Faith and Wisdom in the T'ien-t'ai Buddhist Tradition

A Letter by Ssu-ming Chih-li

Abstract

Christian tradition, Faith and Reason (Wisdom) have often been pitted against one another, as though they are mutually exclusive. This tension, however, grew out of a particular Western heritage which, in many ways, is more the exception than the rule for other religious traditions. The tension began with the Christian reading of pistis (faith) and the formulation of the credo (creed) whereby faith as denoting cognitive accent came to be implied. The usual contrast then of the "God of the Philosophers" and the "God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob" thus began. This was further underlined during the Protestant Reformation through the formula of sola fidie (By faith alone). The anti-intellect bent increased with the Pietist movement reacting to the Age of Reason and its rational theology. A similar later reaction to the scientific erosion of the tenets of faith among Biblical literalists only drove Reason and Faith farther apart. Discussion on Faith, when coloured by that somewhat uncompromising perspective, has often managed to distort the issue of the dialectics between Faith and Wisdom, especially when applied to other religious traditions. In traditions where there had not been a similar conflict between two cultures in the mask of two Gods, Faith and Wisdom are more reconcileable. In Hinduism, for example, bhakti devotionalism would not abrogate the insight or the gnosis that is the Upanisad (Vedanta). In Buddhism, a tradition that began as a wisdom (prajiiii) tradition, even Mahayana "faith" (sraddhii) in its extreme formPure Land Buddhism in the Far East-cannot be divorced from "wisdom." As a small contribution to the discussion on the dynamics of faith, I would introduce a classic defence of the mutual practice of Faith and Wisdom by Sung T'ien-t'ai master, Ssu-ming Chih-Ii (959-1028), In a letter replying to Yang-I.