Some of the most useful advice in Zen arrives as a single sentence, delivered by a teacher who then walks away. Brad Warner, the Zen priest and author who runs the Hardcore Zen channel, has been turning over one such sentence for roughly forty years: his first Zen teacher told him that studying Zen requires an equal amount of faith and doubt. In a 15-minute video titled "Faith and Doubt," Warner admits he is probably "messing the whole thing up" by explaining it at all. He does it anyway, tracing the idea from a teenager's frustration with religious belief to a thirteenth-century Japanese master's claim that doubt is part of reality itself. What follows is a closer look at that argument, and at why it may matter more to a skeptical seeker than any promise of certainty.
The video opens with a song, an odd choice for a talk about doubt, and Warner's own joking admission that he doesn't know what the title means. Then he gets to the point. [0:13] His teacher's remark, he says, is the kind of thing a real Zen teacher in person tends to say before leaving a student alone with it. Warner's own conclusion is that "it's up to you to figure it out."
Warner was not raised in a religious household. His family, as he tells it, "just didn't have a religion" and didn't care much about one. So when he began exploring religion as a teenager, he had no inherited vocabulary for it. [0:109] What he got instead was a particular definition of faith from the Christians he met, one that he says was presented to him as the core of belief: [0:135] "Faith meant believing impossible things." That meant accepting the resurrection after three days, Noah's ark with two of every animal, the parting of the Red Sea, and Jesus's miracles.
Warner recalls one preacher's argument in particular. If Jesus didn't perform miracles, he wasn't divine; because he did, he was. Faith in those miracles was justified, the preacher said, because Jesus's disciples went to their deaths attesting to them. Warner found that shaky. [0:190] How could he believe in an event he hadn't witnessed, some of it thousands of years old? "I couldn't have that kind of faith," he says, and when people told him he needed it, his answer was simply, "I don't know about that."
The problem repeated itself when he drifted toward the Hare Krishna movement. He never joined, but he attended their temples weekly, ate the feast, and listened to the teachings. [0:216] The pitch there was similar: you had to believe Krishna was real and that chanting would carry you to Krishna-loka rather than back into rebirth in this world. Once again, the faith on offer demanded a certainty he couldn't honestly produce.
This is the context in which Warner found his teacher's line genuinely interesting. Here was a tradition insisting that doubt belonged inside the practice, not outside it. The question was whether that was just a softer way of saying "believe anyway," or something different.
To answer that, Warner turns to the texts. He reads from Shohaku Okumura's introduction to The Wholehearted Way, a book built around Dogen's Bendowa. Warner notes he isn't sure Okumura made the translation itself, but the introduction is the part he wants to read. [0:257] The passage's central claim is that practice is not about eliminating delusion. It is about becoming aware that we are deluded, and letting go of being pulled around by those delusions.
"Our practice is not to eliminate our delusion, but to become aware of the fact that we are deluded. Just become aware of it and let go of it. Don't be pulled by the delusions."
— Shohaku Okumura, introduction to The Wholehearted Way, as read by Brad Warner (0:257)
Okumura's passage goes further and suggests that the feeling of not knowing is itself part of what is being described. If we could fully understand the Buddha way, it would not be wondrous. So we live with a kind of doubt about whether we are really in the Buddha way at all, and practice means sitting with that doubt on the basis of the reality that includes our delusions. Warner's point is that this is not an invitation to believe something impossible. It is an invitation to stop requiring that the doubt be resolved before you begin.
Warner then cites several lines from Dogen himself. [0:350] From the essay commonly known by its opening phrase, Hokke Hokke Ten Hokke, comes a sentence that Warner reads with evident relish: "Even alarm, doubt, and fear are nothing other than reality as it is." Doubt, in other words, is not a malfunction that Zen removes. It is one of the things that is already real.
The essay Uji, on being-time, pushes the idea further. Doubt, Dogen writes, is different across different moments of a life, and the doubts of the past do not exactly match the doubts of the present. Still, Warner reads, "we can say for the present, however, that doubt is nothing other than time." Because being and time are one thing in that framework, doubt becomes a form of being rather than an obstacle standing in front of it.
In Muchu Setsumu, Dogen describes waking life as a kind of dream. Warner reads the passage where the moment of doubt is itself the moment of confusion, and in that moment we are asked to notice that confusion. The doubt is not outside the practice. It is where the practice happens.
"It is the very moment in which we doubt that this is so. It is the very moment of confusion."
— Dogen, Muchu Setsumu, as read by Brad Warner (approx. 7:00)
Warner's reading of Dogen is not a license for pure skepticism. He is careful to distinguish Zen from forms of Buddhism that do lean on belief in extraordinary claims. [0:438] Zen, he says, does not ask you to believe impossible things, and this is the key to his teacher's sentence. Faith in the Zen sense is not a commitment to a set of factual propositions. It is closer to trusting the practice enough to keep doing it.
He brings in the comedian Pete Holmes, whom he has referenced before, who defines faith as finding comfort and joy in not knowing. Warner's paraphrase of that idea is that humans are not built to know everything. We can't. So some doubt is always present, and the question is what we do with it. A faith that depends on certainty will break under the first hard question. A faith that is at ease with uncertainty can keep going.
Warner also notes the practical side. To begin Zen practice at all, he says, you need a certain amount of faith, because it is not sold the way other meditation methods are. [0:480] Other traditions promise calm, clarity, or enlightenment as a product. Zen, in Warner's telling, is not given a hard sell. You sit down, and you have to take a bit on trust, because no one can deliver the results to you in advance.
Warner's own experience suggests it doesn't, and he is candid about that. He describes having heard stories about the Buddha, including miracle accounts, and wondering whether they were "a bunch of hooey." He admits he has asked the same kind of questions as a practitioner that he asked as a teenager, and that the questions don't simply disappear with time. [0:532] The honest answer, he implies, is that you may not understand the practice fully until you have put in many years, and even then the doubt keeps reappearing in new forms.
That is why the teacher's "equal amount" line may be more precise than it first sounds. Warner isn't asking for half faith and half doubt as a formula. He's pointing to a balance in which you commit to the practice and also refuse to pretend that the questions have been answered. Too much faith hardens into the belief that you already know you are right. Too much doubt becomes a standing refusal to sit down at all.
The video's final sections, which Warner frames partly as a note about how he runs his channel, return to the idea that the practice is ongoing. Doubt is not a stage you pass through on the way to certainty. It is part of the terrain, and the practice is to keep being present in it.
If you take nothing else from Warner's argument, take the reframing. Faith, as he experienced it from Christian and Hare Krishna teachers, asked him to believe things he could not check and could not honestly accept. Zen, as he reads it through his teacher and Dogen, asks something quieter: that you keep practicing while you are still unsure, and that you treat the unsureness as real rather than as an error to be eliminated.
This is a demanding standard, and Warner doesn't pretend otherwise. But it is also a more honest one. It doesn't require you to swallow a miracle to be a serious student. It asks you to notice what you doubt, to let go of being pulled by the doubt, and to sit anyway. For a skeptic, that may be the most persuasive thing a Zen teacher can say.
The best next step is to watch Warner's original video, which is short, loose, and full of his own asides about his past. Read Dogen's essays directly, especially Uji and Muchu Setsumu, and compare them with Okumura's introduction to The Wholehearted Way. Pay attention to where the translators' choices shape the English, since Warner himself was unsure about one of the translation credits. And when you sit, notice the doubts that arise without trying to settle them first. That noticing, in Warner's account, is the practice.
