Bill!, Zendervish,
Bill, would you we willing to consider that there is an aspect of faith which
is like trust?
Trust, like faith, is often not simply "blind", but is earned; it is developed.
I won't flesh that out.
Also, in all sorts of empirical situations, we humans rely on "Induction";
Philosopher David Hume spent some time on that matter in his TREATISE OF HUMAN
NATURE. For example, each day in the past, the sun has risen in the East and
set in the West: will it happen again tomorrow?
Hume writes that we have a sort of compulsion, a psychological proclivity, to
suppose that it will.
Is this proclivity dependent on a faith, or a trust? Mind you, here's an
empirical situation: a "matter of fact", it's called. We don't know in advance
if the sun will rise; but, ...we have a faith or a trust that it will?
It would seem our lives are based on a very shaky kind of certainty!
Granted, our expectation of the sun's behavior is based on our observation of
how it has appeared to behave in the past, and on our memory of that behavior.
Is it *reasonable* for us to assume or expect that it will behave again as it
has in the past? Or, is this a faith of ours? A trust? If the latter two,
are faith and trust reasonable?
And, then, is not this faith solidly based on empirical observation and upon
our conditioning by empirical, factual information? This is not "blind" faith:
this is the kind of faith one has even in Buddha Nature after one has realized
it. It is a faith lived from the inside, not the outside, and it is very
solid. It continues, and itself has a life, and a career.
To give this faith or this trust a mechanical-sounding name like "induction",
or the workings of induction, does not shift the origins of our expectation of
sunrise to something outside of ourselves, and make it a part of a corpus of
knowledge that has something more to do with "Physics" than with us. It's ALL
our doing!
And I don't mean that in some sort of spooky way. I agree with Hume's notion
that it is "psychological", in the broad sense he employs.
I'll leave this open-ended, because I do not know how to close it.
;-)
--Joe
> "Bill!" <BillSmart@...> wrote:
>
> Zendervish,
>
> IMO, and as I use these terms...
>
> 'Belief' is a condition of the mind that categorizes something as true or
> real.
>
> 'Faith' is a type of belief that has no experiential, scientific or logical
> foundation.
>
> I think these definitions are pretty much the same as the ones you gave in
> the 3rd and 4th paragraphs of your post below.
>
> Both belief and faith are helpful and maybe even necessary in the early
> phases of zen practice. They were in mine. After realizing Buddha Nature
> faith no long plays any part in zen practice - at least not in mine.
>
> ...Bill!
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