Because the way of zazen is indivisible from everything, it is the activity of faith. If there’s any division, then faith in enlightenment cannot take effect and it becomes belief. Faith opens up experience, effecting a receptive and responsive engagement within time and place. There are aspects of trust in this but this trust is not externalized at all.
This level of exposure to the intense and intricate intimacy of experience may seem intimidating, it certainly can be demanding at times. Because of its subtlety too, it can also be lost and neglected in indifference. In continuing to entrust ourselves to it, the ease and enjoyment of original functioning can take root and permeate body and mind. The proof of faith is in the faith pudding and the eating of it, not anywhere else. This is why just sitting is given such respect, the vivid and detailed truth of being is likely being lost while we have distaste for this most simple manifestation. Just sitting is simply total function. How could we doubt this and how could we believe in it? How could we try to use it?
Faith and belief are often conflated I think. From the outside, one can easily look like the other, but they are miles apart in effect. Active faith includes allowing causes, conditions and response in real time and in doing so, it loses the perception of inside, outside or inbetween. Belief insulates from this direct participation and exchange and so impedes the wisdom quality of mind. Our true functioning is always outside of whatever opposite is being perceived. Belief doesn’t allow illumination but projects assumptions outwardly. Caught up in imagining opposites, it covers over the doubt that it’s founded on.
Belief requires a gap and a delusive hope. Faith does not replace this with yet another thing, it is just naked mind. Far from being pink and woolly, the actualized faith of zazen allows an immediate coming together. The synchronized illuminative wisdom of the senses, time, place and everything, is accepted. So actions cannot but be influenced to be in accord with this. This accord though is beyond any idea of perfection, of “getting it right” and still, it changes how you are in unseen ways. The senses precision cannot be perceived and none of them can accumulate anything really, belief has no way to allow this. The seeming certainty that belief in things can provide, whether its a god* or hyper-rationality, creates a gap where there isn’t one and so acts accordingly. The rich and detailed depths of faith in practice lack for nothing and yet also require finding ways to be lived out freshly.
It’s easy to look at awakening true nature as if it will either somehow make us a know it all, or that we can use it for a comfort blanket. To try and use practice in this way, taking refuge in words and ideas, misses the point. Whatever we think we see in the brilliance or lack thereof, obviously language has its place and value. The way of zazen includes our intellectual capacities and crucially, they can assume what their rightful place, which is in service and not in charge. There is an element of surrender permeating Shakyamuni’s enlightenment and teaching, at least that’s what I understand, maybe I’m wrong. That we cannot think ourselves to enlightenment becomes clear in a moment and can be lost in a moment. There isn’t an end point that perception can ever reach, thank goodness.
In the Soto Zen tradition, the significance of a soft and flexible mind is spoken of as how the wisdom and compassionate nature of us manifests. A lovely quality of being that is easily undervalued because it cannot be valued, the senses cannot grasp it. Nothing sticks to the authenticity of a moments awakened activity, no adjectives come close to its ordinary integrity.
Assumption is not the basis of the way of faith, even though we probably do continue to assume things. Going beyond knowing and not knowing, there is a sophisticated investigative activity in applied faith that slips any attempts to grasp it with thought. That it cannot be grasped does not make it nothing and authenticity is not a matter of judgement.
*I’m not knocking belief in a god. Faith in god would be different in my eye.