For my Dharma friends—each following her own path, yet traveling together.
Faith, rather than belief, can come into view when our reliance on understanding, control, or connection no longer holds. In these passages, Ken McLeod and James Low approach faith from different circumstances, yet both point toward what becomes possible when familiar ways of making sense of experience fall away.
From Sutra Session 35, July 8, 2012
Ken: A few years ago, I became increasingly unsettled and discontented with being a teacher, in particular a Buddhist teacher. I’ve never, ever felt like a Buddhist teacher. I’m not even sure what that is, and that may sound very strange to many of you.
Do I teach Buddhism? Do I teach the practice of Buddhism? I have for a very long time. But that somehow feels different from being a Buddhist teacher. I just don’t get along with other Buddhist teachers. Sad, but true. [Laughter] Maybe not so sad.
This reached a point where I had to take some action on it, about six years ago. So I took a sabbatical from teaching because I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, so I felt I would just stop.
It was a little bit of a shock to a small number of people who worked with me. They went, “You can’t do that, we need you.” But they discovered that they didn’t, and actually they learned a lot from it, being one of the basic aspects of life, which is impermanence and change. And I’m going to say a few more words about that.
I came back to teaching somewhat differently a year later, but the discontents hadn’t gone away. One of the ways that I began to think about this is the problem with the word teaching. What’s important here isn’t teaching, it’s learning. Learning is far more important, and being with a teacher who’s talking about things is simply one way of learning. Because when we engage in spiritual practice, we’re learning a way of approaching life, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re trying to understand.
Increasingly, the idea that someone else can tell you, “Oh, this is how you do it,” or whatever, this just doesn’t work at all. Each of us have to discover our own way. This is something I’ve come to feel very deeply. For that reason, I moved my way of doing retreats and everything from being a teacher to creating environments in which people could learn—learn through their own experience, learn with the benefit of my own training and experience, but practicing in the ways that were really fruitful for them and not adhering to a system which had developed somewhere else for another population in another country.
That was sort of all right for a couple of years. And then something happened. Describing this to some people I’ve worked with in business circles, they said, “What happened?” I said, “Well, this is one of those Zen things, where everything just drops out of your life and you don’t know where you are.”
That was about three or four years ago. And my immediate impulse at that point was to stop teaching. There was one small problem. I was teaching two retreats back to back and this occurred in the break between the two retreats. And so I had 18 people flying in from all over the country, expecting to learn something or do a retreat with me. So, I couldn’t just stop right then. But I did start to wind down my individual consulting practice as a teacher, and just gradually wound down from there.
This is kind of the end point of that winding down process. Now, why? A number of my students really quizzed me on this one quite deeply. The reason is that I felt that I had nothing to say to anybody. And not just a kind of trivial thing, I don’t have anything to say. No, I really had nothing to say. In fact, I would call friends up and say, just ask me any question about Buddhism, and they’d say, “Well, what are the three jewels?” I don’t know. Ask me another.
I even went to a Tibetan teacher and said, “I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know what buddha nature is. I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what that is.” And he said, “Doesn’t matter.” He gave me some very interesting instruction. He said, “Just cultivate faith to the point that you can’t think, and rest there. Don’t worry about this or that.”
I thought about that instruction for a very long time. Well, what did he mean by that? And I realized that this played straight into my suspicions and discomfort with the notion of belief.
For Ken, faith seems to have come into view when the understandings he had relied on no longer gave him anything to stand on. “I don’t know anything anymore,” he told a Tibetan teacher. The response was an instruction to cultivate faith to the point where thinking stops.
My path into this territory wound through a different landscape: the failure of connection, a persistent sense of not quite fitting anywhere, of being rootless, and of not being able to rely on anyone. For much of my life this felt like a reaction to past hurts, and a lack of something other people seemed to have. But over time, the compunction to sort it out has faded. If there is nowhere to belong, if no relationship can provide unshakeable support, then another possibility begins to appear: to stop searching outside or inside for that support.
Faith, in this sense, is not a feeling that things will somehow work out, nor trust that someone will always be there. It is closer to the willingness Ken describes: to remain open without requiring certainty. And there's a huge sense of freedom in that.
James Low’s way of talking about faith opens this up further.
James: What I found with the university study was that it was just more a vast accumulation of words and concepts and theories. This was the time of structuralism with Levi Strauss and people like that and a lot of psychoanalysis around. And that wasn’t my cup of tea at that stage anyway. So I dropped out of university and went back to India.
Sam: If anything can announce the spiritual poverty of the Western tradition more than Martin Luther and John Calvin, it might be the post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault.
James: Indeed. It’s like eating a mixture of candy floss and cotton wool. It’s a little bit tasty, but there’s nothing in it.
Sam: Yeah. Okay. So then you moved on. So bring me to your next Dharma perch.
James: So I went back to India and went to Dharamsala briefly for a few months, going to some of the teachings in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, which was just getting going at that time. But it wasn’t my heart’s home. So I went over to Darjeeling and then I met Chatral Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, Karmapa, Kalu Rinpoche.
Sam: Wow. You got four great ones there. Give me your impression at that point. How did you, meeting Dudjom, how did you not go headlong into his Nyingma school and meeting Kalu, how did you not go headlong into his Kagyu context? And to say nothing of the Karmapa. Who struck you as an important advertisement for what was possible at that point when you met these guys?
James: I think they all did in their very different ways. Chatral Rinpoche was very physical and he didn’t like speaking very much, but he was extremely attentive to what was going on all around him. And I used to go and see him every day—he had a little room just in front of a small temple he built at a place called Jor Bungalow—and he was very, very kind. He got one of the students to teach me the beginnings of my understanding of Tibetan, and we translated a biography of Padmasambhava that I used to chant every day.
And basically, he’s just saying, as all the teachers say, faith is the main entry door. That faith is the method by which you gather yourself together, because we’re all so dispersed with our personal histories, national histories, hopes and fears, all the rest of it. But if you can develop a really one-pointed, deep, heartfelt faith, you come into one point, and then you start to see that the diversity of the different thoughts and feelings that we tend to be endlessly sorting out and making into new patterns, they all have the same nature. They arise, and they vanish. They self-arise, and they self-vanish.
Thoughts come to us. We’re not proactively thinking most of the time. Thought arises and vanishes. Feeling arises and vanishes. Sensation arises and vanishes.
So it was a strong introduction to the dynamic nature of the world, and that the whole dualistic consciousness interpretive matrix is a fruitless effort to stabilise the nature of experience so that you can make sense of it after the event. So it’s like learning about the body through doing dissection in the first year in a medical school. But you can also learn through the body through playing football, playing tennis, or dancing. So the connected body, the body that’s part of the world, is showing the co-emergence of subject and object. Whereas if you focus on trying to stabilise the world, then the subject is always concerned with its agency, with its mastery.
Am I really in charge of what’s going on here? Have I taken account of all the different variables so that I can bring my intention into the world just as I want? But of course, that doesn’t really work out.
From Patterns of Emptiness, a conversation between Sam Harris and James Low, August 12, 2025.
For more on faith and devotion read James' introduction to The Seven Chapters of Prayer and Ken's article Where the Thinking Stops.