Faith and Doubt
Faith, Doubt and Determination are the Three Pillars of our Zen Practice. Together, these qualities can serve as a firm foundation for our practice and as a useful guide to see where we may be out of balance. Faith is the experience that we are fundamentally awake and that we can actualize that nature through the practice of zazen. Doubt is the inquiry into this reality. What is this? Who am I? Who is awake?
The more your faith, the bigger and deeper the questions. When we return again and again to this experience of awakeness through deep absorption, we fully internalize our identitification as that awakeness. No matter what arises, we sit in “the condition of openness,” as Maezumi Roshi called it. Does your faith diminish when things go differently than we expect?