Five Spiritual Faculties: Faith

This is a talk given by Lloyd to the Insight Community of Denver, Colorado, on one of the Five Spiritual Faculties: Faith. The teachings of the spiritual faculty of Faith incorporates focus on one's development of mindfulness, concentration and wisdom. This is an insightful talk about how to develop an integrated understanding into how to lead a more productive, enjoyable and fulfilling life.
Note: As this is a live recording, there is some background noise.

Transcript

That we're going to be looking at both this evening and the second and fourth Sundays in September are on the topic of what are called the five spiritual faculties.

As we know the Buddha was a great list maker and he taught in that kind of systematic way as a means of helping people develop a sort of cohesive or integrated understanding of certain aspects of the development of the practice that occur as you do it that kind of work to reinforce and feed each other and have a kind of a combined or collaborative unified effect of really enhancing your ability to understand and get something out of this practice instead of teaching it.

And so that's what the five spiritual faculties are.

The five are faith,

Effort,

Mindfulness,

Concentration,

And wisdom.

In the fall series on the establishing of mindfulness and introduction to Buddhism one of the things I do is to introduce everyone to the Dharma wheel.

The Dharma wheel is this iconic depiction of the Buddha's path to liberation,

The means by which one might achieve cessation from suffering.

It's an eightfold path and there are eight spokes on the Dharma wheel.

Three of those are what are called the meditative qualities,

Samadhi.

And those are in fact effort,

Concentration,

And mindfulness.

Once effort,

Concentration,

And mindfulness are established to a certain degree what begins to happen is that the mind becomes capable of insights.

This is why we call it insight meditation.

Insights into all the causes and conditions in our karma and our background that gave rise to who we are in this moment in time.

And insight into the very process of dependent origination itself,

The core rising of all phenomenon and how we define and engage each other as well as ourselves.

The other wisdom factor,

Right intention,

Has to do with developing insight not into who we are in this moment but who we may be in the next moment.

That is to say the more insight we have into our intentions and our motivations the more likely we are to be able to speak and act and live in a way that leads to the cessation of suffering rather than the perpetuation of suffering.

So the two wisdom factors are finite.

And then comes the fruition of the cultivation of effort and mindfulness and concentration and the wisdom factors of wise view and wise intention that manifest into wise speech action in the way of life.

The sort of fruition factor is the poly word is sila,

Which the formal probably most accurate and elaborate translation of which is to live in harmony with,

Sometimes also translated as morality or ethics.

And so this becomes a kind of a continuous process,

This movement around the darnable.

As the cultivation of effort and mindfulness and concentration become greater then more and more powerful insights become accessible and become available.

The more powerful the insights into the nature of your own character and your own intentions then the more likely you are to be able to speak and act wisely and live life wisely.

And so it has this continuous and mutually reinforcing aspect.

As one kind of,

You know,

Talk about following the Buddha's path,

It's not necessarily a linear path.

In some ways it's kind of a spiral path like this one.

Spiral is outward to touch the earth,

To manifest,

Spiral is inward.

As we become more and more in touch with the empty center of the darnable.

Where the essence lies,

The essence of no-fame-ness,

The essence of not-self.

So if you think about those aspects you'll notice that four out of the five spiritual faculties are already aspects of the eightfold path.

The one that's not,

Which makes it in some ways for me the most interesting or intriguing one,

Is the faculty of faith.

They were his sama.

And many Pali scholars say,

Again,

Not the greatest translation.

It comes to us in the 19th century with the Pali scholars and the missionaries that were trying to wrestle Pali terms to the ground and come up with the closest approximation of what we find in the English language.

So trust,

Confidence,

Devotion,

If you try to pull those terms together that is probably a more accurate depiction,

Maybe a more full or multifaceted flavor of what this word sama means.

When we think of faith in Western traditions,

It customarily has to do with adherence to a set of beliefs or a creed or something of that nature.

I remember I was raised in quite a fundamentalist church when I was a little kid.

At some point it became too much even for my parents.

We decided we needed to find a somewhat more open textured congregation to become a member of.

We eventually wound up with the Disciples of Christ.

As we were looking around at what was out there,

I really developed some sort of intriguing interest in Unitarianism.

I said,

Well how about we check that out?

Dad says,

Ah they don't believe anything.

Actually I found that kind of intriguing.

That's not the direction I came from.

But there's a Buddhist scholar named Stephen Bashor wrote a book called Buddhist in the Pali.

What he was trying to get at was that really maturing one's practice and really developing a deeper understanding of Buddha Dharma is not a matter of clinging to a set of beliefs.

It's a matter of ongoing exploration and of having an initial understanding of a concept or principle and then testing it out in your own experience and maybe having that understanding change as a result of it or go a little deeper.

Finding things that you encounter in studying the Pali texts and the commentaries that are perhaps enormously off-putting or that you can't hold late to at all for one reason or another.

And the creation here,

You know when I was growing up in a fundamentalist church,

If you didn't accept everything in the Bible as the word of God,

You were off the bus.

And more so in this tradition that's,

You know,

That which you find useful,

Use it.

That which you do not,

Put it aside.

You might find it useful at some future time.

You might never.

It's okay.

You know,

Inquire,

Look deeply and find what seems to resonate with you.

What in your own experience seems to be true.

And so that at the core is what the development of samhara,

Trust and confidence or faith,

Is where it comes from.

And when the Buddha taught the establishment of mindfulness,

What's the first foundation,

The first cornerstone,

The establishment of mindfulness?

We've been around this wheel a lot,

Right?

Mindfulness of the body and of breathing.

So what he advises people to do is just sit and attend to the experience of being alive in this body.

The first foundation of mindfulness.

And then later on in the Mahasati Panamas,

When he talks about exploration of what he calls the sixth basis,

Right?

And you hear this,

Like I said during our meditation,

You know,

To cultivate the mind,

Uncounted by fear and longing.

Which is to say,

Not wanting things to be different than they are.

So he said,

When you sit and you experience hearing,

Okay,

In hearing he says,

There's just the hurt.

There's just the noise.

When we were sitting,

Listening to the oscillating fan,

You may have found it annoying and distracting.

You may have found it kind of comforting,

Hoping that the thing is going to swing your way for these things.

So you get all the hurt.

It may have become white noise,

It may have just turned it on.

So there are many ways to relate to the same sense of hurt.

Like he's saying,

In hearing there is just a hurt.

No stories around it.

No light,

Dislike,

Okay.

You're walking around and seeing there is just a scene.

And tasting there is just a taste.

So experiencing all these things without aversion.

And without clinging or longing.

And so in this way what happens is that we begin to cultivate the sense of happiness.

In other words,

We begin to be able to experience things just as they are.

Without necessarily wanting them to be any different.

Being able to be that in touch with the experience of things just as they are.

Which is to say,

Learning how to just really trust your own sense basis.

Learning how to just really trust what your body is telling you about how it is to be in the world.

Is kind of an important step.

Because then it makes it easier to begin to trust what's going on in the mind as well.

And starting to explore the notion of sada.

Faith,

Trust,

Confidence.

I found that a useful starting point actually is in terms of the teachings of the Buddha we've been looking at all this year.

Once we did the Foundations of Mindfulness in October and we did the Brahma Vahara,

The Cultivation of Compassion,

Selfless Joy,

Equanimity and Open Heartedness.

Around the time of the holidays and what not.

And then going into the early part of this year,

We'll probably do some kind of cycle similar to this next year as well.

We began to take some of the teachings the Buddha offered of,

Well what happens when things don't seem to be going quite right.

When you have these obstacles to concentration that begin to arise.

Like lust or aversion or sloth and torpor or restlessness and worry,

Anxiety and fear.

What's the fifth of the head insist for the good lightning?

Doubt.

Absolutely.

More specifically skeptical doubt.

The Buddha talked about the different kinds of doubt.

One kind of doubt is the one that the Tibetan teacher Soka Gavarapu Shey calls noble doubt.

And that is in fact a form of doubt or inquiry that the Buddha encouraged.

You know,

Come see for yourself,

Maybe possibly.

Don't take anything just on somebody else's word.

Check it out for yourself,

See if it feels right to you.

Skeptical doubt is the doubt that is a combination of not taking anything just on face value.

Combined with a certain feeling of suspicion that you are kind of being had,

That you are being somehow or another recruited into a cult or something.

That somebody is trying to get you to have trust in them.

Place the heart upon them for their own nefarious purposes or ulterior motives.

And then the third and in some ways the most painful form of doubt is despair.

Which is a combination of skeptical doubt with a complete loss of hope.

Complete loss of any sense that there is going to be a way through this place where you found yourself getting stuck.

So those are the three kinds of doubt that can arise.

What are the objects of that doubt?

Whatever form it takes.

Classically there is three.

Doubt of the teachings.

The Buddha's teachings,

The Dharma is something variously translated as truth or the way,

How things are.

Well maybe for you they are not.

Maybe you don't find the Buddha's description of the nature of mind,

Where suffering comes from and how it can be brought to an end.

To comport with your own experience.

In that case the Buddha advised continue to see.

Look other places,

Look to other teachings,

Other teachers for answers to your questions.

So you may have some doubt that the teachings are really on the beat.

Or that at any rate they are not right for you.

You may have some doubts about the teacher.

That you are teaching lineage.

The teachings are alright but there is really something a little off about the way that they are being transmitted,

About the way they are being shared.

And in fact there were some Sanghas in the Buddha's time that collapsed because the supporting communities saw there to be a great big gap between what the monastics were teaching and how they were actually behaving.

Whenever that gap gets too great,

And this has been true for the last 2500 years in Buddhist countries,

Then the community ceases to support the monastic Sangha in classes.

So in order for the Dharma to be accurately and adequately and truthfully conveyed there needs to be this discernible relationship between the nature of the teachings and how they are taught.

So there may be doubt about the teacher.

There can also be doubt about oneself.

The teachings seem solid and what not.

And I think the teachers,

She or he seems to know what they are talking about,

The lineage seems sound and what not.

But you know,

I just really can't hack them.

My older daughter had a very good friend in junior high and high school who was a champion swimmer.

She was a state record holder at some events and was an Olympic contender and what not as a young woman.

And she and my daughter and her friend decided it might be fun to do a triathlon together.

And so they trained for it and she thought she was doing pretty well.

She actually was on the cycling team when she went off to college and was quite a good cyclist,

You know,

Good sturdy runner.

They got in the pool and her friend of course,

Being kind of an Olympic contender type,

That was for her a piece of cake.

She was probably the best swimmer in the whole triathlon.

And my daughter thought she trained okay but they got in the pool and started doing laps and her friend was just whipping back and forth.

And my daughter made it through two laps and started the third one and all of a sudden she kind of stood up in the pool.

And her friend's mom who was kind of her attendant and what not in all of her training,

She was thinking,

Are you okay?

Are you okay?

Well she just went out of breath.

And so she was pushing herself real hard but she came to the conclusion that maybe this just wasn't for her.

And it may well have been that the triathlon wasn't for her but it didn't mean that swimming wasn't for her.

But the standard against which she had visited herself turned out to just be too much.

So sometimes you can get a sense of what the teachings have to offer,

What these practices are all about.

But it just seems too hard.

It just seems like,

You know,

I'm just not cut out for this.

I don't think I can follow it.

So those are the three forms of doubt that one might find in us.

The cultivation of sada,

Of trust,

Confidence,

Faith,

You know,

Whatever.

Sada literally means to place the heart upon it.

It's the reverse of those.

It's having some degree of trust or confidence or inspiration even drawn from contact with the teachings of the Buddha.

It's having some trust,

Confidence or some inspiration perhaps from hearing a teacher convey the Dharma,

Share the Dharma.

Or it might be reading a book or listening to a Dharma paper talk online or something.

Sometimes it can simply be being in the presence of a fairly realized being.

Experiencing it is indeed possible to embody these values that the Buddha kept talking about.

It might be an experience that you have during practice where suddenly there's this like a homily.

And it's these things that you heard or have been grappling to understand or something like that become known.

Not just in a cognitive way but in an experiential way.

They become yours.

They become part of who you are.

To some extent they suddenly become your living reality.

And so that's the way that this trust and confidence and what not begins to germinate,

Begins to gestate and begins to manifest in our own consciousness.

In my own experience,

I think it was,

You know I lived in the Berkeley,

California area in the early 1970s and there were all kinds of folks coming through town,

Asian teachers and Western teachers and what not doing their shtick.

And so I'd go and listen to them.

It was great.

You know,

Tarthang Tulku,

Choyo,

Chongpa Rinpoche,

Great,

You know,

Dear Vamsa,

Great many different teachers came through.

Suzuki Roshi was over in the city in the Zen Center.

There are always wonderful teachers to listen to.

And I would occasionally hear talks that really kind of rang a bell,

Really kind of resonated.

So I kept going to these different practice sessions and sitting with these different teachers.

And then finally some friends in the Bay Area who had been abroad sitting for years off and on with some of their friends there.

They said,

Well you know these friends we've been sitting with have come back and they just began to teach,

You know.

Turned out to be Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg.

They're all newbies,

They're all in their 20s.

And this is before there was an Insight Meditation Society,

Certainly before there was a Spirit Rock.

They're just traveling around the country offering courses and sleeping on people's living room floors and what not.

So somebody said,

And the other thing that he was really kind of intriguing was that they weren't charging anything.

You know,

All these other trips they really had entrance fees in them.

Some of them were pretty heavy.

And so we went and did this retreat,

You know,

With them in 1975 and all of a sudden it was like,

Aint no.

I don't know if you've ever had that experience where you hear somebody give a simple and straight forward Dharma talk.

And there is this real sense of deep recognition.

You know,

It's like you may not have heard the words before.

But it's as if you're being reminded of something you've already been.

There's that kind of resonance of recognition and you just kind of know,

That's true.

That describes my experience.

That's talking about what I think,

About what's going on.

It's that person just being worried about something.

So it might be just the spoken word,

It might be hearing a teaching conveyed in a certain way.

So you find yourself,

You know,

Like harmonic strings on a harp,

And you find yourself kind of vibrating with,

You find yourself very much in tune with or in alignment with the teaching in the district.

It might be being in the presence of a certain teacher.

You know,

The vernacular they're using,

The manner,

The words they say and how they say them,

How they are with others.

There may be something that you find that you really resonate with that teacher.

You know,

This person knows who I am.

This person speaks my own language.

This person is speaking to me in a way that I can hear what is being said.

You know,

I guess in my case I heard several different Dharma teachers get similar teachings.

But somehow or another hearing them in a sort of simpler stripped down way from people who are basically my contemporaries.

You know,

No robes,

No nice hats or anything.

You just sit in there in this little summer camp in the woods outside of the casino.

But there is this certain sense of something quite genuine that is being transmitted.

That had really a kind of a transformative effect on me.

But one of the reasons it did have the transformative effect was that in addition to listening to these teachings,

And in fact it's the first time I heard the teachings on the five spiritual faculties.

In addition to listening to the teachings,

We were practicing fourteen hours a day.

We were doing sitting and walking meditation practice from six in the morning till about nine at night.

You know,

Some instructions in the Dharma talk dropped in there,

Maybe an interview.

And so the mind was getting incredibly calm and very clear.

You know,

Very aware when the mind was being afflicted with fear and longing.

And aware when the mind was relatively calm and clear and receptive.

And when the mind reaches that state of calmness and clarity,

It's possible to hear the Dharma in a completely different way.

Because it's kind of like your guard's down a little bit.

And you're hearing these teachings and turning them over in the mind,

In the mind that is exceptionally clear and bright and calm and focused.

So it can be very different to hear a Dharma talk or a teaching,

Or even doing chanting in a retreat setting than not,

Because of the condition that the mind is in when you do it.

And so a combination of the teachings and the teacher and my own practice effort and the concentration that arose as a result of it,

And my ability to start to have insights into what the hell is going on in my mind and why,

And why I didn't seem to be able to do very much about it.

All these things sort of came together in a way that made it very clear to me that I had found my path.

That this in fact was,

I felt like I had come home spiritually in some way or another,

And became eventually pretty well-rounded in this particular practice tradition,

This way of understanding what the Buddha had to teach.

Now since that time,

I've spent time with other teachers in other practice traditions,

Seeking to learn what they had to offer,

And how they were both different from and similar to this particular practice tradition.

But I'm telling my own story simply by way of explaining how this trust and confidence and faith can begin to rise,

Can begin to generate,

And how it can become self-perpetuating as you continue to do the practice,

As you continue to study the Dharma,

Talk about it with friends,

Hear a talk to the fat little bit like we do here in time to time.

That it is again the flip side of doubting oneself,

Of doubting the teacher,

Of doubting the teachings.

It's a growing sense of confidence in all those three as well.

Which does not mean that down the road,

Other forms of doubt may well arise.

Jack Kornfeld wrote this quote called,

After the Ecstasy the Longer.

You get this,

You can have these bright insights and tremendous faith and confidence in yourself,

And the teachings of the teacher arise,

And then at some point,

You know,

It feels like you kind of fall off the wagon,

Wheels come off and you have some kind of spiritual crisis occur,

And then you can have a huge crisis of confidence in yourself,

You know,

Some root out of yourself,

Or you find out one of your teachers has been doing the horizontal aerobics of one of the yogis or something.

Yeah,

Stuff happens,

You know,

People,

Everyone has their shadows out.

And so then you begin to have some real doubts about the teacher,

And they say,

Well,

You know,

I trusted this person,

Maybe I shouldn't put so much faith in what they had to say to me.

And so over the years,

Our understanding,

Our relationship with this stuff really kind of begins to mature,

And we have a sense not only of which teachings we find to be most right for us when,

But how to apply them and become a little more skilled.

And over time,

A little more,

I know when some,

Sometimes people have asked me,

You know,

What's this practice really about,

One of the answers that I sometimes give is learning how to be a better friend to yourself.

Essentially learning how to be a spiritual friend to yourself.

And be kind and compassionate and forgiving,

Learning how to listen to what Ajahn Chah,

The Thai meditation master calls,

The one who knows,

The voice who can.

That's confidence,

That's trust.

Learning to hear that voice and learning to trust it.

The voice that you're basically your inner friend.

So that's a little flavor of this quality of faith.

Why is it so important?

Because it is the fuel,

It is the nutrimental.

It's the way you nourish yourself as you follow the path.

It's what ultimately makes it possible to develop more concentration,

Deeper mindfulness.

Skillful effort.

It's what makes possible the arising of these insights.

And that's why it's the first of the five spiritual faculties that we're going to talk about.

The Faculty of Faith.

Sharon Salzberg's got a whole book on that topic titled,

Faith.

I commend it to you.

It's good.

So please,

Let's talk about,

Reflect on,

Ask questions about anything that I may have said this evening.

Please.

So,

Lloyd,

You mentioned the beginnings of American religion and the insight into the world in the 20s.

And those people,

You know,

Who started here,

Particularly wise at that time,

Who were disappointed kids,

Because I was when I discovered that religion.

And they got that insight from the teachers at the tavern in California.

And then the scientists started here.

When we look around at the people in the same.

As has the inside.

Is that something.

Sure.

I think that future scholars of Buddha,

Dharma and America.

The question is about how,

You know,

Was the establishment of insight meditation here in America.

Reviews

The ambient noise distracted from a useful talk. I'm no techie but if I were I'd want to clean up the sound so the content could be more accessible. Thank you.