2. I Take Refuge in the Dharma.
3. I Take Refuge in the Sangha.
I’m told the three treasures are the core of Buddhism, so I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t understand them all that well. The Great Precepts are specific enough to be understandable. The Pure Precepts are vague enough to find my own understanding. The Three treasures…I don‘t know.
Maybe it’s the language. The treasures have a jargon-ish, religious-y aspect to them. They sound like the sort of thing you need to be a professional to understand and explain, which doesn’t gibe with the way this practice--particularly the Soto version of it--is supposed to work. After all, the thing with Buddhism is that it is do-able by anyone. We can all realize the truth.
I don’t understand the Three Treasures. I’ll do my best to explain them anyways.
Let’s start at the beginning with the idea of taking refuge. When I first heard the phrase, it sounded suspiciously like running and hiding. But Buddhism is about responsibility. Surrender is a part of taking refuge, but we aren’t talking about hiding behind the skirts of some Celestial Being or throwing ourselves on the mercy of some Cosmic Court. Instead, as I understand it, we are talking about trust.
1. I’m learning to trust the Buddha
2. I’m teaching myself to trust the Dharma
3. I’m learning to have faith in the Sangha.
I. I have faith in Buddha
What does it mean to trust the Buddha? Well, on one level, it can mean the life and teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha. That’s self-explanatory, and also uncomfortable. The guy lived twenty five centuries ago in a world we’d scarcely recognize? How can we have faith in something we know so little about?
But let‘s explore that question a little deeper. How different was he from us, really? How well do we need to know the facts of what he said and did not say, what he did and did not do to see the sameness between his life and ours? Is it possible that we can look at others and recognize that even though we might be separated by time, culture, socioeconomic status, or race, we all have in common the ability to suffer and the ability to find freedom from that suffering?
Sometimes we talk about taking refuge in the Buddha as trusting our Buddha-nature. That approach raises the question: What is Buddha-nature?
So what’s Buddha-nature? Great question. I had been hearing the term for years, and it has only recently occurred to me, I don‘t actually know what that is. From the context, I interpreted it as a sort of a universal inner goodness, and that works pretty good, I guess, even if it sidesteps the question. The idea that we are, at heart, good, that there is something wonderful in us and rather than building it, all we have to do is call it forth is quite wonderful.
We can accept this on faith. But for those of us who have trouble finding the line between faith and blind belief, we can perhaps go back to those questions I asked about the historical Buddha. Are there thing we have in common with him? If so, is it possible we have those same things in common with all people, or even all beings?
If the answer is yes, what does it mean for the way we relate to ourselves and others? If we have the same qualities as someone as esteemed as the Buddha, does it make any sense to ignore those qualities, to put ourselves down, to make decisions that hurt us? If we realize that we share those qualities, not just with the Buddha, but with all other beings, what does that tell us about the way we should treat the people around us?
Lately I‘ve been coming at taking refuge in the Buddha from another angle. Technically, Buddha means awakened one. So what do we get when we stop conceiving of Buddha-hood as a rank or a type of person and start thinking of it as a state of being?
Taking refuge in the Buddha then becomes trusting awake-ness. This is having faith in the moment, that everything we need is being supplied to us at this very moment. Rather than figure things out or filter them through ours and others‘ interpretation, we can reach out with our heart and our senses and touch what is there.
II. I trust the Dharma
Dharma seems to have a few meanings. We often understand it to mean things like ‘laws’ or ‘teachings,’ but for me, it has been easiest to use it to mean the truth.
I am learning to trust the truth.
This seems so obvious on the surface that we often don‘t realize how strongly we resist it. We say we want the truth, and there is often a disparity between our words and our behaviour.
We comfort ourselves with reasons and explanations. We make up stories about what things that happen to us mean. When something conflicts with our beliefs we say the truth. Reality is wrong.
This is normal. There something in us that seeks the comfort of stories. Whether its our personal life or the history of the world, there is a pull to bring everything together as part of some grand narrative.
Notice that these stories aren’t all positive. We often act on things we fear are true. But we would still rather have answers than nothing, especially if those answers confirm what we already believe.
Letting go of these stories scares us.
Trusting the truth is a leap into the dark that is difficult to make. We don’t want to make decisions until we know how things will turn out. When something goes wrong, we tell ourselves we need to know why so we don’t make that mistake again.
Once we get used to it though, we can find refuge in trusting the truth. Because it means we don’t have to know everything. We don’t have to be right. We don’t even have to understand what’s going on. We no longer have to make decisions on what we want to be true or what we fear is true
Our stories are sometimes inaccurate. Our explanations are sometimes incomplete. We often don’t have enough information to know whether or not we are right.
The truth, though…the truth will stay true no matter what we say, what we think, what we do, or what we believe.
We can relax, knowing the truth will sort everything out. All we need to do is trust.
III.I have faith in the Sangha
Sangha often refers to a group of Buddhists. Sometimes we use it to refer to a specific group of Buddhists. The sangha of the Edmonton Buddhist Meditation Group.
In a larger context we can refer to all who practice. We can even extend it to all of humanity.
The short, simple version though is the sangha is about people.
It took me a long time to admit I understood this better in theory than in practice. In my mind, I imagined a perfect sangha. One day all the annoying people in my life would be gone and I’d be surrounded by only people I liked. Or I would join the perfect community for me, a place where we all understood and connected with each other in a magical, collective unity.
I forgot one thing. The sangha is the people around us right now. Our sangha, our community, is made up of the people in it, not the people we wish were in it.
They are teaching us with their strengths and weaknesses, in the ways they fall short of our expectations as well as they ways in which they surprise us. They help us by giving us opportunities to be our best selves and they help us by bringing out parts of us we don’t want to see.
They teach us not to be deceived--we learn to trust people to be themselves instead of who we expect them to be.
We don’t need to understand every person in our sangha. We don’t even need to like them all that much. But we need to put our faith in them, not because they are perfect, but because they are the people who are there. By learning to trust them, we learn to trust ourselves.
The Three treasures are the heart of Buddhism, maybe the reason they’re difficult to see is not because they are so far away, but because they are so close. They are so true, it’s easy to overlook them. They aren’t about doing something, or believing something, or even understanding something. They are always there with us.
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