(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - So I'm gonna begin a series of talks on faith with a story. I'm gonna read you a story set in the Albuquerque Airport terminal and I just want you to, you know, I just notice your responses to this story as I read it. Typically you're, if there's any emotional response to this story. The story begins wandering around the Albuquerque Airport terminal. After learning my flight had been detained for hours, I heard an announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate 4a understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate 4a was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor wailing loudly. Help said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this. I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haughtingly. Shudoa. Shubidok habibti. Stani shwai min fadlek. Shubitsiwe. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, you'll find him, you'll get there. Who is picking you up? Let's call him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mammal cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts out of her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mum from California, the lovely woman from the radio. We were all covered with the same halved sugar and smiling. There is no better cookie. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice. And they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend. By now we were holding hands. Had a potted plant poking out of her bag. Some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought. This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate. Once the crying and confusion stopped. Singed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. That's a piece of writing by Naomi Sheehan Knight. So what I suggest we do now is just break into pairs for a few minutes and just talk about the responses we had to that piece of writing. To hearing that story. Particularly any emotional responses you had. To hearing that story. I thought I'd start with that. I think it's a brilliant piece of writing. Just it captures a moment in an airport that we can probably all identify with. But in a way it's that response that it sounds like. Some people had that response of well being moved by it. Picking up on the values, the compassion, the love, the beauty of what happened in that story. And it's that your ability to respond like that. To the story like that. I think that is the root. It's what I call the roots of faith. Yeah, that is actually a response of faith. So you've heard something. It is a very beautifully put story. And it's about people coming together from an airport's people are tense and anxious and just in their own world concentrating on where they want to get to. And it brings people together. So it's sort of. In a way it's highlighting a kind of sense of interconnectedness. You could say it's got something of the nature of reality in it. And brought together very well. So faith. I'm going to look at faith more particularly today. Sort of what I call pre-buddest faith. I'm not going to look at it as what it becomes in Buddhist tradition. I want to try and identify what the experience of faith is in its most sort of simple, straightforward form. And it's something that all human beings have here. So that's what I mean with it. It's pre-buddest. We all have this ability to respond to value when we come across it. Particularly higher values. And I'm going to talk about it in terms of goodness, truth and beauty. You know when we come across things of goodness, truth and beauty is quite possible that what's not just possible is actually innate in being a human being that we have some response to that. And that is the very kind of core of faith. So one of my aims for this retreat, in a way my sort of principle aim, is to get you to identify, be able to identify that experience in your own experience. So I think we can have different ideas about what faith is. But this, my understanding of Buddhist tradition, this is the kind of part of faith. So it's anger, actually, I'll give you a write up. I'm going to write up a few things. Anger, actually, has this aphorism. He says faith is innate. Down to a choir, does that make sense in translation of the Swedish? No. So it is, is it innate? Yeah. So innate means it's inherent within us. It's there in every kind of being born as a human being. We have this faculty there. It may be latent, it may not be very conscious, but it's there, present in us. It's not something that we add on to ourselves. We don't have to get faith from out there and stick it on to ourselves. It's there as an ability to respond. It's innate within every single human being. Yeah, it unites human beings. This is what I mean about its pre-Buddhist, because not every human being knows about Buddhism. But every human being has the possibility to respond in a way, perhaps in similar ways to we did on hearing the story that we just heard. And then it talks about doubt as a choir. So Saint Grazch, this is an aphorism. So he's trying to provoke you to think, maybe to get you to think slightly differently to how you might normally. So it's not that faith is acquired. You've got to get faith from out there and you've got a natural state of doubt. What you've got is a natural state of faith. But often that is overlaid with views and experiences that have suppressed the ability to respond to value. So that's what he's getting at. Faith is innate, it's present in just being alive as a human being. We have this possibility to respond to value. Unfortunately, our culture, our society, our education, our experience as well, can lead us to doubt those higher values, doubt the goodness in other people. You know, we have that immediate response of where we hear about "Can anybody speak Arabic come to this airport gate?" And the immediate thought is, yeah, it's terrorism. You know, we've got that in our minds. That's what happens, yeah. So anyway, that's one of the reasons that's such a good place. Writing it moves you from that state of your habitual sort of response to something completely different. So those things, yeah, are required. Also, maybe I'll write it up to the other thing. The definition of faith. So faith is sadhār in Pali. We have these two primary languages of Sanskrit and Pali. So you sometimes see them written separately. So it's shredhār. So Mahār shredhār is, his name is in a Sanskrit name, rather than Pali name, but sadhār in Pali. And sadhār comes from a root word which literally means to follow the heart upon. So that's what it means again. This is a sort of a pre-buddhist definition. It's just a much more general definition. So sadhār is what we place our heart upon. So if you just think about that phrase, what do you place your heart upon? I mean, I think we place our heart upon what is meaningful to us, what is valuable to us. That's my sense of what that evokes, yeah? So we're talking about a realm of meaning and value in shredhār. And it's interesting that, I don't know how many of you know much about young psychology, Carl Jung. He has something called the Four Factors of Consciousness, which become, if you know Maya's Briggs personality types, it gets used in all of that kind of thing. But he has an interesting definition of feeling. So he talks about these four factors of consciousness. The first one is sensation, which just establishes contact with the world around us. And then he talks about thinking is the interpretation of what we perceive. And then he talks about the evaluation of the object is feeling. So feeling, he uses feeling not in the sense of emotion, not that general sense of emotion, but feeling is the ability to discern and describe value in what we are perceiving, yeah? Which in a way, I think is, I'm not saying that shredhār, I don't want to sort of make a literal equation between that and feeling, but I think it's in the same area. It's interesting that Jung arrived at that definition of feeling in his exploration of the psyche. But yeah, he says it's about the ability to recognize value. Well, in a way, ascribe the value to the things that we come in contact with. So it's a faculty, again, that we all have. You know, these four factors of consciousness in Jung's terms are things that we all have. Yes, but it's interesting also that this, the faculty of faith of what we place our heart upon, it's not rational, yeah? It can't be thought into being. We're going to look a little bit later at how thinking relates to shredhār, because thinking can help to deepen shredhār and clarify the objects of our shredhār. But in itself, feeling is of a different order, yeah? No matter how much you thought you couldn't arrive at the actual experience of shredhār, yeah, does that make sense? So, yes, it's a non-rational faculty. In a way, this maybe leads me on to, I want to talk a little bit about why have a retreat on faith, and a little bit about maybe why that's so unusual, you know, so I mentioned briefly, yeah. In Jung's, Jung talks, the fourth faculty is intuition, which he, very briefly, but he talks about is an immediate awareness of relationships that could not be established by the other three functions at the moment of orientation. So, it's the ability to pick up something in a situation that isn't presented to you through sense, experience, thinking, or feeling. It's a sort of an apprehension of, and he talks about it in terms of picking up space-time relationships more fully as well, that might get quite complex. But those are the four, yeah, so he has sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Those are Jung's four factors of consciousness. So, yes, last night I said it's pretty unusual to have a retreat on the topic of faith in Buddhism. I don't think that I've been on one before, not in quite the way that we're going to be exploring it this time. I mean, obviously, faith, that aspect can be present on other retreats, but to actually have it is the thing is probably pretty rare. So, in a way, it's interesting to think, well, why is that? So, I'm going to just suggest and explore one or two possibilities around that. In a way, the way we've arrived at Buddhism in the West, this is just to give a little bit of a bigger historical picture. You know, we've only come across Buddhism really in the 19th century. People started to come across Buddhist texts and Buddhist sculptures and places in the East and started to translate and look at Buddhist texts, yeah. It's only really since the 1960s, you could say that there's been a real engagement with Buddhist practice in the West. So, it's still only like 50, 60 years old really, Buddhism in the West. But we've come at it with our own particular kind of cultural, religious, intellectual history in the West. And this is a big generalisation and I'm going to simplify it. But in a way, the ability to come across Buddhism, we've arrived that they're only through the scientific revolution in the sort of 16th, 17th centuries, and then what's called the European Enlightenment in the 18th century. And those things were in the history of the West. They were partly tied up with the reaction to religion, to the dogmas of Christianity and to the assertion of things that can't be proved by the intellect, the focus on ritual and those kinds of things, yeah. So, we've sort of arrived at a place where we largely sort of freed ourselves from that, which isn't saying that there aren't Christians around, but as a sort of dominant story and myth of Western culture, it's sort of being broken. And we've got this quite particular idea of what it is to be a human being as a result of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, the rational enlightenment, where we very much value sensory evidence and thinking. That's kind of what you could say in terms of Jung's four factors, perhaps you could say. We emphasise those things. So, we tended to look towards Buddhism in discovering Buddhism, we tended to look both for the sort of wisdom teachings, condition, co-production, shunita, emptiness and perfection of wisdom. Those are the things that have kind of attracted Westerners, partly because they give this notion of a religious life that's non-seistic and have a religious life without having to believe in God. But then also, we've come at it to look for practices, particularly meditation practice, mindfulness practice, those kinds of things. We wanted sort of techniques that we can use. And, even Christians have rediscovered their own meditative traditions through coming across mindfulness and meditation in Buddhism. So, I'm not decrying any of that, but I'm just saying we've taken up Buddhism from a very particular point of view. And that isn't the whole story. It certainly, Buddhism does have great wisdom teachings in it, perhaps deeper and more profound than any of the other traditions. But it also has a lot of other things to it as well. And I think one of the things that does, there's a, there's a, there's perhaps a danger in that approach that we overly intellectualise the Dharma. And we think that the danger with the intellect is it can move a lot faster than the rest of our being. You know, you can rationally apprehend things that you haven't understood very deeply at all. And that can be quite deceptive. You think you've understood much more than you actually have. And there's this famous phrase again of Sanger Astra's, I can't find the exact quote, it's something like, the main problem for us is, the main problem for most people in the West is to develop emotional equivalents for their intellectual understanding. So he actually said that in 1968, it's in his lecture series on the 8th old path, and he's talking about perfect emotion. And saying that that's actually the main task for most people in the West to develop emotional equivalents for our intellectual understandings. And I think he's pointing out that ability, you know, it's easy for us to grasp a teaching and understand it intellectually. And it doesn't necessarily mean we transformed ourselves very deeply at all. Emotional life, even our lifestyle remains kind of largely untouched. There's a danger, I'm not saying, reasons definitely got its strong points, I'm not knocking it. But if we over identify ourselves with the faculty of reasoning, it does have its dangers and can be deceptive. But I think it has meant that we perceive Buddhism in this quite kind of intellectual rationalist in a way, also pragmatic way that can sometimes miss the emotional, mythic, imaginative, poetic depths, which explore this whole territory of value and meaning that we've just sort of tried to get us in touch with. I'm going to read two or three things. These are quotes again. From Sanger Axe, they're just to sort of highlight this point. So he says, one shouldn't think that insight, you know, insight is the key word that a lot of people are very focused on in Buddhism in the West. Yeah, insight translates for passana in the main word it translates. It says, one shouldn't think that insight is necessarily intellectual in nature. It is important to realise that emotion can intuit the unconditioned. That insight is as much emotional as intellectual and can therefore be expressed in terms of emotion as well as in terms of thought and even in terms of reverence, worship and devotion. So, I mean, I don't know what your perception is, but I think sometimes we think of reverence, worship and devotion as not necessarily integral to the gaining of insight, something we do on the side a little bit to make a connection with the Buddha, or it's a preliminary practice. It's something we do to just be able to engage our emotions a little more fully with the goal. But what he's saying, actually, there's other bits in which I'm going to come to later on in the week, he's talking about these reverence, worship and devotion have an element of the transcendental within them. So they're not just preliminary things that we do to connect with the goal. They're actually experiences and a reflection of the transcendental. So, he's just trying to challenge that notion. Insight itself, the very word, I don't know what the word is in Swedish. Insight. It's basically the same meaning. So, in English, it's a perceptual phrase. It's talking about seeing things, having seeing into things or seeing deeply or seeing clearly. So, it's a perceptual metaphor for awakening. Language is using certain kinds of terms and metaphors, but it's a perceptual language. Same direction, I'll read another bit from him. He says, "Faith of this kind is not faith in the current sense of the term, but the emotional counterpart of wisdom, though Pragnyar is the word for wisdom. Though Pragnyar is a word of predominantly intellectual connotation, it would be committing a dangerous mistake to suppose that the transcendental faculty, for which it stands, is a species of interaction in the ordinary, dualistic sense. Or that it would not be possible to indicate that faculty by a word of predominantly emotional connotation instead." So, what he's trying to get at here, he says, "Faith in the current sense of the term is the emotional counterpart of wisdom. It's not the emotional effect of wisdom. It's actually wisdom, as it were, experienced emotionally." So, he's saying we can experience the transcendental in a kind of cognitive intellectual way, which you might talk about as wisdom or insight. Or you can experience it in a predominantly emotional way, in which case, it's Shrathar, it's faith. And in saying the actual thing, and these have a kind of an equal value. You can experience the transcendental just as much through your emotional life, as you can through your cognitive intellectual, perceptual life. Yes, and he sort of says, "We shouldn't mistake Pragnyar, just because it's wisdom. We shouldn't think of it exclusively." And he says, "It's a dangerous mistake to think of that as somehow a species of intellectual thinking that we would normally understand it." So, the point I'm just trying to make, we've come up Buddhism from quite a kind of specific biased way in the West. So, to look at faith is actually to come with it from a quite different perspective. But not any less, it's not like a lower level of teaching. I think in the West we've got it's quite easy for us to think that emotion is a lower level of human kind of being than thinking is. We tend to think of reasoning as our leading faculty as human beings. That's what makes us distinctively human. So, actually, it's quite a big argument in making. I hope it's clear. So, yeah, we're not looking at faith. We're going to be exploring faith this week, not as something preliminary to the development of other qualities. There's actually kind of three ways that Buddhism does look at faith. It does sometimes just talk about faith as a preliminary quality that you need to develop in order that you can go on to higher stages of the path. It also talks about faith as a mandala. I don't know if you know the five spiritual faculties and the five spiritual faculties are faith and wisdom and samadhi, which is meditation and virya, which is energy and then mindfulness. And they're seen as a mandala sometimes. So, faith and wisdom are supposed to balance each other and samadhi, which is more a kind of an introversion on virya, which is energies more of an extroversion, balance each other and mindfulness is in the middle. So, you can see faith in those terms or you can see faith as actually a faculty that can take you the whole way. So, it's not preliminary. It's actually the language of faith and development of the emotional life fully and deeply is the whole of the path. We're going to explore all of these to a degree, but we're going to be moving into that third area where faith can be the faculty that takes you all the way to a state of awakening. Yeah, so maybe I'll just say we're going to, in 10 minutes or so, we'll have a tea break, the short tea break, and then we're going to come back in and I'm going to lead a series of reflections, meditative reflections, which, again, you want pen and paper full so you can write. Exploring this notion of faith, our hearts response to goodness, truth and beauty. But I want to give just one example of something from this in my own life. One of the first books I came across when I came in contact with Tree Ratner, since I was 18 or 19, I read a book of Sandra Actors called The Religion of Art, where he explores in a very kind of clear but heartfelt way, his own response to the world of beauty in the arts, and he's trying to find the connection between the artistic life and the response to beauty and the more obviously spiritual, ascetic life. And he ends up, for him, art and spiritual life are basically the same thing. They're both about heightening, erasing of the level of consciousness. So when I read this, I was actually, I had a strong response in faith to it. I found it completely thrilling to hear somebody articulating that perspective. I've never heard it before, and he did it so clearly and well. So, actually, that response to beauty has been quite a big part of my spiritual life. I've engaged with the arts more through, you know, contemplation of them rather than practice of them. What was the name of the book? The Religion of Art is the English title. I don't know if you've got a Swedish translation of that? No. And, but even the, so, one of the things I do, I listen to lots of classical music, and I find it deeply moving, and it keeps alive a strong, strong vein of emotional positivity and connection with something more, something higher for me. But until maybe, I was only about five years ago, I used to have this, I still had a view that somehow, the part of me that responded to beauty in the arts, that was a different response from the part of me that responded to the Buddha. So, I also have very strong, natural, heartfelt, devotional sense to the Buddha, but somehow, I kind of, I separated them in myself. I thought, there's this bit here that responds to beauty, and I know this bit here that responds to the Buddha. And I was talking with a friend of mine who's now Padma Manas being ordained, and I just had this realization that it's actually exactly the same response. It's not two things. It's one thing. You know, it's a bit, it was one of those pen and dropper moments for me. It might not, you might not have this problem, but it was. And what I've come to realize since is that it's a difference in degree, rather than in kind. I don't know if that makes sense in Swedish. So, it's like my response to, you know, listening to Beethoven or Sibagius or whatever it is, it's not a separate response to the bit, the response to the Buddha. It's just, it doesn't go maybe as far as the response to the Buddha does. I do think that the Buddha's kind of awakening goes beyond what Mozart or Palis experienced, you know. So, it's a difference of degree, but it's the same part of me as responding. It's exactly the same part of me. But for some reason, I divided my experience. I separated these things out. Unfortunately, I think a lot of this is the result of our culture and our education and upbringing. We don't tend to produce for an integrated, whole, happy, healthy human beings, our society. That's my observation of myself and it's my observation of others. Anyway, but that was a real kind of insight for me. And that, again, I'm just, the reason I'm just saying that is to bring it back to, well, they're both a response of faith. So, when I'm listening to music, when I listen to it, you know, at my best, at my deepest as it were, what I feel is that I'm in communion with the composer. I feel like I'm in some quite deep communion relationship with them at their best. I feel like I've got a very strong living relationship with a Mozart, even though I never met the man and he lived well over 200 years before me. There's something, there's a real relationship that unfolds through my listening to his music. And that's the same. In a way, my relationship with the Buddha is the same. I've got a relationship with the Buddha that is, it's not static, it's not fixed, it's an unfolding, deepening, developing relationship that's leading me onwards in my life. So yes, that's the quality, that response. When I'm hoping you have a sense of it from just that story, because we're going to do these reflections in a bit, I'm hoping that through the week that will become clearer to you and that you can trust that. I think one of the dangers of our culture and society is it teaches us to mistrust that response or to just become alienated from it, actually. And that has a big effect on who we are as human beings. Actually, if we mistrust, deny, cut off from alien themselves, it's what makes us fully and deeply human, I think, that quality, that ability to respond to value. Okay, maybe that's enough. So we've got, we've still got a bit of time. So if there's any questions, just have a few minutes of questions and then we'll have a shortage tea break and then we'll come back and do some reflection and then we're going to have groups just before lunch as well. So you'll have another chance to discuss different groups, but if there's any questions, anything that isn't clear or you'd like? Yeah. True. So that, partly I'm doing that, it's an old, in platonic philosophy they talk about those things, but the word in the Buddhist tradition is Kalyana. So we talk of spiritual friendship and the word is Kalyana Mitrata, Mitrata being met at our friendship. Kalyana has these connotations of all of those, the morally good, the beautiful and the true is sort of in the Buddhist dictionary, is given all of those qualities. So that's what the spiritually, spiritual sometimes quite a bland, misused word, I think, to define it in terms of what's morally good, what's beautiful and what's true. I mean, I can say the pieces I love, I don't know that I want to put them on a, I am going to play some pieces of music. We're going to, in the evenings before the puja, I'm going to play a few pieces of music, not all, I probably will play one piece by Mozart. There's a symphonia concertante for violin and viola that he wrote, so it's an orchestral piece with solo viola, viola and solo viola, and I might well play the slow movement of that at some point. He wrote it just after his mother died, and there's this lovely interweaving between the viola and the violin, but there's all the all kinds of pieces. I'm going to love his operas, I love the piano, concertos, some of his wind music, his fabulous, yeah, all sorts. I mean, you might have different responses, I don't want to, you know, I've got, one of the things I don't want to do on this retreat, you need to become more yourselves, and you need to discover what Shrathar is fully for you. I've got a way of, you know, I've dwelt on it and I've thought about it and I've explored it quite fully, but please don't just take on board my responses, you know, you've got to find them in, and it's true that different people experience Shrathar in different ways, we're all very different people, and I am a man of strong feelings, so the whole, the talk of emotion and devotion, that all comes really naturally to me, but I don't think you have to be a strong feeling in that way to experience Shrathar, so I don't want to kind of, although I might model faith in one way, you might experience faith in a different way, so don't, and don't think that because you're not experiencing how I might be talking about it, that you don't have faith, you might experience it quite differently in a quite particular way yourselves, yeah. I mean, that's the same with anything, isn't it, the same in meditation, you can teach people the metabarva and the mindfulness of breathing, and the sort of techniques are universal, but how somebody experiences meditation, I can't, I can't tell what you're experiencing, your experience of meditation is going to be very different from mine or, you know, spiritual life, one has to make it one's own. Yeah, I can also make it, so, yeah, it can, indeed, yeah, yeah, indeed, yeah, yeah, no, I, I mean, I definitely had that response to people talking about things that I've just had a very heartfelt response, I remember when, fairly early on in my tree ratna, but life, yeah, I heard Sabouti who all day me, he gave a series of talks on spiritual friendship, and I just found it completely thrilling hearing him uphold this practice and an idea of spiritual friendships, and you know, he just had a very strong sense of, why haven't I heard this before, you know, that sort of thing, so yeah, we can have responses that can awaken something in ourselves in different ways, but then there's also the process of embodying that in your own life more fully, yeah, yeah, yeah. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freeputus.io.com/donate. And thank you.
