Penetrate deeply into truth
The first thing to say this evening is that, shraddha, faith, is a word used a lot. There was a pupil of a Zen master in the capital, Tokyo, in whose school they were expected to penetrate deeply into truth, in the world and in themselves. He had to go to the countryside, the deep country, on a business trip and he stayed overnight. He attended the service in the local temple. When he came back, he saw the teacher and one or two other fellow pupils and he said, “You know, it was so impressive in that little country temple. They’re poor farmers, but the atmosphere of faith, the complete faith there. As I sat there and I heard that firm resonant voice of the priest intoning the holy texts, I thought of all my doubts and all my queries and intellectual enquiries, I felt so bad about it. The vibrant voice of truth and the complete faith of the peasants.” The teacher said, “Yes. It’s very impressive, that faith. The only one there that might have had his doubts would be the priest himself.” This is called faith without investigation, without observation, without going deeper; and it can be very impressive, but this is not the faith which the Buddha wanted. Faith begins, but it’s to go on to enquiry.
Enquiry too can become a sort of slogan, like blind faith can become a slogan. One of our science pundits on the radio (it was quite a time back) wrote to say that religion takes things on trust and takes things for granted, on authority; but in science even the greatest authority is not decisively accepted. Nothing is taken for granted. Everything has to be investigated. The man wrote a letter to one of the papers the next day to say he’d been very impressed by (I think it was) Dr. Magnus Pyke’s talk about science taking nothing for granted. He said it had changed his attitude to his cat because, when the time came to put the cat out, if the night was wet when he was putting the cat out the front door, the cat would break loose and dash to the back door and mew there, apparently in the hope of finding better weather conditions at the back. He said, “I realise now that my cat has the true scientific spirit of taking nothing for granted, investigating everything; whereas I admit before I used to think my cat was a bit of a fool.”
So we have these two extremes – blind faith without enquiry and enquiry which is no ral enquiry at all, it’s just endless sort of doubt. It has to be focussed. These are three things given by some teachers: instruction, observation, experience, but they have slightly unexpected applications.
If you teach a somewhat risky physical activity, you tell the pupil, “Don’t do this (in a particular throw) because it can lead to a serious accident – you can dislocate your elbow”. That’s an instruction, and the most intelligent pupil can accept that instruction from an experienced, perhaps a famous, teacher; and he no longer makes that dangerous move. But a lot of pupils don’t. They have a sort of little wire among themselves: “Oh, they tell everybody that. You know some idiot once made a mistake. You don’t have to take it literally, we’re all different…” Then they see it happen. Some idiot does it, and his arm starts sticking out from his elbow. Then they’re convinced – but there are still some who even then think, “Well, he was always clumsy that chap. I can get away with it.” With such pupils the teacher sometimes has to arrange a little accident, not a serious one. They can only learn by experiencing the disaster themselves, and this is the worst way of learning. You’re told and you don’t believe it; you see, and you still don’t believe it, and finally through the most bitter experience, then you believe it. The best way of learning is to accept the instruction, but not to stop there. Not simply to say, “Well the teacher says so…”, but then to observe. We can observe what happens when people don’t follow the teacher and also we can observe the hidden advantages of following the teacher, which the teacher often doesn’t state overtly, but they can be observed. Those things are observed in other people, but more than that, finally those instructions are accepted, confirmed by their observations in other people, and finally it’s experienced for himself. These three things then – instruction, observation, and experience – for the worst pupils they don’t believe the instruction, they don’t believe the observation and reluctantly by force have to agree with the experience. The best pupils believe the instruction but don’t stop there. They go on to confirm it by observing, and finally confirm it in their own experience.
There’s an Eastern saying: “The arrow flies with alien feathers”. The arrow flies and often hits the target, but its feathers have come from somewhere else. The arrow flies with alien feathers – the bird flies with its own feathers. The commentator says the arrow flies with alien feathers, and it often hits the target; but it gets nothing. It’s pulled out and shot again; the arrow gets nothing. But the bird, which flies with its own feathers, comes to the nest, and the mate, and the young ones and can feed itself. There is a tendency to want to fly with alien feathers, and to read and be satisfied with reading about great figures in the tradition. This is not bad, but it’s trying to fly with alien feathers and one can end up with a tremendous lot of information about something, but not have anything of one’s own. It’s all borrowed quotations and borrowed experiences and borrowed memories. The bird flies with its own feathers.
One example that’s given is about meditation. Sceptics say that in meditation you’re simply sitting there and basically you’re dreaming, or falling asleep sometimes completely; and no more can come out of the meditation than you began with. This is put by Mephistopheles very powerfully in Goethe’s Faust. Faust sits in meditation and Mephistopheles comes up and he says, “There you are. You’re like a sort of frog, blowing yourself up, bigger and bigger and bigger; and at the end of it, you’re just a frog and you’ll have to come down again, won’t you, and be what you were?” Nothing new can come from the meditation. Maybe you’re not doing much harm to anybody, but that’s about all that can be said.
Titles in this series are:
1. Penetrate deeply into truth
3. Kobo Daishi made a new alphabet
4. People sell themselves cheap
The full talk is: Notes and Anecdotes 1989
© Trevor Leggett