The issue of faith and its role in Buddhism is one I return to frequently. A lovely essay on Bodhi Day by the Rev. Dr. Tess Baumberger led me to another essay on faith, by Sharon Salzberg, that I recommend highly also.
Salzberg writes that the Pali word usually translated as "faith" is saddhà, which means "to place the heart upon." This pulls "faith" away from belief in doctrine, a place where a lot of us have stumbled. As Salzberg says, a lot of people are drawn to Buddhism because it's not really a religion (or is it?) and are a bit put out when Buddhism persists in acting like a religion, anyway. Talk about "faith" does cause some knees to jerk.But the faith of saddhà is not about being bound by narrow, rigid doctrine. It's a path of liberation; a way to open up to new understanding. Salzberg spoke of faith as trust, faith as inspiration, faith as confidence. What faith doesn't necessarily mean is uncritical belief. Yet, unfortunately, when English speakers talk about religious faith, that's nearly always what they mean -- uncritical belief.
Salzberg spoke of "too much faith without enough wisdom." To me, this kind of faith is about grabbing hold of a belief system, institution or a charismatic teacher and expecting salvation from the thing you cling to. If you believe hard enough, everything you experience is filtered through your beliefs, so that facts and experiences that don't conform to beliefs are filtered out. Belief becomes a gauzy curtain between you and reality.
Awhile back I read an interview of (allegedly) "America's brainiest couple," Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, one of whom said "faith is believing something without a good reason to believe it." That's the standard way to define faith these days.
In his book Dynamics of Faith, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich wrote that “Faith is not belief and it is not knowledge with a low degree of probability.” To reduce "faith" to mere belief in fantastical things is an “‘intellectualistic’ distortion of the meaning of faith,” which has "been largely responsible for alienating many from religion since the beginning of the scientific age.” Tillich continued,
The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Something more or less probable or improbable is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation. … If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than of faith.
Tillich defined faith as the centered act of being ultimately concerned. He wrote a whole book explaining this which makes fascinating reading, but Tillich's definition of faith is hard to explain to someone who has never been religious or who is rigidly stuck in the notion that faith is just about believing stuff that can't be proved. It is equally hard to explain to someone for whom religion is something to cling to, or to filter away unpleasantness.
Salzberg and Tillich both speak of faith as a process or an action, not as some rigid, solid thing one must either accept or reject wholesale. I think that's a good starting place for understanding faith.
Thanks for the write up. I generally avoid the word faith and it seems to be used as ‘blind faith,’ which to me is more similar to ‘belief.’ Faith doesn’t have to be blind though, or mystical.
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Walpola Rahula explained that faith or “saddha” was more like a sense of conviction where one explores the Dharma, sees how well it works in life, and their faith in the Dharma increases.
Faith in English is such a confusing word, and too laden with cultural baggage that better terms should be developed as Buddhism grows.