Faith, or belief, and reason are commonly seen as being fundamentally in opposition to each other. Many people regard any kind of belief--and religious belief in particular--as some sort of paralysis of the faculty of reason, an intellectual crutch. Currently, however, this presumption of a sharp opposition between belief and reason, which has been the hallmark of modern thought, is being reexamined.
Twentieth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and José Ortega y Gasset have pointed out that each of us lives, acts and thinks within a system of beliefs that is largely unconscious but without which we would be incapable of any thought or action. "Our beliefs are already operating in the depths of our lives when we begin to think something," writes Ortega y Gasset. Reason, in this sense, is founded on belief. If belief is the foundation of life, we don't really have a choice of whether to believe or not. We can choose, however, what to believe, what the substance of our faith will be.
Within the Buddhist tradition, the relationship between faith and reason has been the subject of sustained inquiry since ancient times. While this tradition has always held that the Buddha's enlightenment cannot be grasped or expressed in its entirety by reason or language, Buddhism has consistently held that reason and language should be highly valued.