Thoughts on Taking Refuge in the Three Treasures
Thoughts on taking refuge in the Three Treasures
Greetings, fellow refugees!
I call you fellow refugees because a few minutes ago we recited the triple treasure chant, taking refuge in Buddha, dharma, sangha. vowing with all beings.
When we were raising money to purchase the Stone Creek property, we called our efforts “the sanctuary project.” Sanctuary! A refuge. A place of safety.
Those efforts were very successful and here we are this morning in this beautiful building, the doors are open, the sun is shining, I get the feeling we are all relatively safe and well fed.
I’m not hearing any gunfire or sirens. I don't see any masked soldiers or tanks in the streets. Not even plain clothes masked men with big black (or white) vans.
Our plumbing here at Stone Creek is amazing! We can drink water straight from the tap. No smell of raw sewage or decomposing flesh. Indeed, this zendo feels like a place of refuge and safety.
And yet, we understand that that feeling of safety is tentative and fragile, and can change in an instant. We understand that as long as our neighbors are not safe neither are we.
In his youth, prince Sakyamuni Buddha was about as safe as he could be. He had everything he wanted. Then, when he left his father’s palace, he discovered the suffering of the world. He discovered that old age sickness and death are relentless, and no one escapes them.
As he looked deeply into the suffering around him, he realized that the idea of a separate substantial self is an illusion. He realized that there is no part of us that is permanent and unchanging, that everything about us depends on context and relationship with everything else around us.
This means that whatever we cling to will pass, and indeed, we see that process of impermanence playing out all around us every day.
In the face of this we tremble. Nothing to cling to. The existential angst of the separate self .
At almost every service we chant about taking refuge in the three treasures, buddha, dharma, and sangha. What are these treasures, and what does it mean to “take refuge” in them?
The three treasures, or three jewels, are the foundation of the Buddha way, and “taking refuge” in them means to make them the foundation of how you do your daily life.
These three are basic to all the main expressions of Buddhism, Tibetan, Theravadan and Mahayana. In our zen lineage, we formalize the process of taking refuge by sewing a rakusu and ceremonializing our intention to enter this great way.
The first of the three treasures is the Buddha.
I take refuge in Buddha, we say, vowing with all beings, embodying the great way, wisdom like the sea.
This first vow does not mean to take buddha as your personal savior.
Refuge here means to recognize and affirm the possibility of profound awakening. This first treasure reminds you to recognize your own Buddha nature, as an intrinsic embodied part of all-that-is.
How do we take refuge in the Buddha?
Your first teacher is within. It is your own experience, your own reflection, your own fearless inventory. It is to recognize your own desire to awaken more deeply to the reality of your life.
This first teacher will always be available to you.
When you sit zazen, in a way, you are doing dokusan, a private interview with this first teacher.
This was the strength of the historical Buddha. This was the teacher that Buddha himself consulted. The teacher that he consulted as he awakened to the inevitability of old age, sickness and death, as he determined to understand the suffering around him, its causes and conditions.
The historical Buddha was able to manifest his understanding clearly and to express it for his students so that they might awaken to their own original nature.
It is helpful to also find a teacher and guide outside ourselves, to help us see through our blind spots, hold a mirror to our efforts, shake us out of our complacency, suggest ways around obstacles, and personally pass this great treasure from warm hand to warm hand.
This was hard for me when I first began exploring the Buddha way. There was a lot of reference to the teacher-student relationship in what I was reading. I scornfully brushed it off, saying “Everyone is my teacher. I don’t need to surrender my autonomy to anyone.”
Only many years later did I realize I was thereby rejecting great gifts of intimacy, support and understanding.
Of course, this inner “one who is awake” is really what you already are. You already participate fully and inescapably in this awakened universe. It’s not something you have to work at, though often those who wake up to their desire for realization still want to work at it. This is indeed Buddha work.
As you ask yourself the basic question “why should I work at something I already have?” you open yourself to appreciate the profound ambiguity of the human condition, you bring grace to your uncertainty, and you discover the freedom to celebrate life exactly as it is, trembling and all.
It’s not safety, but it is starting to feel like some kind of refuge!
You may feel you are not worthy. You may run away for a while, until you realize your feeling of unworthiness has run with you, and that there is no escape from being just who you are.
Congratulations! Come on back. You have awakened to the realization that there is no escape, that wherever you go, there you are, delusion and all.
So you you don't awaken from your delusion, you awaken to your delusion. That delusion has never been other than life exactly as it is.
All of it.
Did you imagine somehow there was another world where you could put all the bad stuff?
No! It is all right here, right now.
That is radical authenticity. That is your original Nature.
You know this, even though you probably forget over and over again like I do.
Coming together in practice we can remind each other.
So, this first treasure, Buddha, is the universal identity. It is our origin and destiny. It is the reality of oceans and mountains. It is the principle within us that is the same as the principle within galaxies, glaciers, and particles, each of us being exactly who we be, no more, no less.
We take refuge in the assurance that we are of the same nature as great mountains and rushing rivers.
Can you feel that?
I take refuge in dharma, vowing with all beings, deeply entering the teachings, wisdom like the sea.
The word ‘Dharma’ has many meanings. Most basically, it is the fact of how things work. It is the fact that everything is connected to everything else. It is mutual cause and effect. It is how things arise and recede. Thich Nhat Hahn called it “interbeing.”
For me, dharma is most easily expressed and understood as the way of nature. Everything downstream is affected by everything upstream.
But there is an amazing process that happens along the way.
What may have been simple upstream becomes more complex downstream.
What started out upstream as a cloud of matter/energy, under conditions of space/time, spread, condensed, and formed galaxies like our own milky way.
Over a few billion years, earth elements morphed into us and everything around us.
Marine algae becomes a lotus blossom. An apple tree! A redwood forest!
The dharma of the natural world seems to move in the direction of diversity, complexity, beauty, and abundance.
It also seems to adhere to some balance of birth and death.
Dharma in this context means taking refuge in being a part of the process of nature. The way of living, the way of interacting with this world, the way of exploring your experience in this life.
The Buddha talked about suffering, the cause of suffering, that there can be an end to suffering, and the path of conduct and practice that leads to the end of suffering. So, taking refuge in the Dharma means to immerse yourself, not just intellectually, but experientially in the investigation of these teachings.
You try them out and see how they work for you.
In the larger sense, to realize the Dharma is to realize that this fundamental activity of interdependency is unfolding in every moment. There is nothing other than this activity of the Dharma.
To take refuge in the Dharma means to see the whole universe as this inclusive fundamental activity of unfolding.
As you investigate how everything is connected to everything else, you will understand the crucial importance of the precepts, and how they are really central to our version of the Buddha way. You will begin to understand your power to create the conditions of happiness for yourself and others by considering the precepts carefully.
You will see your actions in this very moment as the seeds of either future happiness or of suffering, as you yourself are the result of the seeds sewn by all beings before you.
The implication of this is that everything matters. Hence, the central importance of the precepts in meeting life fully, wakefully, and on purpose.
Of course, in this world, good intentions sometimes result in unexpected consequences. So the precepts are questions rather than commandments. They are an invitation to inquire, to use your own due diligence, to engage wisdom as well as compassion.
This is deeply entering the teachings.
This second great treasure, dharma,is our garden of practice, where we are intimately involved in the process of birth and death, of arising and perishing, free to cultivate wisdom, beauty and compassion or not, and, with all beings, to experience the outcome.
Surely we can take refuge in this treasure of dharma.
The third great treasure is Sangha.
I take refuge in sangha, vowing with all beings, bringing harmony to all.
Sangha – The community of awakening. In one sense, the Sangha is those who come together in any size group to study, discuss, and practice the Buddha way as they understand it, with a desire for mutual aid and support.
You may have entered the Buddha away on your own from books as I did, or you may have learned from family and friends.
Now we are here together, at Stone Creek Zen Center, thanks to the determination, skill, and initiative of our founder, Jisho Warner Roshi, with the help of this sangha’s many hands.
This is what non-monastic, American zen looks like. Some of us have been sitting together for many years. But even for newbies, we like to be helpful to each other. We come forward ready to help each other cook, clean, sew, plan, ring bells and light incense, raise money, remodel the building, to do all the ten thousand things it takes to maintain this center and to facilitate each others practice. Helping each other we help ourselves. We are holding open the dharma gate that we ourselves are entering.
It is a family practice. We have rejoiced together and mourned together. We have been through births, marriages, deaths, feuds and separations, through triumphs and tragedies. We are ordinary people with ordinary fears, neuroses, resentments and delusions. We will inevitably bring our sharp edges into the community and hurt each other despite our best intentions.
Our commitment to the practice must be strong enough that we are hard to dislodge, quick to learn, and quick to forgive, as many times as it takes, and to hang in long enough to trust each other again.
This brings harmony to all.
On another level sangha may mean all those who profess to be exploring the way to awakening. Some people move from one group to another, from teacher to teacher, somewhat like the old Chinese monks who went from temple to temple, and each temple had a place for them and a way to incorporate them into the local sangha. So there is a way of taking refuge in a larger aggregation of way-seekers, who might not even use the word Buddha. You might call it “northern California eclectic” though of course it’s much wider than northern California.
The boundaries of this grand dharma community have fluctuated over the centuries. Originally only the monks and nuns who traveled with the historical Buddha may have been counted. Five centuries later, at the time the Lotus Sutra was first set in writing, the boundaries were very wide, including Buddhas and bodhisattvas, in this very world of birth and death, as numerous as the grains of sand of sixty thousand Ganges rivers.
At the time of the Lotus Sutra, around the beginning of the common era, there were only about 190 million humans on earth, so “beings” had to include the other forms of life.
Later Buddhist texts sounded as if only humans and other animals who had sensations recognizable to us humans were counted.
Now those boundaries seem to be ever receding, and sangha may yet come to include all beings, regardless of their scale, complexity, or form of sentience.
Awakening intimately to ourselves, we find ourselves surrounded, supported, and held by the whole universe. This is a very important way to consider Sangha – community; that everything in this vast universe is your community. You don’t get to pick what’s in your universe. You don’t get to choose certain aspects of this vast cosmos and ignore others. It’s all there.
To take refuge in this great sangha is to say yes to the universe, to come forward to meet your life with your whole heart, regardless of outcome.
This is not safety. It is deep vulnerability. But in the deepest sense, it is refuge. It is coming home.
I take refuge in sangha, vowing with all beings, bringing harmony to all.
When we leave here today, let's leave like Prince Buddha, leaving the illusory safety of the palace, with our eyes open to the suffering of the world.
If this kind of refuge appeals to you, please talk to one of the teachers here.