Great Faith: Three Essentials of Zen
Photo by Philip Oroni
In this first talk in a series on the Three Essentials of Zen, Zuisei speaks on the first essential: Great Faith, discussing the four stages of faith and the role that they play in our commitment to the dharma.
To have faith is to trust and to let that trust guide us along our path as it unfolds. Having Great Faith is believing in our goodness, in the teachings, and in the sangha or community of practitioners. It is trusting that they will support us in the process of awakening.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
From these clouds, that carelessly cover the star
that just was there—
from these mountains over there, now, for a while, taken by the night—
from this river on the valley floor,
that glimmers with the sky’s broken light—
from me and all of this: to make one thing.
From me and from the feel of the flock
brought back to the fold,
to outlast the great dark closing down of the world—
from me and from each flicker of light
from the shadowed houses—Lord, to make one thing.
From the strangers, among whom I know not one, Lord,
and from me, from me—
to make one thing.
From all the slumbering ones,
coughing old men in the hospice,
sleep-drunken children in crowded beds,
from me and all I don't know,
to make the thing, oh Lord,
that thing, that half-heaven, half-earth…
gathers into its gravity only the sum of flight,
weighing nothing but arrival.
I have been thinking about faith. A couple of people asked me recently about faith, about what it is to me and how it relates to my practice. This led me to think about doubt, its counterpart. And quite naturally, determination followed, this three being, as most of you know, the three pillars of Zen, as Kapleau Roshi called them, or the three essentials, as his teacher, Yasutani Roshi, referred to them.
And at the same time that I was thinking of this, two other things happened. Someone sent me a couple of lines from a Rilke poem called “Spanish Trilogy.” So I read this three-part poem in three parts and saw that it captured, quite nicely, these three essentials (the one I read is the first part). And in the meantime, I kept receiving packages from an unnamed source, little booklets called The Modern Spirituality Series, Arranged for Daily Reading. Now I have three, on teachings by Dorothy Day, Fr. Bede Griffiths, T. Merton, all of whom, in their own way, had something to say about great faith, great doubt, and great determination.
I decided I would explore these three essentials of Zen, beginning with faith. But the fact is, faith contains the other two, and the same is true of doubt and determination. So that what we have is not just three essentials, but three containing three, each of which each contains three, and so on, and so on, into infinity. Like an image of a lighted candle between two mirrors, or work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, points of light that get multiplied endlessly.
This is why you only need a tiny little bit of faith, just enough doubt, a flicker of determination. You need just enough to turn you toward yourself, toward a path, toward a different way of meeting your mind, which is the same as meeting the world.
You just need one percent, Yasutani Roshi once said, enough to get you started. And if you stay with it, that bit of light will spark another bit of light that gets reflected in a skillful action, a word, a moment of letting go, And this flicker sparks another and another.
Edith Wharton said, there are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. We can have faith in our ability to awaken or we can take actions that reflect that faith, even if in a moment—or two or three—we are not feeling it. If we waited to practice until we feel strong and clear and trusting, we might not practice at all. If we waited until we had a roaring fire, most of us would be waiting for a long time.
So sometimes we turn towards a faith we do not yet feel and we act based, not on our feeling, but on our aspiration. “But that doesn’t feel sincere,” people sometimes say. Our sincerity is in our intent, not in our ever-changing states of mind. Think of this sesshin, for one—or one period of zazen. One moment you hate everyone, you hate the person sitting next to you, their smell, their haircut, the way they’re breathing, the fact that they’re moving, they’re not moving … you hate everything about them.
The poor jikidos get it the worst, how many times have you cursed them in mind?
Jikido, ring the bell, Jikido Ring. The. Bell. Ringthebell, c’mmon, the period has to be over by now, are you asleep? And why isn’t the monitor saying anything? They’re probably asleep too…great.
So one minute you hate everyone, the next you’re in love with everyone and everything and you’ve decided you’ll move in, become a monk and live happily ever after.
So what do we trust, if not our fickle minds? You know, sometimes you really just do it, there is such a thing. We could call it discipline, we could call it faith. I may not be feeling this now, but let me turn to it anyway and see what happens.
Dorothy Day said we have to enter faith through our senses. Not through some lofty idea of God or enlightenment, but through the smell of the incense, the doing of a bow, the eating, with complete attention, a bowl of oatmeal.
And still, when we say “Trust yourself” what does that mean? What are you trusting? This is such a good question. It’s such an important question for a practitioner. If I’m deluded, confused, not awake, if I don’t see clearly, then how do I trust what I see before me? How do I know that what I’m seeing is what is really there?
You may have heard this story. A man is driving his car through a long stretch of road in the middle of Death Valley. It is noon in July and a 115 degrees outside. He’s driving a rented car whose right front tire begins wobbling. He stops and sees that it’s flat, but when he opens the trunk, there is no car jack. But five miles back he passed a gas station, so he decides to walk back there to ask for a jack. He starts walking, thinking "I hope someone is there. I’ll just ask them for a jack and maybe a lift back here. I’m sure they wouldn’t turn me away in this heat.” He walks a bit more, and now he’s really, really hot.
“But, what if they ask me for money. It’s their jack, after all. Well, that’s okay, I have money. How much can they charge—$20? I can pay that. That’s reasonable. But, we’re in the middle of nowhere. They know I have no choice. So what if they decide to charge me double? $40? You have $40. Don’t be stingy. $40 is not that much. But what if they want more? How much more could they want? What if they charge me $80? What if they have a jack but won’t let me use it? What if they don’t like how I’m dressed? What if they think I had it coming to me?”
By now he’s dizzy from the heat and he’s so thirsty his mouth feels like he’s swallowed his shirt. “I’ll offer them $100. They can’t possibly turn that down. It’s five times what the jack is worth…. And if they don’t accept it? Jesus! How cruel can these people be? $200? You know that even if they ask for $300 you’ll have to pay. It’s either that or spending the night in your car. But you'll probably die if you do that.”
Now he’s right outside the gas station.
“These people are ruthless. What was I thinking asking them for help? They'll probably just take all my money and my new watch. After all, they can, so why wouldn’t they?"
He walks through the door just as an older woman behind the counter sees him and smiles. He bangs his fist on the counter and shouts: “Keep your stupid jack. I didn’t want it anyway!” And he slams his way out.
In Christianity—specifically the Old Testament—faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I would say that in Buddhism, faith is the “substance of things recognized and the evidence of things not yet seen.” In Buddhism, having faith means knowing somewhere deep down, that that which you seek, you already are. That no matter how off course you think you’ve gone, you’re never actually lost.
A student told me that many years ago they went to an AA meeting where a woman, after introducing herself, said that she finally understood she could not drink like other people, because she was abnormal. And this student thought, “No, wait, that’s not right.” The next day they went to the Temple for the first time, and in the Sunday discourse they heard, “You’re perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” And they thought, “I’m home.”
Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. There’s lots of work to be done. We just have to look at the papers, we just have to look at our minds. There’s lots of work to be done. Like Suzuki Roshi said: “You’re perfect and complete, and you could use a bit of work.” But we have faith in both truths. I am perfect and complete, but I don’t act this way. I forget. I get afraid. But I trust in my capacity to see and act out of my perfection more and more. By perfection we mean wholeness and harmony.
The Buddha said:
Whatever beings there are, whether footless or two-footed or four-footed, with form or without form, with or without understanding, of these the Tathagata is reckoned foremost.
Those who have faith in the Buddha have faith in the foremost, and for those with faith in the foremost the result will be foremost.
Whatever states there are, whether conditioned or unconditioned, of these detachment is reckoned foremost, that is, the subduing of vanity, the elimination of thirst… the destruction of craving, detachment, cessation, nirvana. Those who have faith in the dharma of non-attachment have faith in the foremost…
The sangha of the Buddha’s disciples is worthy of gifts, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of reverential salutation, the unsurpassable field of merit for the world. Those who have faith in the sangha have faith in the foremost, and for those with faith in the foremost the result will be foremost.
This is faith in the Buddha, in his awakening and the awakening of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas who’ve come before us, who’ll come after us. It is also faith in the teacher, in their vow to help us awaken. And it’s not just faith in their guidance, but also in their faith in us.
So many times I have doubted myself and my ability to do this practice, to see clearly, to let go of my deeply, deeply entrenched habits. And my teachers would show me that they had utter faith in me, even if I didn’t. And I would think, “Well, if they think I can do it, and I trust them, then I must be able to do it.” It is also faith in our own buddha nature.
Then there is faith in the dharma, in the teachings that point to harmony, to the end of craving and delusion. It is faith in the truth of things, in their suchness. Things don’t deceive us, we deceive ourselves. So having faith in the dharma is having deep trust in things as they are, in their capacity to help us awaken. How many stories have we heard of practitioners realizing themselves at the sound of raindrops, or a phrase, or on seeing blossoms falling, or the slamming of a door, even just in experiencing the breath… fully.
Rain falls all the time, doors slam all the time, we breathe all the time. The truth is expounded ceaselessly, we just have to be able to hear it, see it, feel it.
There is faith in the sangha, in the company of noble friends from whom we gain strength and guidance and inspiration to continue walking the path. That same person you were hating last period, in this next period inspires you. You see them sitting with such stillness and you think, “Wow! I want to do that. If they can do it, maybe I can too.”
So we have faith in these three treasures and this faith goes through four stages:
Clear faith: seeing the wonderful qualities of the Buddha, seeing them in your teacher or in someone you admire, your mind becomes clear and joyful.
There’s longing faith: wanting to have those qualities yourself so you can be of benefit in this world. So this aspirational faith, as opposed to greed. In the beginning, we may want these qualities just so we can feel good and proud, so you can feel like you’ve achieved something but remember that this faith is on the three treasures, which means you bring everyone with you, which means your success, as it were, depends on them. You can’t leave anyone behind otherwise it doesn’t work.
Confident faith: you know you are able to attain these qualities and the more you practice, the more you know this, the harder it is to willfully go back to sleep.
Irreversible faith: you can’t go back any more no matter how long the path, no matter how difficult, you know it is not just long and hard and anyway, it doesn’t matter because it’s your path and you simply have to walk it.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said “Faith is the precious wheel that rolls day and night along the path of liberation.” But we should be clear that faith is not certainty. One writer says it’s the willingness to keep your eyes open, to stay awake and alert to what is true and real. One of the desert fathers told his monks, “You have to be all eye.” I would say it’s the willingness to not know.
Which is so hard for us. We don’t like not knowing. I haven’t. I’ve had to learn to open into that discomfort, so I could see what I previously couldn’t even imagine because what we know is so limited. It’s so black and white, so… certain.
Thankfully for us, life is not that way. We are not that way. We continue to change and develop, hopefully, and grow. And although faith ebbs and flows, like any other created thing, underneath it is solid ground—which is not solid at all. Daido Roshi called it the ground of being. We call it our true nature.
I believe it’s this ground that Rilke is turning to when he invokes “the making of one thing,”
from a cloud, carelessly covering a star
a mountain long swallowed by night,
from strangers and friends,
from those we love and those we cannot stand,
from me and all of this, he says, to make one thing.
And it’s not really that we’re making that one thing. The one thing is always there but we are working to see it in everything. When we don’t see it, it becomes possible, even reasonable, to separate a parent from their child. It becomes possible to speak of political agendas and tough policies and keep at bay the knowledge that these agendas are affecting human beings, 11-month-old human beings. So here it is, perfect and complete, and there is definitely work to be done. There is sitting quietly, minding our own business. There is speaking up, minding our own business. That is how large our business actually is.
The only way to willfully create harm is through the illusion of separation. The only way to unconsciously create harm is through the illusion of separation. That is why our practice is about getting close.
Getting close to strangers and friends, getting close to dying old men and to children in crowded beds, getting close to everything we think we know and everything we don’t. To what we love to see and what we would rather not look at, not think about, not meet.
Because whether we know it or not, we are a single flock, returning to the fold and there are stray sheep, wandering about and some of them are wreaking havoc, some are caring for the ones who can’t care for themselves. It’s still just one flock. It moves and breathes and lives as one body which means that what I do, what you do, little old me and you, matters.
And if this makes you anxious, don’t worry, Rilke accounted for this too. In his Letters to a Young Poet he said:
You must not be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like a light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do.
You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Life holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. You hold yourself in your own hand, and if you know this, you cannot fall. Seen from close up, from the inside, so there’s nothing else to see, what is falling anyway?
Great Faith, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.