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Ya Gotta Have Faith
In The Flower Ornament Sutra a trillion trillion (give or take a couple trillion) various Buddhas surround our own sweet Shakyamuni Buddha, each one eager to learn. When he tells them that it is ok to ask questions, they let loose with a barrage. “What are the stages of the Buddha? What are the acts of the Buddha? What are the meditations?……” Of all the Buddhas they could ask, it is amazing that they all choose this particular Buddha for their questions.
Why? The sutra tells us that it is because he causes people to develop great faith.
Huh?
Usually great faith is about trusting someone or something outside of ourselves to get us through this wild adventure we call life. Since Buddhism doesn’t teach us to rely on anything or anyone outside of ourselves what is going on here? Buddha teaches a different kind of faith. He teaches us to have complete faith in ourselves. Actually it is even stronger than that. In Buddhism, faith Is a verb. We faith. We actively trust ourselves. We trust that we each have the capacity to discover the deepest truths in our lives. One of those truths is this: not only can you and I be loving and wise. We also have the capacity live a fully enlightened life.
So the faith of this tradition is not faith in an external anything. In fact whenever someone asked Buddha if there was a God, he refused to answer the question. Instead we need to ask a different question: “How can I help?” How can I help myself; how can I help you; how can I be helpful to all things, all the time?
This faith is liberating because it emphasizes a foundation of love and respect that is as big as we need it to be. In Buddha’s own words, “Faith is the start of all good things.” Faith is what gets us back on the cushion. It is what makes us start all over again, from scratch if we have to, every time we screw up. Faith is what drives us to trust again, to love again. As we question our lives, explore our minds, become more curious about our experience as a mind-body combination that is walking around with our name attached to it, faith keeps us going.
Writ large, faith protects us from despair. How can we despair when the sun will come up tomorrow and we have Buddha’s own promise that we have what it takes?
It will fuel our awakening if we let it. That’s how amazing faith as a verb can be. But it can’t do anything until we decide to have faith. I have a close friend who, as I write, is arm wrestling with one heck of an addiction – one of those killer ones. I can love her, nag, chant for her and do tonglen practice until I am blue in the face, but until she has faith in her own capacity to recover, everything I do, while well intentioned, won’t break the spell of the addiction. On the other hand, if she decides to have faith in herself, she will save her own life. And if we do, we’ll save ours.
