Faith, Doubt, and the Buddhist Path of Enlightenment

Abstract

This essay is an inquiry into the roles played by both faith and doubt in the Buddhist quest for enlightenment (rather than in an ordinary life of piety). It describes parallels between exemplary acts of faith in Christianity and in Buddhism and concludes that faith and doubt of particular kinds are essential to the religious experience of both traditions. The essay explores a hypothesis that an experience of faith as conversion is an experience of a profound identity between the religious figure or text or object that has evoked a religious experience and the experiencing person’s own deepest sense of identity. This thesis is connected to a certain way of understanding what religious ideals are and how they function in human lives. It understands human ideals as historically moving projections of authentic possibility and maintains that Buddhist enlightenment is not so much a fixed ideal for all Buddhists and all ages as an impermanent and ongoing sense of ultimate concern experienced somewhat differently among different people in different historical epochs.