The utility of doubt

In Zen Buddhism, the greater your doubt, the greater will be your enlightenment. That is why doubt can be a good thing. If you are too sure, if you always have conviction, then you may be caught in your wrong perception for a long time. —Thich Nhat Hanh

Doubt is one of the major hindrances to the Buddhist way of life. This kind of doubt isn't a healthy questioning—everything can be questioned—but more of an indecision, a lack of conviction, a dithering that prevents one from practising wholeheartedly. Imagine you had to cross from one side of the country to the other. You could fly or drive or take the train but you can't decide which would be the best method, so you procastinate. Weeks go by and soon you could have crossed the country by walking if you had just set out in a timely way.

Confessions of a flip-flopper

So instead of doubting excessively, traits like decisiveness, confidence, and faith are helpful. But it's not hard to understand why people—myself included—struggle with the bewildering range of traditions, practices, and interpretations that come under the heading of "Buddhism". It's even worse than that, since many of these practices denounce others and put forward logical reasons as to why their interpretations are correct. It can be the case that we end up agreeing with the last teacher we hear or the last book we read. Then we pick up the next book and suddenly our perspective flips. "Jhāna is not necessary", "Jhāna is essential", "Jhāna doesn't mean what people think it means", "Mahasi noting is the way", "Actually, maybe I should go back to shikantaza".

On and on it can go. Sometimes I look at Buddhism and think, "This is a mess!" There are so many beautiful ideas but how do you prioritise them, why do contemporary teachers contradict each other, how exactly should it be practised? For some of us, this takes a lot of consideration. But maybe flip-flopping is preferable to becoming one of the true believers who push all (reasonable) doubts and forge on with the one and true way, decrying the false paths of others. Initially, I thought my propensity to cast around between practices was THE BAD KIND OF DOUBT but more than one dharma teacher has said that actually, maybe I'm just curious, and it can be helpful to have a broad foundation for one's explorations.

The need for plurality

What I'm getting at is that we need a plurality of voices and views. We need people trying different things. Buddhist scholar Sarah Shaw compares this to a forest in her book, Breathing Mindfulness: we need all kinds of plants, trees, and creatures for the ecosystem to be healthy. It is the same with dharma practice. There is room for scholars and yogis of all stripes.

Furthermore, the fact is that we cannot say with certainty what kinds of practices and techniques were used by the Buddha and his followers. The texts often describe principles rather than specific techniques, although there are exceptions such as the Ānapānāsati Sutta (Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing). Buddhism might be a broader and more general system of ideas than people imagine from their silos.

By the time I was halfway through reading the Majjhima Nikaya (The Middle Length Discourses), I was surprised at how little discussion of meditation technique there was. Instead of technical, most of the Buddha's wisdom seemed attitudinal. It was about bringing care and wisdom to life, particularly, I thought, it was about responding from a position of equanimity: neither getting lost in the pleasant or caught up in aversion and resistance to the unpleasant. As an aside, that seems reminiscent of the Stoics, but it also leaves room for a multiplicity of practices.

The trouble with overly specific systems

And it occurs to me that...

The more specialised and specific any interpretation of Buddhism is, the more likely it is to veer from what the Buddha taught in those details.

Now, that's fine. A practice doesn't have to have been taught directly by the Buddha to be useful or to be Buddhist. But it also cannot then be the ONE TRUE PRACTICE. Zen practitioners are conceive of Buddhism in terms of radical doubt: doubt your perceptions, your value judgments, doubt your tradition, the stories you tell yourself... because what can you really know? Question your views, don't get fixed in any particular way of seeing. Buddhism is primarily, perhaps, about understanding more than any particular technique or experience.

WWSD: What Would Socrates Do?

Self-doubt is part of the Socratic method, too. We are to examine our beliefs and see whether they contradict each other. If they do, then it is up to us to ascertain which beliefs are dissonant. Socrates views this as a kind of therapy, as care for the psyche, and as vitally important work. I feel like this is very important generally, but also as a useful compass for integrating Buddhist ideas into our lives, and for the Buddhist community as a whole.

Socrates was very clear that we should see it as a great generosity when someone challenges our views because it just might help us correct an internal contradiction, and this would be of great long-term benefit.

People often feel that their way of doing things, seeing things is necessarily right. But we all operate from different frames of reference. If you grew up in the Great Depression, you would likely have a different attitude towards money than someone who grew up in the 1980s. But that's not to say that everyone is right and no one is wrong, only that most of the things we argue about are highly subjective. Which interpretations of Buddhism can we really say are the true Buddhism? Is that ultimately a question worth answering?

Perhaps we finally move beyond the unhelpful kind of doubt not when we have certainty but when we realise that we can never have certainty and that our best hope is to put one foot in front of the other, wholeheartedly, intelligently, and with faith.