In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. This is the sixth of 35 sutra sessions held in Los Angeles. In these Ken converses informally with students about life and practice.

Introducing faith

Ken: Okay. So this evening, the sutra session here is at L.A. and the date today is December 9th. Generally speaking, in these sutra sessions what I’ve done up to now is just take your questions. But I want to do something slightly different this evening. And that is I’d like to focus on the topic of faith. What role, what do you understand, what questions you might have around faith. What its role is in spiritual practice in general, what its role is in meditation? What do you have faith in? The difference between faith and belief, if any? These kinds of questions. So, I’m just going to throw that out as a general topic. If any of you have any questions about faith, I’d be very interested in them.

Student: How does faith apply to Buddhism?

Ken: Quite importantly. Now, faith is handled in different ways, in different traditions. In the Tibetan tradition, for instance, the cultivation of faith is a very important method for developing energy and attention. In the Theravada tradition, to the best of my knowledge faith is regarded as an emotion which generates the conditions for virtuous action. In the Zen tradition, they take a different view of it. And there’s a great saying “big doubt, big enlightenment, little doubt, little enlightenment, no doubt, no enlightenment.” So they have a very different perspective on these things. But I’m curious; what leads you to ask this question?

Student: I’m just interested in knowing how faith is part of Buddhism. What does faith mean in Buddhist terms?

Ken: How does this connect with you personally?

Student: Oh, me personally.

Ken: We like to use live ammunition in these things.

Student: I was raised a heathen, so I didn’t have much …

Ken: You say you were raised a heathen, that is someone who doesn’t believe anything?

Student: I was being facetious. My father was an adamant atheist, and my mother was straddling the fence. So we really didn’t get any kind of faith-based religion when I was younger at all. It’s like, you can believe in electricity. That’s about as much as we could believe in. And now I’m just always curious about it, because I have faith in people and I have faith in love. I have faith in the world. I’m just wondering in what way does faith apply … I mean, what does it mean in Buddhist terms?

Three kinds of faith

Ken: Well. This may be a little bit of a long answer, but maybe it will be informative. At least in the Tibetan tradition faith is often broken down into three different kinds of faith. The first one is the faith which comes from a rational understanding. The second one is faith which is an expression of longing or yearning. The third is faith which is—this may sound like an oxymoron—but a radiant opening. Now, let me say a bit more about each of these.

The first kind is, we hear a teaching or we hear about a way of approaching life. We may study it, and it makes sense to us. And just because it makes sense, then we have a kind of confidence or faith in it. You follow? And what that allows us to do is to engage that practice or adopt that perspective because that’s an emotional opening. So we’re more open to it and so we can start living or practicing that.

The second kind of faith is, as I said, a yearning. Now, when you want something very, very deeply then you are constantly opening to those possibilities or anything which points in that direction. So that kind of expression of faith leads you to approach the world or approach your practice in such a way that you’re open to all of the possibilities which might move you in that direction. And there’s a story I have about this, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

Then the third kind of faith is very, very difficult to put into words. Have you ever stood in front of a painting and the hair on your neck, the back of your neck stands up. Yeah, that’s the artistic equivalent of the third kind of faith. It’s just something that moves us very deeply and that’s why I call it a radiant opening.

Student: Does it have a result? I mean, you believe in something, and then there’s a result that comes from it. You have faith that there’s a God and that you’ll go to heaven. So there’s an end result. So how does that relate?

Ken: Well, that’s very interesting. I think here is where we need to distinguish between faith and belief. Very broadly speaking one can describe faith as the willingness to open to whatever arises. Okay. Whereas belief, in the way that you’ve described it, is you believe things are a certain way. And yes, it is very result-oriented. And if you permit me that distinction, then when you say I believe something, it’s actually a kind of closing down. Where you have faith in something, it’s an opening out. Can you feel the difference?

Student: I understand, I understand the difference, but I don’t really see how faith is … I mean, I understand it as an opening, but what is the point, then, of faith?

Ken: The point of faith. I think there are many points, but the one that’s most important to me is it brings an emotional energy to your spiritual practice, and that emotional energy powers attention. So you can see and experience things more deeply.

Student: So you are going to get something from faith?

Ken: Yes, but maybe not what you think you’re going to get. [Laughter]

Student: I don’t think it’s what you expect, but you are doing it for a result. You experience the result of feeling more and being more in the world and being more receptive.

Ken: Why do you practice at all?

Student: God knows.

Ken: I’m not sure that he does. Okay. Do you have a question?

Faith, belief, and attachment

Student: If there’s an emotional energy involved, then how is that different from attachment?

Ken: This is very important, very important. To clarify this, I’d like to consider the emotion of love. Okay. Love and faith are actually quite closely related. So I feel I’m on fairly safe ground. Now, is there anybody in your life that you love? Okay, that was a yes. I’m going to take that. So think of that person and when you think of that person, what happens in you? Yeah. That’s right. What happens?

Student: Well, I feel fuzzy.

Ken: Yeah. So there’s a softening and an opening of the heart, a feeling of warmth, and something opens up. Sure. Now, think of being attached to this person. Now, what happens in you? Yes, that’s right, describe that.

Student: Oh, shoot. Well, then there’s this stickiness to it.

Ken: I agree. I think that’s a wonderful term for it. It’s sticky. Now, what’s the difference between those two? Because the first one, it was warm and fuzzy and the sense I had was very open. And then this other one was sticky and it was something else. What was the difference?

Student: Aren’t you supposed to tell us? No. Well, I mean, okay, I would say … yeah.

Ken: I think it’s far more valuable and why I work this way is for you to discover the difference in your own experience, rather than me telling you how things are.

Student: Okay. With the first, there’s an allowing of … not sure, like an appreciation which is independent of me, there’s space involved. With the second this space disappears, and …

Ken: It becomes a lot about you, doesn’t it? The attachment or something in you?

Student: Maybe.

Ken: No. Okay. Go on. Where does the stickiness come from?

Student: Oh, well, possibly. It’s like not being able to breathe as freely, for me.

Ken: So explore that a little bit. Just feel it. What’s going on there? Okay.

Student: Well, maybe, then there’s another kind of expectation, instead of just allowing. Well, I think there might be something, it might have something to do with an expectation.

Ken: Yes. That’s what you said. Yeah. An expectation. And this is the difference. With that first aspect of love, which is just love. There is openness, acceptance and appreciation. I think that was the word you used and with attachment there’s some kind of expectation. I’m going to get something and it’s wanting that. And it’s a wanting that closes down. It’s not something that opens up. The same distinction applies to faith. That is the way that I’m talking about faith and the way that I understand faith.

It’s like when we were talking about love. It’s that opening. And that’s the emotional energy. You said something that’s very, very important when you were describing that love. That somehow it wasn’t about you and there’s a number of emotions that we have which aren’t about us. In fact, they free us from our obsession with me. And you know many of these; there are four which run all through Buddhism, called the four brahmaviharas or, in the Mahayana tradition, the four immeasurables. They are loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. But we can add our devotion and faith to those. But as you observed with love, it can degenerate into attachment. And now it creates, when that happens, there’s this expectation, as you observed. And now “I” comes in quite powerfully. And the same thing can happen with faith. It can degenerate into kind of an obsession and or worship or what have you. And then it becomes, what am I going to get out of this? And those kinds of emotions reinforce the sense of I and our idea of ourselves. Whereas the other kind of emotions actually free us from that. So a very important distinction. Is this helpful to you? Okay. All right. Yes. That wasn’t too painful, was it?

Faith and the glass half full

Student: The image that comes to mind, Ken, with this discussion is the glass half full versus the glass half empty. That when I think of living open-minded without my upbringing of needing to justify everything. Then the glass is half full.

Ken: So let me get that straight. When you consider living open-minded without the need to justify everything, then the glass feels half full or the glass is half full. Okay.

Student: And that when the glass is half full, there’s room.

Ken: Yes. Okay.

Student: And then my question is: how does living with the glass half full fit with being an opportunist or feeling naively looking at the world through rose-colored glasses?

Ken: Wow, that was quite a jump. Could you help me there?

Student: Just having been raised, as I mentioned, with a very scientific background and no religious or worship oriented, everything was about justifying it.

Ken: But evidence-based and all. Okay. I mean, it’s okay. I have a math and science background. I’m guilty too. We’re all in this together.

Student: It feels, in a way it shouldn’t be in conflict with, but it feels like in my nature, it’s in conflict with choosing to live with the glass half full, wanting to see the world as opportunity as opposed to feeling like I need to justify everything or protect myself.

Ken: So what’s the problem?

Student: Well, the …

Ken: I think I’ve got the distinction. You slipped the word opportunist in here earlier.

Student: If the glass is half full, then my sense is I’m living with faith or I’m living …

Ken: With faith through faith, whatever. Yeah. Okay.

Student: But that …

Ken: I mean, is this like the audacity of hope or something like that?

Student: I feel like I’m wearing rose-colored glasses and I’m being too simplistic.

Ken: Okay. I think I get it. Well, let me say a bit more about these three kinds of faith. See if that contributes anything here. The first kind of faith, there’s this rational appreciation which I’m sure you can connect with because, you know, it makes sense, right? Well. This kind of faith is for people who are angry or aversion types. This is where they go and being that kind of person it took me a very long time to understand this. Suppose there’s something happening that you don’t like. And you come up with a very clear, rational argument why? This is a very bad idea. Okay. Well, you love that because you never have to own your anger. It just makes sense. This is a bad idea because of x, y, and z. And so you don’t have to connect with your own emotions about it because you have a very good rational argument. And anybody who doesn’t agree with a rational argument is a fool, obviously. So anger types love rational arguments and justification because it means they never have to acknowledge or own their anger. Go ahead.

Student: So then what is the difference between rational thought or rational faith and belief or objective thinking coming to a conclusion, creating a concept based on evidence, and is that faith?

Ken: Well, they’re somewhat related, but there’s a little cliff here and the cliff is—well, there are several ways, this is very interesting, I’m glad you asked this. I’m going to go at it in a completely different way. Somebody sent me a video, which is an Indian, scientist, philosopher, I’m not sure what, giving a talk at the TEDx conference in India. And he starts off with a Hindu myth, I can’t remember the characters, but two of the gods have this argument about who’s the most powerful, and it’s agreed that whoever can go around the world the fastest is the top god. So the one god goes around the whole world. And the other god just walks around his room. I won. It takes him a lot less time of course. The first god goes around the world, the second god goes around his world. Now, I probably should have started off here, but I didn’t. So now we’re in this mess. When we talk about evidence-based stuff, and I know I introduced that term, but I was trying to make sure that we were talking the same language.

We are talking about the world. The kind of thing I’ve been talking about in terms of faith is very much talking about my world. Now, in the world, we have to justify things, you know? Well, why do you turn on that switch? Because it’s hooked up, and when I turn it this way electricity flows through and the lights go on. Things like that. Well, how do you know that? You can justify that and basically there’s a common body of understanding and a common vocabulary and a common way of testing things and all of that stuff. And we’ve got all the science and technology and engineering, etc., etc. How do you justify things in your world and how do I justify things in my world? And if I justify something in my world? What effect does that have on the justification in your world?

Student: Well, I wouldn’t think it would have anything to do with the justification in my world.

Ken: Right. So. Now we go back to your glasses, half empty glasses, half full thing. If justification has nothing to do with your world, why can’t you just open to your world? And what would that be like?

Student: I would probably not run around in circles so much, trying to prove things.

Ken: Well, it’s really irritating if you’re a glass half-empty kind of person, isn’t it?

Student: It’s painful, I think.

Ken: Well, yeah, but but this approach is very irritating because you have no reason to hold on to the glass half empty point of view, which is very irritating if you’re a glass half empty kind of person. If you don’t need to justify anything, then you are free to open to all of your experience and enjoy it. And if you’re a glass half empty kind of person, that’s very irritating. You follow? So it puts us in touch with the reactive patterns or whatever you want to call them, that keep our world closed and restricted and kind of miserable, i.e., suffering. And we see from here that it’s an emotional posture we take with respect to our lives and it’s a rather arbitrary one. That is, there is no good justification for it. There may be a lot of things that contributed to it. Maybe our mother hung spiders in our crib and things like that. And we weren’t presented with various opportunities and ways of thinking when we were young, etc. So they may have contributed, but it’s actually arbitrary and we don’t have to hold on to it. And the cultivation of faith in the way that we’re talking about it this evening is a way of stepping out of that rather restricted way of approaching life into something just as I suggested to this woman earlier. Faith is the willingness to open to whatever’s there, and it makes an entirely different way of life possible. This makes sense to you?

Student: Thank you.

Ken: Okay, so I talked a little bit more about the first kind of faith, how it’s linked up with anger, and it’s for people who have that way of approaching things. It’s a very important kind of faith, because they’re not going to open at all to other possibilities unless they make sense. So being able to present a way of practice in a way that makes sense is very helpful to that kind of person. One of my students was a businessman and a very, very angry person. I mean very volatile, he used to be the kind of person who, if you cut him off on a freeway, he would follow you home and punch you out. He was the senior executive in a headhunting firm. He was very successful, but very volatile. And everything had to make sense to him. Once it made sense, he’d just do the practice, there was no problem there. It was very, very consistent. But absolutely, it had to make sense. That was his way. The first step in him opening to the world.

Faith, trust, and devotion

Ken: The second kind of faith Is about yearning and when I think of this kind of faith a very different picture emerges for me. In the 11th century in Tibet, there is an individual by the name of Khyungpo Naljor who was a very, very great master and teacher. But he has an interesting history, and this is recorded in his biography. He was raised in a Bön family. Now, Bön is the original religion of Tibet. The religion that was there before Buddhism came, and is still practiced today. And he became a well known and respected Bön priest. But his practice didn’t answer his own spiritual questions. So he sought out a dzogchen teacher and became a quite proficient dzogchen practitioner. Dzogchen is a direct awareness tradition in teaching in the Tibetan tradition. He still had some questions and so he thought, “Well, I think I’ll go to India,” which is a very difficult journey. But his parents said, “What about us? You can’t leave us.” So he said, “Okay, fine.” So he stayed in Tibet and went to study with a mahamudra teacher, which is another tradition of awareness, and mastered that. And still his questions weren’t answered. And then he went to study with another mahamudra teacher. And after a few months of studying with this person the teacher said to him, “You know everything I know, you should go and teach now.” And Khyungpo Naljor said to himself, “Well, if I know everything you know, then you know nothing, because I don’t know anything.” And by this time, his parents had died.

So he went to India, and he was 57 at this point, which today would be like … journeying to India would be equivalent to if you were, say 75, walking to Central America. It was a very, very difficult journey.

He gets to India and he studies with a lot of other teachers. He gets a lot of valuable teaching and still his spiritual questions aren’t resolved. So he says, “Who is going to be able to help me resolve my spiritual questions?” And somebody says, “I think you need to see Niguma.” “Who?” “Niguma.” “Who is she?” And she is described as this very highly practiced woman who had stepped completely out of society and she just hung around in the charnel grounds and things like that. And this incredible faith came up in him, and this was the faith of yearning. He’s had these spiritual questions all his life. He hears her name and he just wants to meet her so much. And so he started wandering around India looking for this particular charnel ground, saying a prayer, feeling this intense yearning. Now, again, the questions that we had before about the difference between love and attachment, very, very important here. Because there’s one way in which you’re just trying to get something to fit in with what’s inside.

It has to be very particular. How many of you have encountered being in love or meeting a person who can offer you their love, but you can’t accept it because it doesn’t fit exactly the way you want to be loved? So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It just has to be just this way. Whereas the kind of yearning that Khyungpo Naljor was just, like, so open. And what happens when we open that way? We’re using the power of our yearning to open more completely to the world of experience. And it’s a little bit frightening because we’re very open and if you wish, very vulnerable. It’s like anything could happen. But whereas the anger type needs to be able to justify everything and everything has to make sense, the attraction type—person who works with this kind of yearning faith—it’s using the power of their desire, the power of their wanting to open to the world. And eventually he meets her. And that’s another whole story that you have to come back another time for that one.

And then the third kind of faith as I said, it’s very, very difficult to put into words. And as I said, it can be very similar to hearing a piece of music or seeing a painting or a piece of sculpture, and you just stop and go …

So essentially, you become very stupid here because you can’t say anything. But in that stopping, there is a complete opening. And if you’ve had that kind of experience with music or a piece of art, when you stop that way, how conscious are you of yourself? Yeah. So this is why it’s a very, very powerful form of faith. Because you stop being you when it arises and you’re just there. So there are many instances of this. A friend of mine when he met his teacher as a young man, he just looked at this person and he said, “This person knows about things that I had never ever considered,” and everything stopped. And his teacher died some years ago, but he spent his whole life practicing. And that was just based on that extraordinary opening that he felt. So, all three kinds of faith are important, and they are related to these fundamental emotional patterns. And they all represent different degrees of opening whatever we may be capable of. It’s time for me to stop here and see if there are any questions. Yes. Peri.

Peri: Well, it’s interesting to me that you’ve named these three types of faith, and one of them was sort of came from an aversive stance, one an attractive. And then I’m assuming the third is more of a neutral.

Ken: Indifference, you know.

Peri: Yeah, yeah. And and then I’m wondering, would you say, like there’s three types of devotion and look at them from those three places as well, or any of the other immeasurables?

Ken: You know you could do that. Yeah. I think you could do that. I don’t see any particular problem. I mean, you can, some people are going to take loving kindness, metta, for instance. A person who is very uncomfortable, basically averse to the world and as regards connection, that’s a bad word. Well, you might be able to convince such a person that it makes sense and okay, fine. So it’ll be a sort of grudging acknowledgment with that and that leads to an opening. And then, as I’ve encountered with many people, when they start touching loving kindness, they go, oh, this is a different world, I want to live in this world. And so the yearning comes from that. And then love and kindness just happens, and that kind of love and kindness is not so much an emotion, but just an expression of mind. If you read Uchiyama’s book Refining Your Life because the Zen practice really approaches the four immeasurables from that third kind all the time. The term they have in Zen for this is roughly translatable as magnanimous mind or magnanimous heart, it’s just like you’re open to things and you welcome whatever comes, which is, you know, really hard, to welcome whatever comes. And this tips into a very far-reaching approach and in Christianity where you just welcome everything as an expression of God’s will. And it’s the same kind of thing. So, yeah, and then one could run to compassion and joy and equanimity in the same way. Yeah.

Peri: Thank you.

Ken: Okay. Yeah. Good. Steve.

Cultivating faith

Steve: The word faith. Am I right, just technically that faith, you have to have faith in something you have faith in …

Ken: I don’t think so, faith in something I think is a step towards faith, or about.

Steve: Or about. It’s … well, it’s faith about.

Ken: Or let me put it this way. I proposed that we consider faith as the willingness to open to whatever arises. And if you think about faith that way, it’s not faith in something. But one could have faith in the dharma, or faith in a teacher, or faith in a certain way of practicing. And those are different faith in, It gives you a way to open to whatever is arising. And what I call this is a a repository of faith. And every tradition usually has one or more repositories. In the Zen tradition the repository of faith is the posture. In the Tibetan tradition the repository of faith is the teacher. You have faith in the teacher, and that allows you to open to everything. So I would say faith in is a means or a way of practicing faith, moving you to the possibility of just opening to everything.

Steve: So for example the painting, do you have the experience and so you develop faith In that experience, that experience can … and how it arose or in that there’s a …

Ken: Well what you’re talking about now, if I understand you correctly, is the question might be phrased, is there a way to use that opening to a painting to cultivate faith?

Steve: Sort of. Yeah.

Ken: And I think there is in the following way. So you stand in front of this painting and everything stops. And as you are open to that experience you no longer need the painting now. You just open to the experience of stopping and let that absorb or absorb that as deeply as you can. Then in your practice, you can recall it. And when you recall it, that experience doesn’t happen again. But there is an echo of it and you can feel that echo in your body, you can feel it at all the levels. It’s not that you’re trying to recapture that, you’re using the echo as a way of guiding you into just opening. And I think I think that’s a possible way of practice. Yes. A little more difficult with music because it’s constantly moving. But maybe. Yes.

Steve: I would like to know if you see any difference between faith and trust in that matter and if you can also elaborate a little more about the difference between faith and or trust. I believe you addressed it earlier, if you can, add a little bit to that. Thank you.

Ken: Well. This third kind of faith that I was talking about, I think is probably closest to trust. Because, usually we say we trust somebody or we trust in something or something like that. But if you look at the actual moment of trust, it’s very interesting, how many of you have tried that exercise where you lean back and somebody catches you, you know? Now, if you recall that and I’ve done this with a number of people, they’re leaning back and at a certain point you tip beyond the center of gravity and you start to fall and you have to trust at that point. And I ask people, okay, so at that point when you were trusting, what was going on? They first said, well, I was trusting the other person to catch me and that’s what most of us say. However, if you go through that experience right at the point that you’re tipping you’re actually not thinking of the other person at all. There’s a moment of complete openness, and you’re actually trusting nothing whatsoever. It’s just that openness and I think it’s very similar to that third kind of faith. So whenever we say we trust things, actually we’re saying we’re just opening and going to receive whatever happens. In the actual moment of trust there’s just being open. Now, belief for me is very different. You talked earlier about having an expectation. But belief for me is wanting the world to be a certain way. And interpreting things that arise to conform to the way that we want the world to be. And so for me anyway, it lacks that openness. So when people say “I believe this,” there’s a kind of rigidity and fixing this now, one has to allow that people use words differently. But that’s the kind of distinction that I’m making. Does this help? Okay. Other questions here. Ann?

Faith in daily life

Ann: The way you’ve defined faith as a willingness to open to whatever arises, that really covers the predominant kind of living experience that I want to cultivate. It really feels as you’ve defined it, that it permeates everything in terms of how to live. And for me, the more I find that something works, the more I find it works to let go. The more I understand impermanence, the more I let go into what Sharon Salzberg calls abiding faith and its beyond rationality. It resides in the emptiness of my being. So I felt that tonight you’re using a very powerful word, faith, in your descriptions of what it is like.

Ken: I agree, I think it is very powerful.

Ann: It could be everything.

Ken: Well. It’s a way of approaching experience and it’s a very powerful way. Which means that there are places where it’s not particularly easy because if you’re going to open to everything that arises in experience it means that you are willing to experience whatever arises. Now, I think a case can be made that every time we react to something, every time an emotional reaction arises, it’s because there’s something that we are unwilling to experience. My student called me today, and she said, “do you have a few moments?” I said, “sure.” This is a person who studied with me for years and she said, “I’m a complete failure as a student.” Her practice is really pretty good but she was describing a situation with her husband. Her husband had pushed one of her buttons, and she just lost it completely. And to the point, her husband said “All of those years of meditation,” which didn’t help the situation at all. So well, he lived, so it’s not too bad. Now we get angry because there is a degree of loneliness or isolation that we can’t experience or aren’t willing to experience or don’t know how to experience or whatever. The way that we avoid experiencing it is that we get angry and we can shove that anger in our body and make ourselves very sick, or we can shove the anger out into the world and make everybody else miserable. But either way, all of that energy we don’t have to experience.

Student: You just described my daughter.

Ken: Okay, now. The way faith works here is that surge comes up and you have the faith to just experience it. And it can feel like death or you’re dying or something horrible is going to happen, or, you know, there are going to be all kinds of stuff but that’s the practice at that point. And that’s why none of us know what lurks inside us. You know, I mean, one can really practice for years and years and years and get tripped up by something. I’ve hung out with some of the great teachers of the Tibetan tradition and the one I’m thinking of is the previous Karmapa. We were in London, England, I was with him between two or three year retreats. He wasn’t very happy about what was happening in the Kagyu centers in England. And he was walking up and down his apartment where he was staying in these few days. And it was like being in the presence of a thunderstorm. He was very, very angry. And when a person like that is very angry, you really feel it? So the idea that we’re just going to never have these emotions is, to my view, a kind of myth. The thing is, can we stay present in them, actually experience them so that we don’t end up doing stupid and hurtful things? And I mean, the same person that I was describing to you before this angry businessman. Well I remember one occasion I came into his office and he was sitting with his feet up on his desk and his arms folded and looked angry. He was obviously very annoyed about something. I said, “what’s eating you?” He said, “it was much easier when I just got angry at people.” Because then he didn’t have to experience the anger everybody else did. But now he had developed the ability to experience himself and all of that stuff. This is where faith comes in, the willingness to open to that and it’s an approach. It’s a way of practicing. Yeah. Okay.

Student: Same as, again, like everything, the way you’re describing it just it flows through all activity, that willingness to open.

Ken: Yes. I think that is the essential gesture of spiritual practice. Yeah. Peri, you had a question.

Peri: Well, I sort of ask myself the question, what is the opposite of faith? Well, I have a little … Can I respond? I have a …

Ken: Of course, Yes.

Peri: Oh, goody.

Ken: It makes my work much easier.

Peri: It’s sort of the gesture is, “I’m not that! I’m not that!” And faith is sort of like a willingness to be and include whatever is happening as part of what you are. But it’s the opposite of what faith is really, you know, trying to be something separate and apart from other things.

Ken: Well, I think there are two ways we can look at opposites. And I think you’ve identified one of them. The opposite of faith in a certain sense, is belief. You see, I’m not that, that’s a belief. You know, I’m not that, rather just being open to things. Another way and the more traditional way of the opposite of faith is doubt. Which you know, well, “I don’t know whether it’s that way.” How do I know that? Now as I said, faith and doubt are handled very differently in different traditions. In the Tibetan tradition you’re encouraged to have no doubt whatsoever and what that means is that you are totally open to what arises. And then I quoted the Zen saying, “big doubt, big enlightenment, little doubt, little enlightenment, no doubt. no enlightenment.” Well, I think it’s good if we take a little look at that. They say, “big doubt, big enlightenment.” Well, what are you doubting here? Here you’re doubting the way you experience the world right now. You know, is this really how things are? Am I this entity that I feel that I am? And if you start questioning that then all kinds of possibilities open up. So the way they’re talking about doubt is a way of opening to the ephemeral or ineffable nature of experience which ordinarily people just don’t question, except they believe what they see and they believe what they experience. And so this makes the sentence, “no doubt, no enlightenment” make sense. If you don’t doubt this at all, then there’s no possibility and this was illustrated for me when a person came to see me.

He’s one of the minor—though he probably wouldn’t like to be called one of the minor—movers and shakers in Hollywood. And he came to see me for meditation instruction. And the third or fourth time I said, “Look, you’ve got to get it through your head that what you think isn’t how things are. They’re just thoughts that come and go. They actually don’t define reality.”

And he said “What?”

And I said, “What you’re experiencing when you sit in meditation, thoughts come and go and the world goes on but your thoughts are just stuff that comes and goes.”

And he started to explore that. And years later he said to me, “This is the most important thing I learned. My thoughts are not reality.” And yet for many people, how they think is how the world is. And this of course creates all kinds of problems, because how often do people conform to the way you think they should behave? Okay, so if you think that your thoughts are reality and people don’t conform, they do something different. What do you do then? Well, one way or another, you kill them because they have violated the world order. You know, you get very angry or upset or whatever, and you’re going to make sure that they never do that again. So you become very, very harsh and rigid about the world. As long as you’re thinking that how you think is how the world is. So does his speak to you?

Peri: Yes.

Ken: Yeah. Being able to see the world beyond, well as a friend of mine puts it, the purpose of our practice is to experience things without the projection of thought and emotion. Now, this doesn’t mean, and this is very important, this doesn’t mean we get rid of thought and emotion. A lot of people, when they approach meditation practice and so forth, they try very, very hard to have a quiet mind and they take thoughts as the enemy. I think it is much better, a much better approach to regard thoughts just like leaves swirling in the wind. They’re just movement, movement in the mind and one can get caught by that movement. So then you’re completely involved in the movement and now you don’t see anything else. That’s one form of confusion. Another form of confusion is trying to stop all the movement and get rid of all the leaves. That’s highly problematic and basically doesn’t work. But the third possibility is to know the movement is movement and be able to see what is there anyway. I think that’s a fairly reasonable way to define the efforts that we’re making in this practice. It’s not that we get rid of our thoughts and and emotions. They’re there, but we’re no longer caught up in them. And what is … and this goes back to what Ann was saying earlier. In order not to get caught up in them, we have to be willing to experience them completely and that’s where faith comes in. Okay. All right. Anything else? Please.

Student: So, so faith is something we develop then through practice and through experience. It develops.

Ken: We can certainly cultivate it. Yeah, that’s all, yes you can cultivate it in different ways. In the Tibetan tradition, one of the ways that you cultivate faith is you pray a lot. And at first it’s contrived and then it becomes natural and by praying, usually to your teacher or to a historical figure you’re practicing opening.

Student: And, but if you have an experience over and over again which can come through practicing and you experience things differently, a faith would develop.

Ken: Yeah, and if you have a way, you know, maybe as we were discussing earlier, looking at a piece of art or looking over a beautiful view, what’s important here is not to get caught by the object. When you’re doing this and you feel that opening, then allow yourself to experience the opening and recall that in your practice. Not the view itself, but the physical experience of just being that open and being able to take everything in and then recall that again and again, not just when one’s meditating, but also during the day. It’s very interesting to do this. When you have a business meeting, just be completely open or when you’re having a fight with your spouse, that’s a really good time to recall it. It’ll change everything but you won’t be in control, just one of the little problematic aspects. So, yes, you can make it a practice that way and this is why metta practice, loving kindness practice is very helpful because it’s another form of opening.

Closing reflections

Ken: Okay, let’s close here and as a way of closing I’d just like to just sit for a few moments and consider anything that— well, actually, before we do that, can we just pass the microphone quickly? What I’d like to hear from each of you is something that you got out of this evening, and if you didn’t get anything, you can say, I got nothing out of this evening. Steve, start with you.

Steve: It’s just faith is a word that is weighted, especially in our culture and so it took a little weight off the word, some of the ways that we talked about it. Okay.

Student: Yeah. Following up on that, I guess, I do feel like this is an aspect of practice that I’ve experienced, but wouldn’t have given it this term, wouldn’t have talked about it in these terms. And so this was an interesting conversation just to have put a framework on some of it. So thank you.

Student: Well, many things, but to pick one: the dividing of faith into the three aspects, which makes sense to me now you know what type of person I am. So that that was very profound for me. So thank you.

Student: I think I mean, not that I didn’t know this, but it just sort of hit me again about my own anger approach to everything. I suppose I can thank you for that and also, I just really liked the idea that belief … did you say belief could be the opposite of faith, I liked that.

Student: Well, this opens a lot of doors, a lot more. A lot more questions about faith. I have a lot more questions about Buddhism. Just whetted my appetite for more.

Student: The division of faith into those three aspects, particularly the first one and then just what was touched on at the end as practice as a way to cultivate. Right?

Student: Yeah. I think I also recognized myself in that first cranky part.

Student: The three aspects of faith, and to look at things, to look at more than just the faith, but to look at the other immeasurables in the same light. It’s really helpful. And then at the end of the conversation, I was beginning to look at the differences and similarities between faith and hope and the connection with that and just sort of looking at it in a different way. Thank you.

Student: When we were talking about doubt, I’ve always thought it’s good to have doubt because you arrive at a new truth or a new belief, but it sounds like that really isn’t the goal. It sounds like the goal is just to be open to experience without more or less building a new framework of belief.

Student: As was noted earlier, I think faith has been a word that I’ve always had issues with because it couldn’t be proved or it wasn’t evidence based. But simultaneously, being one who lives with the cup half full I’ve always embraced a sense of I’m going to add a new word here, a sense of living with grace. And so this definition of faith is very fulfilling.

Student: I’ve heard you speak about faith, I guess, a number of times, but this time I feel very much more inside it. You know, like, I I don’t know, I just felt like I saw something in a new way that was very, very helpful. I’m sorry, I can’t say more about it.

Student: This evening just reiterated to me to continue being willing to experience what is …

Ken: Yeah. We’re finished. So by way of closing whatever goodness has come from this for you, for all of us. Don’t think of holding it but think of possibly in some mysterious way just spreading through all your experience and in this way this goodness brings good to the whole world. So let’s just sit with that idea for a few moments. [Pause]

Goodness comes from this practice now.
Let me not hold it just in me.
Let it spread to all that is known
And awaken good throughout the world.

[Gong]

Thank you. I’ll be here next week also. So you can ask your questions. As many as you wish.