What can we have faith in?

I read Bhikkhu Anālayo's critique of Rob Burbea's Seeing That Frees with interest. It raises questions about when we can trust that a teaching is valid, and on what grounds. The sense I sometimes have is of walking over a wooden platform high above the ground. Many of the planks are sound and will take your weight, but a few are rotten and if you place your full weight on them they will break. This leads to a conundrum...

How do you know which planks are compromised and which are sound?

Scholarship is one route. You have to study a little. You have to listen to experts who understand the languages and history and philosophy. Without any scholarship, it's clear we would be lost. You can't expect to understand the world of early Buddhism without reading the suttas. Scholarship is not always conclusive, and it doesn't always make contact with practice. But over the decades, we can make progress and gain clarity about some aspects of philosophy and practice, though perhaps not all.

What about authority? Surely we'll be fine as long as we listen to "the best teachers"? Many teachers have reputations that lend weight to their teachings... but this is not a reliable guide to true ways of practice in and of itself. Celebrated teachers can be mistaken, or worse. Seeing the problem with relying on authority, we might think it's better to use reason to discern what's right. That appeals to the "rational" Western mind. Except that some teachings will be well-reasoned and yet still be erroneous or otherwise miss the point.

What about if we combine these factors? We can ask what is likely to be true given what we already know: a kind of Bayesian inference. What is likely to be true, given the reputation of the teacher, their reasoning, and what the consensus already says? But, of course, there are mind states available in meditation that no normie would think probable from the outside. Yet experience proves otherwise. Improbable things turn out to be true all the time. So probability by itself doesn't really help us in establishing what's true, either, though it can right-size our guesses and with a Bayesian kind of mindset we can at least update our prior probabilities as new information comes along. As you feel a bit more calm and peace, you put a little more stock in the possibilities of meditation. Then one day you melt into bliss and the calibration changes again.

What this begins to look like is a long process of exploring widely and deeply and checking what we experience against consensus, against traditions, against trusted teachers. But we should also check to see if our most cherished ideas are internally consistent, and reliably putting them to the sword when they are not. The challenge of consistency is a high bar. It was central to Socrates' approach. Consistency doesn't mean that a doctrine is true, but it can sometimes tell us that one is suspect. It requires a willingness to examine our beliefs and perhaps some philosophical training.

It's possible, of course, to overthink it. The Buddha said that any true teaching would contain the eightfold path. So if a teaching makes a reasonable stab at the eightfold path, perhaps it's good enough. Teachings will vary widely as to how well they express the eightfold path—and interpretations of things like samādhi will vary—but if they have it basically right, then maybe it's fine.

There is one more approach. If you can find a living tradition that has a long history, ideally at least a few centuries, then what you have has been roadtested by practitioners over generations. The idea is that...

The wisdom born of trial and error shapes practice traditions like a river shapes the riverbank.

Such a tradition may follow the spirit but not the letter of the teachings but hopefully people in that tradition have faced the same kinds of problems you will encounter and found solutions. In the right circumstances, a living practice tradition will tend to converge on something useful. It will be a path that one can live. This is not to be dismissed lightly. Perhaps it is the best we can hope for.

It may be that the fledgling Insight Meditation tradition will one day get to this point of generational wisdom. Until it does, we might do well to keep reading and reflecting on what can be learned from older traditions. These things take time. This is how they start.