From our Buddhist point of view, faith is not the superficial belief in the unknown, the unintelligible or the impossible but it is the gift of inner confidence conferred to us by Inconceivable Life and Light that emphasizes reason, understanding, and awe through actual experience, by means of deeply hearing and seeing the dharma (the teachings & reality-as-it-is).
Confidence is not blind faith but becomes confirmed in everyday life through observation and practice. By hearing and seeing more clearly, with the help of the Buddhist teachings and practices, our hearts naturally open to and entrusts in the infinite and interconnected living 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 courage 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 biophysical and spiritual reality of being human, that adamantly refrains from entangling itself in present-day toxic philosophies and ideologies, and fashionable and cultish “activist” movements that celebrate the distortions of reality-as-it-is, and worse, seek to radically revise the Buddhist teachings to conform to their extreme dogmas. Such movements invariable cause more human suffering (dukkha), and undermine the validity and potency of the Buddha’s teachings.
For discerning Shin Buddhists, these dogmas are fundamentally contradictory to Buddhist teachings and cause real distractions and become debilitating hindrances to spiritual growth by corrosively divide one’s faith, and diminish focus and clarity, weaken intentionality and purpose, and invariably reduce inner peace. Any sangha, teacher or practicioner who dabbles or embraces in such philosophies or ideologies and also propagates these teachings via activism is truly deceiving themselves and others, and cannot claim to be true disciples of the Buddha. Alternatively, our focus is solely on the enlightenment of the mind and heart through the working of the Dharma, the universal reality, that has been transmitted by the Buddhist teachings for milennia, which has had the proven power to emancipate sentient beings from dukkha (suffering) and improve the the state of the world.
This is the definition of the word “faith,” in which our organization, the Buddhist Faith Fellowship, derives its name. This “Buddhist Faith” is shaped by trust, sraddha & the entrusting heart, that is neither blind, unreasonable, distracted nor dogmatic but is informed by reason, openness, resoluteness, and direct experience.