Zen and the Structure of Faith

What if faith isn’t something you have?

What if it’s something that happens?

We commonly speak about faith as though it were a possession. Someone has faith. Someone loses faith. Someone’s faith is strong, weak, tested, restored, or abandoned.

But there may be another way to understand it.

Faith may be an activity.

And if faith is an activity, then it should have a structure.

In Chapter 2 of The Last Turtle: Zero, Zen, and the Power of Willpower, we explore that possibility through the teachings of Zen master Joshu Sasaki and his deceptively simple description of Zero:

Zero inevitably splits into naturally opposing activities, which inevitably disappear back into Zero.

That single idea gives us an unusual framework for investigating faith.

Instead of asking, “What do you believe?”

We can ask:

What conditions cause faith to arise?

What disturbance triggers it?

What opposing activities define it once it appears?

And what does the activity of faith actually produce?

These questions lead us to four useful concepts:

Zero Activity — the conditions from which an activity can arise.

Disturbance — the event that triggers its manifestation.

Manifested Activity — the activity that arises and expresses itself through naturally opposing tendencies.

Outcome — the product created by that activity.

Apply this structure to something simple—a fire, a conversation, a decision—and the model is relatively easy to see.

Apply it to faith, however, and things become much more interesting.

Because faith does not arise where there is perfect certainty.

There would be no reason for it to.

Faith becomes relevant precisely where certainty ends.

We encounter a question we cannot definitively answer. We face a decision whose outcome cannot be known. We confront suffering, death, purpose, morality, identity, or simply the question:

What should I do now?

Something has disturbed the equilibrium.

And authority must be assigned somewhere.

To a teacher.

To a tradition.

To scripture.

To science.

To reason.

To intuition.

To experience.

To ourselves.

This leads to the working definition of faith explored throughout the book:

Faith is the activity of assigning authority in the face of uncertainty.

Seen this way, faith is no longer confined to religion.

The atheist may manifest faith.

The scientist may manifest faith.

The skeptic may manifest faith.

The Zen practitioner certainly manifests faith.

The important question is no longer whether we have faith.

The more revealing question becomes:

When uncertainty appears, where do we assign authority?

And then comes an even more interesting Zen question:

What happens when the activity of faith has completed its work?

If Sasaki’s teaching of Zero applies universally, then faith cannot remain permanently manifested.

It must arise.

It must function.

It must produce outcomes.

And eventually, it must disappear.

Perhaps the culmination of faith, then, is not perfect belief.

Perhaps it is the point at which faith is no longer necessary.

🎧 Listen to Chapter 2: “Zen and the Structure of Faith.”

An exploration of Zero Activity, disturbance, Manifested Activity, outcomes—and what happens when we stop treating faith as something we possess and begin examining it as something we do.

What If There Is a Last Turtle?

“It’s turtles all the way down.”

The old expression describes a wonderfully absurd problem.

The world rests on the back of a turtle.

Fine.

But what does that turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

Another.

Keep asking long enough and apparently you never reach the bottom.

Zen can sometimes feel remarkably similar.

Ask what Zen is, and you may be given a teaching.

Ask what supports that teaching, and you may be given another.

Keep asking and eventually you may encounter some version of: concepts are traps, reality cannot be captured in words, explanations have limits, and perhaps you should stop asking so many questions and simply sit.

There is certainly wisdom in recognizing the limitations of conceptual thought.

But there is another possibility worth considering:

What if there is a last turtle?

Not a final metaphysical explanation of the universe.

Not an ultimate doctrine we are required to believe.

But a functional ground from which we can begin examining what Zen actually does.

Zero

The late Zen master Joshu Sasaki taught what I refer to throughout The Last Turtle as the teachings of Zero.

At their simplest:

From Zero, all activity inevitably arises.

And all activity inevitably returns to Zero.

Look closely and the pattern is everywhere.

A thought arises.

An emotion arises.

An intention arises.

A sense of “I am” arises.

Each manifests for some period of time—and each inevitably disappears.

Seen this way, Zero is not simply another Zen teaching to place on top of the philosophical stack.

It offers a way of examining the stack itself.

And once we begin looking at Zen as activity, something else becomes interesting.

Faith is activity, too.

What Is Faith?

Faith is commonly placed on the opposite side of reason.

Reason takes us as far as evidence and logic permit.

Then, supposedly, faith takes over.

Where knowledge ends, belief begins.

But this treats faith primarily as something we believe.

There may be a more practical way to understand it:

Faith is the activity of assigning authority in the face of uncertainty.

We do this constantly.

We assign authority to physicians because we cannot independently verify all of medical science.

We assign authority to engineers when we drive across bridges we did not design.

We assign authority to teachers when we begin learning something we do not yet understand.

And in spiritual practice, we may assign authority to traditions, scriptures, lineages, teachers, methods, and interpretations.

The question, then, is not simply:

“Do you have faith?”

A more useful question may be:

To what are you assigning authority—and why?

Faith as Appeal to Authority

“Appeal to authority” is often discussed as though it were inherently a logical mistake.

But practically speaking, some appeal to authority is unavoidable.

You cannot learn something new without temporarily accepting guidance from someone or something that presumably knows what you do not.

The real problem is not assigning authority.

The problem is assigning it without examining what follows.

Who—or what—are you trusting?

Why?

What evidence supports that trust?

What happens when you follow that authority?

And perhaps most importantly:

When should that authority be reconsidered?

Zen makes this question particularly interesting because authority does not necessarily remain where it began.

A practitioner may begin by trusting Buddhism generally.

Then a particular Zen tradition.

Then a particular teacher.

Then a particular practice.

As understanding changes, the assignment of authority changes with it.

Faith evolves.

And if the process continues far enough, faith eventually manifests as practice—and ultimately as what we will later call manifesting the norm.

Faith has not simply disappeared.

Its function has changed.

The Map Is Not the Journey

A book naturally presents ideas in a sequence.

Chapter follows chapter.

One concept leads logically to another.

Faith leads to practice.

Practice leads somewhere else.

Everything appears wonderfully orderly.

But nobody actually experiences Zen that way.

The lived journey is much messier.

We trust.

Then doubt.

Understand.

Then misunderstand.

Think we have finally figured something out.

Then discover that what we understood was incomplete.

We may adopt a framework, abandon it, and return years later with an entirely different understanding of what it was trying to say.

This is important to remember while reading The Last Turtle.

The book necessarily presents a logical, linear description of Zen and faith.

Your experience probably will not be logical or linear.

It will more likely be a persistent adjustment to your own understanding.

And that adjustment is not a detour from the journey.

It is the journey.

Zen is not a recipe.

It is an activity.

Finding the Last Turtle

The title The Last Turtle points toward the central question underlying the book.

How far down can we go?

If a Zen teaching rests upon another teaching, and that teaching rests upon another conceptual framework, do we eventually reach something foundational?

The teachings of Zero suggest that we do.

Not a final belief.

Not an unquestionable doctrine.

Not a metaphysical answer to everything.

A functional ground.

Activity arises.

Activity manifests.

Activity disappears.

That simple observation gives us a different way to examine Zen, the self, practice—and eventually faith itself.

The purpose is not to find something new to believe.

It is to understand what is actually happening.

Perhaps that is the more interesting possibility hidden inside the old turtle story.

Maybe the answer was never “turtles all the way down.”

Maybe, eventually, there is a last turtle.

And maybe the real journey begins when we ask what lies beneath it.

What Is Faith?

What if faith has almost nothing to do with belief?

That may sound like a strange question. After all, faith and belief are so commonly treated as synonyms that separating them can seem unnecessary.

But consider what actually happens when we encounter uncertainty.

We do not know what will happen.

We do not have enough information.

We cannot personally verify every fact, investigate every possibility, or predict every outcome.

And yet, we still have to act.

So what do we do?

We assign authority.

We trust the doctor.

We follow the teacher.

We accept the conclusions of the scientist.

We rely on a religious tradition, a philosophical framework, our own reasoning, or our past experience.

And then we move forward.

This suggests a very different definition of faith:

Faith is not belief in what lies beyond reason.

Faith is the activity of assigning authority in the face of uncertainty.

That definition changes the discussion considerably.

Because faith is no longer something possessed only by religious people.

Everyone has faith.

The atheist has faith.

The scientist has faith.

The skeptic has faith.

The Zen student has faith.

The question is not whether we assign authority.

We do it constantly.

The more interesting question is:

Where do we assign it?

And why?

Between Certainty and Doubt

Faith becomes necessary because human beings live somewhere between certainty and doubt.

If we possessed absolute certainty, faith would be unnecessary.

We would simply know.

But absolute certainty is rare.

At the other extreme lies complete doubt.

If we doubted everything equally, action would become nearly impossible. We would have no basis for choosing one course over another.

Faith occupies the territory between the two.

We do not know.

But we must act anyway.

So we assign authority.

Sometimes to another person.

Sometimes to an institution.

Sometimes to a text.

Sometimes to reason.

Sometimes to our own experience.

Seen this way, faith is not an intellectual weakness.

It is a practical necessity.

The difficulty is that assigning authority does not guarantee that we have assigned it wisely.

And that is where things become interesting.

The Problem With Belief

Defining faith as belief can hide the most important part of the process.

A belief can simply sit there.

We can claim to believe something without allowing it to affect our lives in any meaningful way.

But assigning authority is different.

Authority changes behavior.

If I assign authority to a doctor, I may take the prescribed medicine.

If I assign authority to a teacher, I may follow the teacher’s instructions.

If I assign authority to reason, I may reject a conclusion that appears unsupported.

If I assign authority to my own direct experience, I may question ideas that I previously accepted without hesitation.

Faith, understood this way, is not primarily about what we say we believe.

It is revealed by what we actually rely upon.

The Problem of Double Vision

But there is another complication.

We experience our lives with something like double vision.

First, there is the immediate experience itself.

Something happens.

We see.

We hear.

We feel.

We act.

And then there is the second view.

We look back.

We remember.

We analyze.

We interpret.

We explain what happened.

The experience and the explanation are not necessarily the same thing.

A person may have a powerful experience during meditation and later interpret it as enlightenment.

Another person may interpret the same experience as a temporary psychological state.

A religious believer might call an unexpected event divine intervention.

A skeptic might call it coincidence.

The event occurred first.

The explanation came later.

This is the double vision that complicates any serious discussion of faith.

We have the experience.

And then we have the story we tell about the experience.

The two can become so intertwined that we eventually forget there was ever a difference.

Faith as an Activity

This is why faith may be better understood as an activity rather than a possession.

We assign authority.

We act.

Something happens.

We look back.

We interpret what happened.

And then, whether we realize it or not, we adjust where authority will be assigned the next time.

Faith becomes a continuing process.

A feedback loop.

Authority.

Action.

Experience.

Interpretation.

Adjustment.

And then the process begins again.

This also gives doubt an important role.

Doubt is not necessarily the enemy of faith.

Doubt can be the mechanism by which faith is corrected.

Without doubt, authority can harden into dogma.

But without faith, doubt can prevent action altogether.

The challenge is not to eliminate one in favor of the other.

The challenge is learning how to live between them.

So, What Is Faith?

The opening chapter of The Last Turtle: Zero, Zen, and the Culmination of Faith begins with a deceptively simple question:

What is faith?

The answer proposed here is equally simple:

Faith is the activity of assigning authority in the face of uncertainty.

But that definition immediately raises another series of questions.

Where does authority begin?

Why do we trust one person rather than another?

What happens when reason challenges tradition?

What happens when direct experience challenges reason?

Can authority eventually move from the teacher to the student?

And what happens when we discover that even our own interpretations cannot provide absolute certainty?

These are not questions about what we should believe.

They are questions about what human beings actually do.

We encounter uncertainty.

We assign authority.

We act.

We experience the consequences.

And then, looking backward through the second lens of our double vision, we try to understand what just happened.

The audio narration accompanying this post presents Chapter 1, “What Is Faith?”

It begins with belief.

But the larger journey is about authority.

And about what happens when, despite all our uncertainty, we must decide where to place it.

What If Faith Isn’t Belief?

Most discussions of faith begin with belief.

Believe in a doctrine.
Believe in a teacher.
Believe in something that cannot be proven.

But what if we’ve been asking the wrong question?

What if faith isn’t primarily about what you believe at all?

The introduction to my book, The Last Turtle: Zero, Zen, and the Culmination of Faith, explores a different possibility: that faith is not belief beyond reason, but the activity of assigning authority in the face of uncertainty.

Think about it for a moment.

Every day we make decisions without possessing complete knowledge. We trust physicians whose research we have not personally verified. We drive across bridges we did not engineer. We follow GPS directions through unfamiliar cities. We accept the findings of scientists, historians, and teachers because we cannot independently rediscover everything humanity has learned.

This is not irrational. It is unavoidable.

The real question is not whether we exercise faith.

The question is where we assign our authority.

Zen presents a fascinating case study because it begins with external authority—a teacher, a tradition, a method—but ultimately aims toward something entirely different. If the practice succeeds, authority gradually shifts away from books, teachers, and institutions toward direct experience itself.

That journey is rarely as tidy as books make it appear.

One purpose of writing is to create logical maps. Chapters naturally proceed from one idea to the next, each concept building upon the previous one. Reality, however, has little interest in chapter headings.

Our own practice tends to move in circles rather than straight lines. We become convinced, then uncertain. We discover clarity, only to question it later. We return to ideas we thought we had already understood, finding entirely new meanings years after first encountering them.

Far from being evidence of failure, this constant recalibration may be the very mechanism through which understanding matures.

The teachings of Zero, developed by the late Zen master Joshu Sasaki and explored throughout this book, provide a foundation for understanding this movement. Rather than presenting another philosophical framework, Zero offers a way of describing activity itself: how experiences arise, stabilize, and inevitably disappear.

Seen from this perspective, Zen becomes less about collecting profound ideas and more about recognizing recurring patterns.

The goal is not to accumulate beliefs.

The goal is to see clearly.

And perhaps that is why the title The Last Turtle feels so appropriate.

We’ve all heard the old story of “turtles all the way down”—the suggestion that every explanation simply rests upon another explanation without end. Zen is sometimes portrayed in much the same way, where every sincere question is answered with another paradox, another koan, or another reminder that words ultimately fail.

I have never found that response entirely satisfying.

If Zen consistently produces greater clarity, compassion, and freedom from suffering, then something real must be happening. Whatever that “something” is deserves careful examination.

Not blind acceptance.

Not blind skepticism.

Careful examination.

That is the spirit in which this book is written.

If you’ve ever wondered why Zen emphasizes teachers, why practice matters more than philosophy, why reason eventually reaches its limits without becoming irrelevant, or why faith may have far more to do with everyday decision-making than supernatural belief, I hope you’ll enjoy this introduction.

Sometimes the most important questions aren’t answered by adding another turtle.

Sometimes they’re answered by discovering the ground beneath them.