Teachings

www.sharonsalzberg.com

Teaching 1

Abiding Faith: Faith in Ourselves

From her island in the New York City harbor, the Statue of Liberty has welcomed countless immigrants, including my grandparents, at the end of their wearisome journey and the beginning of their life in a new land. Her welcome of all, even those unwanted by anyone else anywhere, is professed in the moving inscription at her base, written by the poet Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I’ve adored the Statue of Liberty for a long time and admit to having bought many photos and souvenir replicas of her from shops in New York City. As a woman bearing light, as a symbol of bottomless compassion, she has long been my personal icon. In Hinduism, the personal deity one offers one’s heart to is called an “ishta dev.” The ishta dev is chosen from the vast pantheon of gods and goddesses for the qualities one most wants to emulate. If I were to adopt an ishta dev, it would without a doubt be the Lady of Liberty.

As an image of inspiration, she seems as enduring as the freedom she symbolizes. Like the Great Pyramid or the Mahabodhi stupa in Bodhgaya, I can’t imagine her not being there. Yet even monuments that have endured for centuries can crumble in an instant. Between the second and fifth centuries AD, monks painstakingly carved two massive Buddhas, standing about 120 feet and 175 feet tall, out of a sandstone cliff in the area of Afghanistan. Even though I hadn’t yet seen them on my various trips to the East, I loved knowing they were there. They felt like guardians of peace, so tall they could silently watch over me and the whole restive world. In March of 2001, despite rigorous efforts on the part of the world community, the Taliban of Afghanistan blew them up. Monuments to eternity, reduced to charred rubble by tanks, shells and rockets.

The Statue of Liberty might herself one day be reduced to a memory, like the twin towers that once stood nearby. In the days following the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, I feared for her. Then a new image of her appeared on newsstands and in souvenir shops—an image that is profoundly related to faith. She stands, lamp aloft, promising freedom to the tired and wretched, while huge plumes of black smoke billow up from behind. Beneath that smoke, in the rubble and ruin of the Center lay terrible tragedy. Yet despite the horror and destruction, she still stands there in welcome. As my ishta dev she reminds me that, even in the midst of devastation, something within us always points the way to freedom.

Anything outside of us that we look to for inspiration can crumble into dust. No symbol, no construction, no condition, no relationship, no life is immune from change. No beloved and esteemed teacher, no friend or loved one can avoid dying. Devastated by the deaths of her husband and children, my teacher Dipa Ma remembered asking herself, “What can I take with me when I die? I looked around me: My dowry—my silk saris and gold jewelry—I knew I couldn’t take them with me. My daughter, my only child—I couldn’t take her. So what could I take?” At that moment she decided, “Let me go to the meditation center. Maybe I can find something there I can take with me when I die.” What Dipa Ma found formed the core of what she could have faith in, something that couldn’t be torn away from her through change. What can any of us place our faith in that endures? According to Buddhist teachings, to discover that is to know the deepest level of faith.

The offering of one’s heart happens in stages, with shadings of hesitation and bursts of freedom. Faith evolves from the first intoxicating blush of bright faith to a faith that is verified through our doubting, questioning, and sincere effort to see the truth for ourselves. Bright faith steeps us in a sense of possibility; verified faith confirms our ability to make that possibility real. Then, as we come to deeply know the underlying truths of who we are and what our lives are about, abiding faith, or unwavering faith as it is traditionally called, arises.

Abiding faith does not depend on borrowed concepts. Rather, it is the magnetic force of a bone-deep, lived understanding, one that draws us to realize our ideals, walk our talk, and act in accord with what we know to be true. Theologian Paul Tillich defines faith as alignment with our “ultimate concern,” those values that we are most devoted to, that form the core of what we care passionately about. An ultimate concern is not an interest that is merely a fashion or a whim, but one that is a centering point for our lives.

When we wake up in the morning and picture the dealings of our day as consequential, we tell ourselves a story that is based on our ultimate concern. We remind ourselves of loving our neighbor or remembering God. When at the end of our day we recall its events and arrange them in a pattern that reveals something significant, our ultimate concern is what we reference in the arranging. Because of abiding faith in an ultimate concern, the day wasn’t just a series of flashing moments, lost to us now and amounting to nothing. We count on our ultimate concern not just for ballast when things get rocky, or for a sense of easy comfort on a bad day; we go there for light.

Our ultimate concern is the touchstone we turn to over and over again, the thread that we reach for to convey a sense of meaning in our lives. It is the glue that connects the disparate pieces, the frame that gives shape to the picture of our experiences. We turn to our ultimate concern when afraid, or bewildered, or when we don’t quite know who we are anymore. We turn urgently toward our ultimate concern to give us context when we are shaken by loss or the threat of loss; we turn there quietly when something we wanted disappoints us, or begins to fade away.

For many, a principle such as justice serves as an ultimate concern. Bernice Johnson Reagan, a singer with Sweet Honey in the Rock, was a dedicated civil rights activist in the early sixties. Recalling the danger she and her friends faced in challenging segregation in Georgia, she says: “Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, ‘What in the world came over us?’ But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us, we would be dead. And when people died, we cried and went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like sometimes you know what you’re supposed to be doing. And when you know what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s somebody else’s job to kill you.” Unwavering faith in justice enabled these civil rights workers to carry on through the tremendous ups and downs of their life.

We might have abiding faith in the lawfulness of nature—seeds regenerating after a fire, rivers flowing toward the sea, renewal following decay. After the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, it is reported that a wave of panic swept through the city when rumors spread that grass, trees and flowers would never grow there again. Had the disaster been of such proportions that the laws of nature had exploded with the bomb? As we know, even in the face of massive human intervention, the grass and trees and flowers did grow again in Hiroshima. Several people, describing their experience of that time, say that it was only once they learned that natural law was still intact, they had faith to go on.

An aspiration, too, can be the ultimate concern we rest our abiding faith in. In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi writes, "Even if the sun should rise in the West, the bodhisattva has only one way." That "one way" of a bodhisattva is the commitment to compassion, to dedicating the activities of one’s life to the benefit of all beings. We might know success or failure, great wealth or barely enough to get by, acclaim or a quiet life, but we can be inspired by our sense of purpose in all these circumstances.

For those who aspire to the freedom from suffering taught by the Buddha, the primary repository of abiding faith is our own Buddha nature. Because Buddhist teachings arise out of the experience of a human being, rather than being conferred by a deity, great emphasis is placed on abiding faith in oneself, in one’s true capacities.

Lack of faith in our own potential limits our sense of possibility to habitual concepts. It keeps us from sensing who we might yet become, or might needlessly circumscribe our lives.  Whatever we might be conditioned to believe, the teachings say that beneath our small, constricted identity lies the innate capacity for awareness and love that is Buddha nature. This is what faith in ourselves rests upon.

The texts liken Buddha nature before it is awakened to “flowers before their petals have opened, a kernel of wheat that has not yet had its husk removed, a store of treasure hidden beneath an impoverished household.” That potential for love and awareness we can place our hearts upon is present regardless of our particular conditioning or background or traumas or fears—is not destroyed, no matter what we have gone through or what we will go through. Although some people are completely out of touch with that capacity—they can’t find it, or don’t trust it—it is always there.

What distinguishes faith in ourselves from conceit is the fact that conceit lays claim to specialness, while our fundamental nature is not personal—it's universal, it's shared. When we look at the Buddha or a great teacher, we can see our own potential for happiness, for vibrant wisdom and sustained compassion—a potential that all beings share. However, if we stop at faith in another, admiring him or her and overlooking ourselves, our faith remains incomplete.

 

(Excerpt from Sharon’s book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Chapter X, Pages X- X)