I want to come back to the question asked by Thanissaro Bhikkhu in his commentary on the Kalama Sutta -- Where can you place your trust? This question speaks deeply to the living experience of practice.
People approach the dharma from all directions, and the trust question poses different challenges to different people. But we can talk about two ends of a continuum.
At one end are people who don't trust themselves at all and are looking for something or someone else to fix their lives for them. At the other end are people who don't trust anything but themselves, meaning their own egos, biases, intellects, and conditioning. And there are countless points between those two extremes, and we may find our "trust point" shifting wildly as we mature in practice.
People often grasp this passage of the Kalama Sutta as a kind of permission slip to stay stuck in that second extreme.
"Don't blindly believe what I say. Don't believe me because others convince you of my words. Don't believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts."
But, as the Bhikkhu says, the Kalama Sutta also warns us to not go by logical deduction, inference, analogies, or whether it agrees with what you already believe. What does that leave you? Where can you place your trust?
My first Zen teacher once told me to trust myself. Well, told me that more than once, actually. I was new to practice, saw myself as a total loser screwup, and wanted someone to give me whatever it was I was missing. Instead, I was told to trust myself.
Trusting myself is not easy. I'm still working on it. But at some point my focus changed from "how do I trust myself?" to "what is the self to be trusted?" It's not the self that reasons or the self hoping to be a very different self in the future. It's certainly not the self with lots of fixed ideas about things.
So what is the self that can be trusted? I would say anyone working with the Kalama Sutta, whether Theravada or Mahayana, who hasn't asked that question is not working hard enough.
It's common to trust a false self, and then you're in trouble. There are people all over the Web and in academia who are very attached to their intellectual understanding and scholarly knowledge of Buddhism, but they don't know dharma from doughnuts. And they won't learn, because their cups are full.
They trust themselves just fine. The problem is that the self they trust is an illusion.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu says,
"Now, if you're expecting quick access to a totally reliable authority, this may sound like a catch: If you're not wise enough to trust your own judgment, how can you recognize who's really wise? But it's not a catch. It's simply the way we have to operate when developing any kind of skill -- your appreciation of good carpentry, for example, grows as you master carpentry yourself -- and the Buddha is making the point that this is how to approach the dhamma: as a skill to be mastered. As with any skill, your inner sensitivity and assurance as to who's truly wise in the skill grows only through your willingness to learn."
I think that's a good place to start. In the beginning we all flail around trusting things we shouldn't and not trusting things we should. As we practice, we clarify for ourselves what is trustworthy. Sometimes what is trustworthy is a teacher or a scripture, but when the trust is founded in sincere practice it won't be a blind trust.
The Bhikkhu goes on to discuss ways to recognize trustworthy teachers, and he makes good points I want to come back to in a future post.
Developing trust relates to shraddha (Sanskrit) or saddha (Pali), which are words often translated as "faith." But this faith that is closer to "trust" or "conviction" than it is to "belief." In the Saddha Sutta of the Pali Canon, the Buddha taught us to trust in the dharma the way birds "trust" a tree in which they build their nests. Developing shraddha is a big part of practice.
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