Edward Conze (accesstoinsight.org) edited by Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly
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| The world's largest gold statue is a 5.5 ton Buddha in Thailand (U.S. Gold Bureau) |
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Part I: The Five Spiritual Faculties
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| What is the way of wisdom? Knowing-and-seeing |
The conduct of the ordinary worldling is governed by sense-based instincts and impulses. As we progress, new spiritual forces gradually take over, until in the end the five spiritual faculties or cardinal virtues dominate and shape everything we do feel and do and think.
These virtues are called, in Sanskrit and Pali, indriya, variously translated as "faculties," "controlling faculties," or "spiritual faculties" [1]. The very same five virtues are called powers (bala) if emphasis is on the fact that they are "unshakable by their opposites."
1. Confidence (Faith)
Confidence or faith (saddha) is called "the seed," for without it the plant of spiritual life cannot start at all. This is tentative, testable "faith," not any kind of "blind faith."Without some faith one can, as a matter of fact, do nothing worthwhile at all. This is true in Buddhism as well as all religions and practices, even modern pseudo-religion, such as capitalism and communism.
Faith is much more than the mere "acceptance of beliefs." It requires the combination of four factors — intellectual, volitional, emotional, and social.
1.1 Intellectually, faith or confidence is an assent to doctrines that are not substantiated by immediately available direct factual evidence. To be a matter of faith, a belief must go beyond the available evidence and the believer must be willing and ready to fill up the gaps in the evidence with an attitude of patient and trusting acceptance.
- [One takes the first step in faith, with confidence, trusting that the rest of the staircase will be there. We needn't use our eyes and see each step with the first one. Taking the first one leads to the others in a natural order, and we can always turn around when we start losing faith.]
Faith, taken in this sense, has two opposites, that is, a dull unawareness of the things that are worth believing in, on the one hand, and doubt or perplexity on the other.
In any kind of religion some assumptions are taken on trust and accepted on the authority of scriptures or trusted teachers.
Generally speaking, faith is, however, regarded as only a preliminary step, as a merely provisional state.
In due course direct spiritual awareness will know that which faith took on trust and longed to know: "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face."
Much time must usually elapse before the virtue of wisdom has become strong enough to support a vigorous insight into the true nature of reality. Until then quite a number of doctrinal points must be taken on faith.
What then in Buddhism are the objects of faith? They are essentially four:
- (1) the belief in karma and rebirth;
- (2) the acceptance of the basic teachings about the nature of reality, such as conditioned co-production, emptiness, and so on;
- (3) confidence in the "Three Guides," the Buddha, the Dharma, and the [Noble] Sangha; and
- (4) a belief in the efficacy of the prescribed practices, and in nirvana as the final way out of all difficulties.
It is, as Prof. Radhakrishnan incisively puts it, the "striving after self-realization by concentrating the powers of the mind on a given idea."
Volitionally, faith implies a resolute and courageous act of will (strong intention) or determination (adhitthana). It combines the steadfast resolution that one will do a thing with the self-confidence that one can do it.
Suppose that people living on the one side of a river are doomed to perish from many enemies, diseases, and famine. Safety rests on the other shore. The person of faith is then likened to the person who swims across the river, braving its danger, being saved and inspiring others by example.
Those without faith will go on dithering along the nearer bank. The opposites to this aspect of faith are timidity, cowardice, fear, wavering, and a smallminded and calculating mentality.
1.3 Emotionally, faith is an attitude of serenity and lucidity. Its opposite here is worry, the state of being troubled by many things. It is said that someone who has faith loses the "five terrors." That is, one ceases to worry about the necessities of life, about loss of reputation, death, an unhappy rebirth, and the impression one may make on an audience.
It is fairly obvious that the burden of life must be greatly lightened by a belief in karma and emptiness (not-self, the impersonal nature of things, anatta).
Even an unpleasant fate can be accepted more easily when it is understood as a dispensation of justice (comeuppance), when vexations are explained as an inevitable retribution (when our suffering has some reason or benefit), when law seems to rule instead of blind chance, when even apparent loss is bound to turn into true gain (delayed gratification).
And if there is really no self after all, what and whom do we worry about? If there is only one vast emptiness (nothingness, nihilism, pointlessness), what is there to disturb our radiance?
1.4 Socially, and this is more difficult to understand, faith involves confidence and trust (conviction) in the Buddha and the Sangha (the community of those in any of the four stages of enlightenment from stream entry to full enlightenment).
Its opposite here is the state of being submerged in cares about one's sensory social environment, cares which spring from either social pressure or social isolation.
The break with the normal social environment is, of course, complete only in the case of the monastic (renunciate, wandering ascetic) who, as the formula goes, "in faith [confidence in the Three Treasures or Triple Gem] forsakes the home-life."
To a lesser extent it must be carried out by every practitioner of the Dharma, who must "live apart" from this society, in spirit if not in fact.
- [The real meaning of "renunciation" (nekkhamma) is not letting go of things externally, which most anyone can do, but internally, which next to no one can do without wisdom, insight, true knowledge, or confidence/faith.]
The company of others and the help we expect from them are usually a mainstay of our sense of security.
By going for guidance (sarana) to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the noble Sangha [the Teacher of enlightenment, the Teaching of enlightenment, and the successfully Taught, who themselves are now awakened by that Teacher's Teaching] one turns from the visible and tangible to the invisible and elusive [impalpable].
By placing one's reliance on spiritual forces, one gains the strength to disregard public opinion and social discouragement. Some measure of defiant contempt for [or disregard, dislike, rejection of] the world and its ways is inseparable from a spiritual life.
The spiritual person does not "belong" to one's visible environment, in which one is bound to feel rather a stranger. One belongs to the community of the enlightened (liberated, free, saints/arhats), to the family of the Buddha.
It is with these more invisible forces that one must learn to establish satisfactory social relations. In carrying out this task, faith requires a considerable capacity for renunciation [internal letting go even if one retains the connection to the item, non-addiction, non-obsession].
This concludes our survey of the four factors that go into the making of faith. Like other spiritual qualities, faith is somewhat paradoxical in that in one sense it is a gift which one cannot obtain by merely wanting to, and in another sense it is a virtue that can be cultivated.
The capacity for faith varies with the constitution of the individual and our social circumstances. It is usual to classify types of personality according to whether they are dominated by greed, hatred (which includes fear), or confusion.
Those who walk in greed are said to be more susceptible (amenable) to faith than the other two, because of the kinship that exists between faith and greed. To quote Buddhaghosa (The Path of Purification, III,75):
"As on the unwholesome plane greed clings and takes no offense, so faith on the wholesome plane. As greed searches for objects of sense-desire, so faith for the qualities of morality, and so on. As greed does not let go of that which is harmful, so faith does not let go that which is beneficial."
As regards social conditions, there are ages of faith and ages of unbelief (doubt, skepticism, nihilism). The present age rather fosters unbelief. It puts a premium on intellectual smartness, so that faith is easily held to indicate nothing but a weak head or a lack of intellectual integrity.
It multiplies the distractions from the sensory world to such an extent that the calm of the invisible world is harder to reach than ever.
It exposes the citizen to so great a variety of conflicting viewpoints that one finds it hard to make a choice.
The prestige of science, the concern with a high standard of living, and the disappearance of all institutions of uncontested authority are the chief foes of faith in our present-day society.
It is largely a matter of temperament whether we believe that matters will improve in the near future.
As a virtue, faith is strengthened and built up by self-discipline, not by discussing opinions.
Intellectual difficulties are by no means the most powerful among the obstacles to faith. Doubts are inevitable, but how one deals with them depends on one's character.
The first of our four "articles of faith" well illustrates this situation. There are many sound reasons for accepting the rebirth doctrine. This is not the place to expound them, and I must be content to refer the reader to the very impressive "East-West Anthology" on Reincarnation, which J. Head and S.L. Cranston have published in 1961 (New York, The Julian Press Inc.)
Yet, although belief in rebirth is perfectly rational and does not conflict with any known fact, the range of the average person's vision is so limited that he has no access to the decisive evidence, which is direct and immediate experience.
The rebirth doctrine assumes at least two things.
(1) Behind the natural causality that links together events in the world of sense there are invisible chains of moral causality, which assures that all skillful acts are rewarded and all unskillful actions punished [assuming there are no mediating or intervening acts of karma and that one does not gain enlightenment, making all karmic seeds barren].
(2) This chain of moral sequences is not interrupted by death, but continues life after life from rebirth to rebirth.
To the average person these two assumptions cannot be proved absolutely, conclusively, and beyond the possibility of doubt. However plausible they may seem on rational grounds, Buddhism teaches that they become a matter of direct experience only after the "super-knowledges" (Sanskrit abhijna, Pali abhiñña) have been developed.
The fourth "super-knowledge" is the recollection of one's own previous rebirths, and the fifth the knowledge of the rebirths of other people, by which one "sees that whatever happens to them happens in accordance with their deeds."
There are many well-authenticated cases of persons spontaneously remembering certain details of one or the other of their own previous lives, and these people obviously have an additional reason for belief in rebirth that is lacking in those who cannot recall ever having lived before.
Full certitude on the issue is, however, given to those only who can, on the basis of the fourth meditative absorption (jhana) and by taking definite prescribed and disciplined steps on emerging from that absorption, "recall their manifold former lives," according to the well-known formula:
"There I was, that was my name, that was my family, that was my caste, such was my food, this was the happiness, this the suffering I experienced, this was the duration of my life-span. Deceased there I was reborn elsewhere and there had this name" and so on. More
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