đż Faith
To Believe, and To Return Home
đď¸ What Is Faith?
I was born and raised in Japan, in a place where reverence for nature is simply part of life. Bringing our hands together before mountains or rivers is not so much âbelief,â but a quiet response to what is already there.
Faith, in this sense, is not something we choose.
It is something we live.
âď¸ Encountering Another World
At the same time, I was also exposed to Christianity. I attended a Catholic Sunday school, read the Bible several times, and graduated from an American Methodist-affiliated university in Japan.
So I am not unfamiliar with the God of the Bible.
And yet, for someone like me who grew up within a tradition of nature-based reverence, âhaving faithâ in the Biblical sense always felt like a high threshold.
When I was younger, I believed that becoming Christian meant moving to a higher placeâas if there were a continuous path upward.
But now I see this was an illusion.
đ Different Houses, Same Sky
Christianity is one house.
Japanese faith is another.
They are not above or below one another.
They simply stand in different placesâunder the same sky.
đ Faith Is Rooted in Culture â Prior to Language
Faith is shaped by the environment in which we are raised.
What we revere, what we bow to, what we feel as sacredâthese arise naturally from the culture that formed us.
To say that faith is rooted in culture is to say that it exists prior to language.
It is not something we choose through thought.
It is something already embodied.
There is a Japanese saying: âThe soul of a child of three remains until one hundred.â
What we absorb early in life does not easily disappear.
The difficulty of fundamentally changing oneâs faith can also be seen historically. Christianity has been present in Japan for roughly 150 years in its modern form, and yet Christians still make up only about one percent of the population. At the same time, even after more than 1,500 years since the introduction of Buddhism, Shinto has not disappeared.
These are not simply statistics.
They point to something deeper:
Faith is not easily replaced,
because it is already lived.
âď¸ Division and Overlap
In cultures shaped by the Bible, distinctions arise naturally: God and human, right and wrong, belief and unbelief.
In Japanese culture, where nature itself is the object of reverence, things are often received as overlapping rather than divided.
Differentâand yet not conflicting.
Each exists as it is.
đ§ Faith and Practice
In monotheistic traditions, believing in God naturally leads into practice. Faith and practice form a continuous movement.
In MahÄyÄna Buddhismâespecially in Zenâit is different.
Faith and practice do not necessarily coincide.
Zen does not begin with belief.
It asks how we are living.
Practice is not something that follows from belief.
Life itself is practice.
đ Zen Is Not Philosophy
Many people approach Zen as a philosophy or a system of thought. But as long as it is understood in that way, Zen cannot truly be understood.
Zen is not something to think about.
It is something to live.
In recent years, Zen has also been used as a tool for wellness or stress reduction. While there may be some benefit in that, it is not Zen itselfâit is only borrowing the name.
đ Not Conversion
Zenâespecially in its pure formâis not âreligionâ in the usual sense.
Because of this, the idea of âconversionâ does not truly apply.
Zen is not about moving from one belief system to another.
It is about awakening to where one has always already been.
