Towards the Truth

8
he can grasp with his two hands. We accept many things without
personal experience. That we do on trust. Though it may be
possible, it is not always practicable to try and experience everything
for ourselves. Our schoolboys would not mind if their course
of study of geography included a trip round the world, especially
under the free education scheme; but it is not practicable, though of
course everyone of those schoolboys, later on if he happens to have
too much money and not enough work, can embark upon the experiment
and convince himself of the roundness of the world. This
example shows the difference between trust and faith. Both lack the
basis of personal experience, but trust is only a temporary reliance
on the authority of somebody else out of expedience, together with
the knowledge however that it can be experienced, though not just
now.
Faith, on the other hand, is the acceptance of the authority of
somebody else, of something which cannot be known. Faith indeed
precludes reason, for it is the acceptance of the unknowable. If
reason could approve of it, it would cease to be faith. Hence faith is
the acceptance of something which reason cannot approve of. And
it is that kind of faith which is entirely absent from and strongly
condemned by the teaching of the Buddha.
But a certain amount of confidence will help the beginner till he
can find his own way. That confidence, moreover, is not so much a
trust in a teacher, but a trust in one’s own common sense. For, where
faith has mystery and revelation as its objects, there confidence is
required only with regard to the common facts of daily life.
Daily life is a problem, is a struggle. And all religions and philosophical
systems, as well as all scientific and strategic exploits have
ultimately but this single aim: to solve the problem of the struggle
for life.
Buddhism is one of those systems; but Buddhism refuses to shift
the problem to a plane where its pretended solution cannot be contradicted,
because there it is beyond investigation and experience.