From the Buddhist point of view, faith is not the belief in the unknown, the unintelligible or the impossible but it is the gift of inner confidence that emphasizes reason and understanding through actual experience, by deeply hearing and seeing the dharma (the teachings & reality-as-it-is).
Confidence is not blind faith but becomes confirmed in everyday life through practice. By hearing and seeing more clearly, with the help of the teachings and practices, we open our hearts and entrust ourselves to the infinite and interconnected Life and Light of the universe. This entrusting awareness through deep hearing and seeing allows us to recognize and accept our self-centered nature and blind passions, while at the same time, reveals the gift of the unconditional Dharma/Truth that accepts us just as we are. Our everyday response for this unconditional gift of faith is living a life of gratitude, virtue, benevolence, and generosity towards all sentient beings including ourselves. What’s more, Faith grants us the fortitude to unconditionally accept the incessant flow of impermanence with all of its blessings and challenges.
Our faith is fully yoked in the Buddha’s teachings of wisdom and compassion, and the biological reality of being human, that adamantly refrains from entangling itself in present-day ideologies, and fashionable and cultish revolutionary movements that celebrate the distortions of reality-as-it-is, and even seek to radically revise the Buddhist teachings to conform to their extreme dogmas. Such movements invariable cause more human suffering, and undermine the validity and potency of the Buddha’s teachings. Alternatively, our focus is solely on the enlightenment of the mind and heart through the working of the Dharma, the universal truth, and the Buddhist teachings, that has had the proven power to emancipate sentient beings from dukkha/suffering for millennia.
It is this definition of the word “faith,” in which our organization, the Buddhist Faith Fellowship, derives its name. This “Buddhist Faith” is shaped by trust (sraddha & true entrusting) that is neither blind, unreasonable, distracted nor dogmatic but is informed by reason, openness, resoluteness, and direct experience.