What is Buddhist Faith?

Faith is something very personally meaningful to me. It is something difficult to understand, and it is something that is not often spoken about within the context of a wisdom tradi­tion. The word we normally translate as faith from the Pali language, the lan­guage of the original Buddhist texts, is saddhā, which literally means “to place the heart upon.” Saddhā means to give our hearts over to, or place our hearts upon something. Its meaning can vary a lot, depending on what we put our heart upon or the quality with which we give our hearts over. So there are a number of different ways faith can be manifest. Sometimes faith means trust. In your reflections you can contemplate: Is there some quality within yourself that you trust? Awareness, love, critical thinking? What do you trust? I remember having a great deal of difficulty with my practice at one point in my life and my teacher Dr. Day said to me: “You just sit and walk. The dharma will take care of the rest. I was trying too hard to “make the practice work,” and the faith that came from simply trusting that the practice would work all by itself has been tremen­dously helpful for me. Faith can also take the form of inspira­tion, where all of our being comes together behind something, behind an endeavor. This doesn’t feel like a struggle, because we are so inspired to engage in a pur­suit. We might be inspired by a teacher or a teaching, but whatever it is a sense of possibility is awakened for us. This initial inspiration is what brings us to a practice or to any deeper exploration, and it helps sustain us in the difficulties we inevitably encounter. Faith has the quality of allowing us to open, to draw near, and to go forth, to harness our energy to pursue a goal or an aspiration. But faith also has to be carefully balanced with wisdom. If we have too much faith without enough wis­dom, then it really becomes what we or­dinarily call “blind faith.” I think that belief and faith go together. It’s not that they are mutu­ally exclusive — we can believe something and also have faith in it. It can be something that we have never really examined, and therefore we don’t have a quality of faith in it that comes from see­ing for ourselves that it is true. It’s more just an idea that we have. Beliefs are of­ten these assumptions that we have about so many things that are really fab­rications of the mind. I think of faith as “the willing suspen­sion of disbelief.” So rather than think­ing of it as the assumption or the taking up of a belief, it’s the willing suspension of disbelief— a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate.