Faith as a Virtue
August 06, 2024

Ajaan Suwat would often begin meditation instructions by saying to have a sense of saddha and pasada. Pasada means confidence—confidence that you’re doing something good that will have good consequences. Saddha is a word we translate sometimes as faith, sometimes as conviction.

The differences in the meaning between faith and conviction seem to be that you have faith that someone or something will do something for you. Conviction is more a matter of being convinced that something has actually happened. So we have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening; we have faith in the path. At the moment, it’s not yet knowledge, because to have real knowledge about the Buddha and the Dhamma, as he said, requires that you gain full awakening.

But in the meantime, we can decide that this is a good path to follow and that he’s a good person to trust. Having faith in the path requires that we take on some pre-suppositions, some assumptions.

As in the first verse in the Dhammapada: The mind is the fore-runner of all things. We have to have faith in the potentials of the mind; conviction that the Buddha discovered them—they really are true—and in the principles of action—that you act on skillful intentions, there are going to be good results; you act on unskillful intentions, there are going to be bad results.

Yet when you look around you, sometimes it seems it’s just the opposite. But then, he says that part of this has to do with the fact that we’ve been here through many, many lifetimes, and results can take a long time to play themselves out.

So, on the one hand, we may accept that because we believe that he really did step outside of space and time, that he came from a spot where his knowledge really was objective.

Think about the factors of dependent co-arising that come prior to sensory contact and shape our interpretation of that contact. Anything influenced by those factors—your intentions, your perceptions, your acts of attention—can always be called into question.

But he was somebody who stepped out of space and time entirely, gained knowledge that was not subject to those things. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to believe in that or not.

So in some cases, our conviction in what he’s done depends on our faith in him as a trustworthy reporter of what he’s done.

But he didn’t leave it there. He also provided what is called a pragmatic proof. If you believe in the principle of karma—that your actions really do make a difference, make the difference, and that they can have results go for a long, long time—you’re going to behave more skillfully, you’re going to behave with more heedfulness, more care. You’re not going to be complacent.

That’s a good thing.

Again, you’ve got to ask yourself, what kind of people would find that argument appealing? People who do find joy, find a sense of their worth as human beings, in being responsible for their actions.

Remember the questions that lie at the beginning of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” In asking those questions, you’re taking responsibility.

They go together with two other questions: “What is blameworthy? What is blameless?” You want to make sure that your actions don’t harm anybody. You want to be honorable in your choices.

Those are the kind of people the Buddha would want to teach. As he said, he wasn’t the teacher of everybody—he was the teacher of those who were fit to tamed. The people fit to be tamed are the ones who are honest and observant. As he once said, “Let someone come who is honest and observant, who is no deceiver, and I’ll teach that person the Dhamma that leads to freedom.”

In this sense, conviction is a virtue. If you take it on as conviction in your own desire to be responsible and to use the power of your actions in an honorable way, you’re willing to step back from the actions and look at them objectively.

This is what the whole principle of commitment and reflection comes down to—based on the assumption that, as the Buddha said, the mind is luminous. Which doesn’t mean that it’s pure, but it does mean that it can observe itself. And you’re willing to step back and observe yourself and learn when your actions are actually helpful and when they are not.

There are all too many people who make mistakes and they know that they were mistakes and yet they don’t care. They just keep on making the mistakes again and again.

Those are the kind of people the Buddha wouldn’t be able to teach.

There’s another argument that he gives when he’s talking to the Kalamas. He tells them, “Don’t go by scriptures, don’t go by respect for your teacher. Go by what you see is skillful, in the sense of not harming anyone, and what is praised by the wise.”

You have to think carefully: Who are the people you really do find wise? What do they have to say?

So the Buddha is recommending a combination of your own appropriate attention together with trying to develop admirable friendship—finding people who are wise—who themselves have conviction, who are virtuous, generous, discerning—and trying to emulate those people. When you see that their actions are good, you want to know—“How do you do this?”

Some people find it hard to be able to stick with the precepts, but there are other people who can do it. If you find it hard, ask somebody who is able to do it: “How do you do this?”

If you’ve trouble being generous, find someone who’s generous. Ask that person, “How do you do this? What types of thinking go through your mind?”

So the Buddha is asking you to develop friendship with people of integrity, which requires that you have some integrity, too.

He tells this to the Kalamas and then he says, “Try to develop the brahmaviharas. Let your actions be motivated by universal goodwill, universal compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Then if there is rebirth, you’ve acted in a way that will lead to good results—assuming that your rebirth is shaped by your karma. If it turns out that there is no rebirth or there is rebirth, but it’s not shaped by your karma, then at the very least, you know you’ve behaved in an honorable way, in a blameless way.

Again, what kind of people would find that argument appealing, convincing? People who already have some sense of integrity, some sense of responsibility, a desire to be harmless.

So, faith and conviction—conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, faith in the path—are not just ideas or assertions. They’re virtues. They build on virtuous qualities in the mind.

Look in yourself. The fact that you’re sitting here meditating means that you have some sense, at least, that what the mind does is important. It’s not just on the receiving end of things.

I gave a talk on karma a couple of years back up in the Bay Area. After the talk, a woman came up and said, “You know, maybe, if this is true, then it means that my whole life hasn’t been shaped by my DNA.” She said it as if it were a totally new idea to her. I kept wondering, “Here you are, going to a Buddhist group, meditating. Don’t you think about the implications of what you’re doing?”

I was conversing with an editor of a Buddhist magazine one time, talking about how if someone really in the practice or really believed in the principles of action, they’d have to behave in a better way. He said, “Assuming that they act on their beliefs.”

Well, if you have a belief but you don’t act on it, it’s a sign you don’t really believe it. If you say one thing to yourself and then act in another way, you have to ask yourself, “What do I really believe? What are the lines of reasoning that lead me to make the choices I actually make?”

Conviction, faith in the Buddha’s teachings means just that: It’s a question of who you believe, what you believe, and what you do is the result. These things must come together for the conviction or the faith to be genuine, for it to be really virtuous.

So as you meditate, try to take responsibility for your mind. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to blame yourself for everything that shows up in the mind, but you do want to be careful about what kind of things you pick up to think about and what kind of thoughts you follow through with—or, as the Buddha says, bend your mind.

Which directions do you want it to be bent in?

You can always bend the mind in a good direction. You’ve got that opportunity. Make the most of it. Ultimately, you get to a state that the Buddha says is unbent. That’s nibbana. What it means is that the mind doesn’t incline in any direction because it has arrived.

But up until that point, you want to incline your mind in the direction of that state. You want to make yourself worthy of the Dhamma, because it is something you can do.

You can make yourself someone fit to be tamed.