The Buddhist Path
power of rituals, whose truths are not accepted on the authority
of scripture, but verified by direct experience.Certainly the Buddha counsels the Kalamas not to reject or
accept things because tradition, scripture, reasoning, logic, orargument tells them to do so, nor out of respect for some ascetic,
but rather because of their own direct knowledge.^3 Yet a preoc-
cupation with the Kalama Sutta as a repudiation of faith betrays
a misunderstanding of the very nature of faith and its devotional
and ritual expression in Buddhism. As the Buddhist scholar
Edward Conze has commented:This sceptical age dwells anyway far too much on the intellectual side
of faith. Sraddhti, the word we render as 'faith', is etymologically akin
to Latin cor, 'the heart', and faith is much more a matter of the heart
than the intellect.^4
Conze's comment highlights a distinction that is sometimes made
between faith as 'cognitive' and faith as 'affective'. Faith in its
cognitive mode is a putative knowledge or awareness that amounts
to belief in propositions or statements of which one does not, or
cannot, have direct knowledge. Faith in its affective mode, on
the other hand, is a positive emotional response to sonieone or
something one has heard or read. The Buddhist understanding
of 'faith' is almost entirely affective. In other words, Buddhist
texts understand faith in the Buddha and Dharma not so much
as a matter of intellectual assent to certain propositions about
the world in the form of a Buddhist creed, as of a state of trust,
confidence, affection, and devotion inspired by the person of the
Buddha and his teachings-a confidence that there is indeed a
path leading to the cessation of suffering which has been walked
by the Buddha and his followers. ·
The traditional expression of one's faith, one's commitment
to the Buddhist path, is the act of going to the three 'jewels' of
the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha for refuge, realized by the