The Other "F-word": Faith
In Zazen We Trust
[In just three days, my teacher will be acknowledging me as a Zen teacher. This is called the Dharma transmission ceremony, which is mostly held in private, and will last for ten days. Of course, when I first stepped onto this spiritual path I had no idea where it would lead. In this post, I explore “faith” and what it means to me as this milestone nears.]
Since I am writing this on Saturday, September 3rd, and it is my niece Skylar’s 10th birthday, I thought I’d begin at her beginning. Ten years ago I traveled to Miami, FL, to meet Skylar who had just emerged six days before from the water realm to the air realm. My mother, whose birthday is September 4th (Happy 84th Mom!), had been there for a couple of weeks. So I was arriving as a much needed relief nanny.
As teenagers, neither my sister Tara nor myself had spent much (if any!) time as babysitters. So when I arrived in Miami on vacation from Tassajara, where I had been living for a while, it was a whole new world for me, Tara, and her husband, as much as it was for my newborn niece.
The most marvelous thing occurred every time she finished drinking a bottle I gave her: she’d rub her tiny face against my chest a bunch of times, and then she’d slowly slide down my arm and rest her ruddy forehead in the crook of my elbow. The first few times she did this I was startled, worried, amazed, and awe struck. (I later read that this is called the “rooting reflex” and babies are born with this instinct as well as the “sucking reflex.)
Now, I am sure some of you are wondering how this relates to Zen meditation? For me, it has everything to do with Zen practice. First, like a good Zen student Skylar accepted the bottle of formula I offered her and wholeheartedly drank it. Second, she followed her “after the bottle” routine by sliding down my arm where she rested and breathed. Just like we do on our meditation cushions: resting and breathing.
For me, what Skylar did was an act or expression of “faith.” Because she was precognitive and pre-verbal, there were no inner voices debating whether or not my arm was going to be there. She had no prior associations of like or dislike. She did not hesitate. She just slid silently into the hammock of my arm. It was just a simple, undivided act: just a body being a body.
As a newborn, Skylar did not perceive herself as separate from me, or her parents or grandmother. Nor would she even have experienced her own arms, hands, legs, and feet as her’s. I read that infants do not perceive themselves as a separate entity from their parents until they are six or seven months old. Skylar was fresh from the “no-where-everywhere” of the non-dual: the original face before her parents were born.
We’re all born with this innate heart-mind-body that is faith. That is “trusting” of the world around us because it is us and we are it.
As a Zen priest, the concept “faith” has a different meaning for me than it did during my childhood. The Oxford English dictionary defines “faith” as “belief founded on authority” and a “belief in religious doctrines.” As a Roman Catholic, we were told to have faith in the Holy Trinity: God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus. This type of faith is theistic. It’s a belief in an external entity called “God”, one that is omnipresent and omniscient, and the final arbiter of where I will spend the afterlife.
After spending a number of years living at a Zen monastery, when I contemplate this word “faith” what arises is a sense of calm spacious knowing in the body. It’s no longer a concept to ponder, parse, and debate.
The Buddhist scholar and former Korean Zen monk, Mu Soeng, says this about the word:
“Faith is not used in the Christian sense of trusting something outside oneself, but in the sense of a trusting mind; and the trust is in what has been directly experienced, in direct knowledge (prajna), and a conviction coming out of that experience and knowledge.”1
There are many perspectives on “faith” in the Buddhist tradition. The Sanskrit word for “faith” is sraddha; in Japanese and Chinese it’s shin. The Chinese characters representing shin are translated as “heart-mind.” According to Mu Soeng, “The Chinese have never made a sharp distinction between the psychological and the emotional; throughout Buddhist literature, when one is talking about “mind” one is talking about the total package of psycho-emotional network.” 2
Mu Soeng notes that there’s also another Chinese word hsin that sounds very similar to shin. The Chinese character for hsin is represented by a person standing upright. The common translation for hsin is “faith” or “trust” (trust someone who is standing upright, or who stands by their word). In Chinese there is no distinction between a noun and a verb; thus hsin can mean “trust” or “trusting” or “to trust.”3
In Zen Buddhism there’s no doctrine stipulating that we must trust in God or believe in Jesus to be saved. So who needs faith when there’s no God expecting us to believe in him (for it’s almost always a “him,” isn’t it?) So what are we trusting? For Eihei Dogen, the 13th century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, we are putting our faith in the ritual known as zazen.
In one of his essays called “Fukanzazengi,” or “Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen,” Dogen says that “The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation practice. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss, the practice-realization of totally culminated awakening.”
For Dogen, meditation practice is not a tool that we employ to attain some distant goal of enlightenment. This is a shift in perspective that alters our understanding from one of “I can become a Buddha, to Buddha Nature is the ground of all being.” Zazen is a ritual that expresses Buddha Nature. So what we’re trusting or resting in is this suchness or as Dogen says, “The wisdom that runs through all things.”
Hongzhi, a Chinese Ch’an monk who lived in the 12th century, expresses his faith in the practice of the meditative practice of “silent illumination” like this:
“The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this you cannot be turned around by external causes or conditions. This empty, wide open mind is subtly and correctly illuminating . . . Here you can rest and become clean, pure and lucid. Bright and penetrating, you can immediately return, accord, and respond to deal with events.”4
According to the Buddhist scholar and Soto priest Taigen Dan Leighton, Hongzhi’s meditation teaching was a model for Dogen’s just sitting zazen. I appreciate that Hongzhi begins with the serenity we can feel sitting still amid the silence and then ends with responding to arising events. Bringing zazen mind into everyday activities like sweeping a floor or making a bed or changing poopy diapers (!) is one of the hallmarks of the Soto Zen tradition. Seated meditation is then not only an expression of our True Nature, but also the foundation from which we can respond to the trials and tribulations of our lives with upaya or skillful means.
Faith is also the first of the Five Spiritual Powers or Faculties. The other four are: vigor, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. Faith is what animates our aspiration to focus our mind’s attention on cultivating the other four faculties and raising the thought of enlightenment. Or at least faith stirs Bodhicitta: the mind that is “aimed at awakening with wisdom and compassion to be of benefit to all beings.”
We could engage in a chicken-and-egg debate about what comes first, faith or practice. Do we come to Zen practice because we feel something like faith bubbling up from the depths of our bodies and minds? Or do we begin to have faith after we start meditating?
One scholar says that “faith” in early Buddhism was understood as “a faculty or power of the mind by which one first comes to react when she hears the Buddha dharma, enters the stream, takes refuge in the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and resolves to become enlightened.”
I don’t know about you, but this does not remotely resemble what brought me to Zen practice. What propelled me was a desperate desire to find some relief from an ocean of suffering. The ideas of “enlightenment” or “faith” never crossed my mind. The words that come up are “RELIEF” and “FREEDOM.” To harken back to my Catholic upbringing: I wanted salvation. And for whatever the unfathomable reasons were, I did not find any relief in any of the doctrines or rituals of Catholicism.
I did however love sitting in church when it was empty. The sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows, the plush red carpet that led to the altar, the shiny crosses, the lingering smell of frankincense and myrrh, this was when I felt the most at ease and perhaps this was my first taste of silent illumination.
Although “faith” is not what propelled me to seek out Zen, it’s definitely what’s kept me going. I actually prefer the word “trust” because it feels more tactile and “faith” still has a Christian connotation for me. This is not a blind belief in some transcendent other worldly experience; it’s a trust that’s grounded in the physicality of the here and now.
Some of you might know the story of Mara, the God of Delusion, attempting to dissuade Siddartha Gautama from seeking enlightenment while he sat immovably in deep states of meditation under the Bodhi tree. Mara tempted Siddhartha with his three daughters of Greed, Hatred, and Delusion. Mara is the personification of delusive thinking that tells us we are separate from everyone else and the world around us.
But Siddhartha was not taking the bait. At last in exasperation, Mara asks “Who are you to defy me?” And Siddhartha touches the earth. The physical ground, the entire earth, was his witness. Siddhartha’s faith was immovable in his True Nature was not influenced by arising causes and conditions (Mara).
As the Buddhist scholar Masao Abe (Ah-BE) points out, “The Buddha said to be a “lamp unto ourselves” and to “seek salvation alone in the Dharma” are not contradictions, but are complementary. One’s self as ultimate reliance is not the ego-self but the “true Self” as the realizer of Dharma. Gautama’s awakening is the self-awakening of the Dharma.”
Sengcan, the Third Ancestor of Zen who lived in the 6th century in China, wrote a famous poem called the Hsin Shin Ming or “Trust in Mind.” If you haven’t read it, it’s a wondrous poem filled with profound insights into the nature of reality and practical reminders how we can live a more equanimous and fulfilling life when we trust in the One Mind of Buddha Nature.
Sengcan says this about “faith”:
Faith is non-duality
Non-duality is faith.
Here words fail.
For it is beyond past, present, and future.
Sengcan gives voice to the voiceless just like my niece did when she fell asleep in my arms.
Mu Soeng. Trust in Mind. Boston, Wisdom Publications, 2004.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Heine, Steven, and Dale S. Wright, editors. Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Congratulations Heather!!!