a creator God, there is no question of hope. Hope is not a virtue in Buddhism because it means there is a lack of faith. At the age of fifteen or sixteen I stopped believing in the existence of a creator God. This would have been seen as losing my faith.
However, it is probably not possible for anyone to lose their faith. We always have faith in something or in many things. Even if it's only faith that the Metro will be running when you want to go somewhere. Bhante Sangharakshita has an aphorism – “faith is innate, doubt is acquired.”
If you are familiar with the Tibetan Wheel of Life you will know that at the centre of the wheel the is an image of a cock, a snake and a pig going around in a circle biting each other's tales. This image represents greed, hatred and delusion at the heart of unenlightened consciousness. But this is not the whole story. If Humans were just prone to greed, hatred and spiritual ignorance then there would be no possibility of spiritual growth and development, there would be no possibility of Awakening or Enlightenment. Above the wheel of life a Buddha is depicted and he is pointing to the path of Dharma practice. This represents the extra element that is present, which could be called faith, or as Bhante has called it “the response of what is highest in us to what is highest in the universe.”
Faith is innate but it needs to be activated. For that to happen we need to be inspired. We need to be in touch with inspiration. We need to know and love whatever we have faith in. It's not really possible to have faith in something you don't know and love. To have faith in yourself, for instance, you need to know yourself and love yourself. Similarly, to have faith in the Buddha's teaching we need to know and to love the Dharma. This of course implies learning,discussing, reflecting and practising. If we act on our faith, then faith will grow.
Initially this faith may just be felt as dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with our current life implies that we have an inkling or intuition that there is something more to life. This was certainly the case for me. I lost faith in God but I was left with dissatisfaction with the lack of meaning in my life. I felt that there must be more to life than continuation of the species or accumulation of possessions or status. Therefore I was searching for meaning. I spent five or six years doing that.
In the course of my questing I came to live in Berlin ( West Berlin, as it was then) and after a couple of years there I encountered a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk called Maha Dhammanisanthi. My meeting with him was a turning point in my life. He told me about the five precepts and the Metta Bhavana meditation. I was very impressed by what I heard, but even more than that I was impressed by him; I was impressed by the congruency between what he was saying and how he lived his life.
Immediately I felt I had found what I was looking for. I became a Buddhist there and then! This was an experience of faith that was definitely emotional. But it was also volitional: I wanted to act on it. I didn't have any knowledge of Buddhism, so there was no intellectual, rational or reasoning element to my faith then. A year later, in London, I cam across a book called Buddhism for Today by Subhuti. That book laid out the Buddhist path and, in particular, the Buddhsit path as practised in the Triratna Community and Order. I responded very strongly to the ideas expressed and to how people were trying to live out those ideas. From that book I gained a more intellectual understanding of the Buddhist path.
As a result I got involved in Triratna and began to study the Dharma more systematically. I also started making friends and learning from and being inspired by the example of others. This could be seen as the social aspect of faith.
It wasn't all easy, however, and after a couple of years I had a very difficult time. One of the things about becoming more aware is that you can encounter difficulties. You can encounter aspects of yourself that you were never aware of before. That's what happened to me and it was probably somewhat dramatic because I was so enthusiastic. I became aware of low self esteem. I had feelings of worthlessness and felt I was a burden on others. I became depressed. I felt that I was incapable of practising the Dharma. When I was at my worst I realised that I still had faith in the Dharma and I reasoned with myself that the Dharma says that everybody is capable of Awakening, therefore if I have faith in the dharma I have to have faith in myself. This then is faith by reasoning.
In the last couple of decades I have many times felt happy, even blissful for no particular reason. This is the fruits of practice and it gives me a sense of deep conviction in law of karma. I know now that the Dharma works. Actions do have consequences. There is no need to be concerned with the goal of Awakening, we just need to set up good conditions and practise. Everything else follows.This is faith based on experience.
Dr Conze talked about faith as being emotional and volitional. In a sense these are inextricably tied together. It is because we are moved by something that we act. Faith is what gives us the energy to take action. If we have no faith in meditation we won't meditate. If we have no faith in the efficacy of ethical practice we will have no incentive to be ethical. Faith is the dynamo, the fuel, that enables us to keep going even when we are having a difficult time.
Faith is innate. We don't have to manufacture it, but we do need to be clear about what we have faith in. We need to try to be clear what we are responding to emotionally, what are we moved by, what is motivating us to act. It is easy to fool ourselves, because so often we allow ourselves to be ruled by our intellect and reason and remain alienated from what we truly feel, what our deepest needs really are. Our task is to get to know ourselves deeply and become clear about what really, truly, deeply moves us, what motivates us. What we will often discover is that we are complicated and may be moved by many different things, sometimes contradictory things. When this happens we are making progress and becoming more integrated, because we are becoming more aware.
We can become more aware of what we have faith in through communication with friends, through study, through reading; especially through reading about the life of the Buddha and the lives of his followers down the generations. Devotional practice is also very important because it helps us to bypass our intellectual barriers to faith. Also of course meditation and reflection helps us to know ourselves and know what we have faith in. Sometimes if we don't know what we want to do with our lives, we just have to act and by doing so we discover what we really want to do.
Faith (shraddha) is the motivating factor. It is what motivates and energises us to look into ourselves, into our behaviour and thoughts deeply and thoroughly. It is what energises and motivates us to transform ourselves and it is what motivates and energises us to engage and participate and co-operate within the spiritual community. It is what energises and motivates us to be open-hearted and open-handed in our empathy and generosity towards others.
We speak of faith in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, but what does it really mean? What really motivates us? When we are convinced that it is possible to grow and develop, to transform ourselves for the better and when we are convinced that the methods of Buddhism will enable us to grow and develop and when we have a conviction that change is not just possible but highly desirable, is the most desirable thing, then we will be motivated. This needs to be more than just an intellectual conviction. It needs to be in our hearts. It is being emotionally convinced as well as intellectually and rationally convinced. When we have a yearning or longing to emulate the Buddha and the great Buddhists who have gone before us, then we will be motivated. Strong conviction and yearning towards something higher is what we need. If we just have a vague feeling that Buddhism is nice and Buddhists are nice and the Buddha was a nice man, it probably won’t motivate us hugely.
However shraddha or faith is innate, it is part of human consciousness and it can be further developed. We can develop shraddha through reflection, study, meditation and spiritual friendship. And if we practise like that, then from our own experience we will have the evidence on which our conviction can be based and out of which a longing for even greater wisdom and compassion can emerge.
Our faith is our conviction, our confidence in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha as the medicine for the worlds sickness. This is the flame that has to burn within us and the flame that has to burn within our community if we are to avoid the worshipping of ashes. Good intentions, good works and being nice people are the ashes that are left when a Sangha ceases to burn and flame with a strong conviction of the supreme wisdom of the Buddha and his teachings.
I would say that it is my deep and abiding faith in the Dharma that has sustained me through difficulties. It is what has motivated me to shoulder responsibility, it is what has allowed me to be unconcerned about personal material security. It is why I have immersed myself in the work of the Triratna Order; that work being the passing on of the spirit of the Dharma as taught by the Buddha and elucidated for us by Bhante Sangharakshita. My faith in the Dharma began long before I knew anything about the Dharma. It began as a conviction that there must be deeper meaning and a bigger purpose to life than material security and procreation. When that faith encountered Buddhism it found a channel to flow through. It found expression. And when I encountered the teaching of Bhante Sangharakshita my faith was augmented by clarity and by the inspiring beauty of the vast vision of the Buddha and the concrete way it was expressed by Bhante. I wish that you all may be inspired to practise the Buddha's teachings and I hope these few words on faith in the Buddhist context will be of some help to you.
