Talk On Taking Refuge In The Dharma

42:58

42:58

Talk On Taking Refuge In The Dharma

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talks

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Meditation

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Beginners

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241

This is a talk on the importance of taking refuge in the dharma--finding safety and support in the teachings of the Buddha and other teachings of wisdom and compassion. The talk begins with a discussion of the meaning of the three central Buddhist refuges--in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. I go on to explore why it is essential to put these teachings at the center of our lives, if we are to attain benefit from them. I finish by sharing a personal experience of learning the hard way why refuge in the teachings and the truth of our experience is essential on the Buddha's path to freedom from suffering.

Buddhism Dharma Spirituality Interconnectedness Four Noble Truths Mindfulness Compassion Personal Growth Psychological Wellbeing Reflection Buddhist Teachings Present Moment Awareness Heart Practice

Meet your Teacher

Silver Spring, MD, USA

Meet your Teacher

Silver Spring, MD, USA

Transcript

So. . . The talk today i was thinking you know, What would be helpful. As we begin the new year and the new year is a great time for us Excuse me. Great time for us to kind of reflect and take stock of where we are and particularly to think about our intentions, You know, What's important for us in the time ahead. And so I thought today a talk on. Taking refuge, And particularly today taking refuge in the Dharma, In the in the teachings. Know it's kind of has a broad range of meaning taking route refuge and the teachings is kind of very specific. Um, Aspect if you like of of refuge but it more broadly it's taking refuge in the truth taking refuge in life itself the way things are And what I want to really get at today is. . . Emphasize today is importance of of taking refuge in the importance of our commitment to our spiritual practice really at the centre of our lives, How important that is for us. So I want to share some reflections on that today. Begin just by saying that um refuge in the dharma is in buddhist teachings is one of the three buddhist refuges many of you be familiar with with with that the three refuges but i'll just briefly name them and describe them. First of all, In Buddhism, A refuge is understood to be, And this is much like it is in everyday. Kind of in our everyday understanding of refuge. It's really a place of safety or security or well-being that one can go to particularly in times of difficulty or danger. It's a. . . Something that we can you know rely on we have our our word obviously you know to be a refugee would be to find a place of refuge a place of safety away from war violence oppression etc all of the things that people you know are often escaping from and finding refuge and in the spiritual sense it has a similar connotation the sense of something where can we go in the midst of the turbulence in the midst of all of the challenges of the time we're living in. What is reliable? What is safe? What can we rely on? What can be a refuge, A genuine spiritual refuge for us? And so that's what this kind of taking refuge refers to, Speaks of. So the three refuges, The first. And each of these refuges can be looked at in both kind of more of an external way or more of an internal or inner way. So the first refuge is refuge in the Buddha. And that can refer to taking finding support finding safety if you like in in this this historical buddha this human being who awakened who you know struggled and sought to find the end of suffering and ultimately did awaken to the deepest freedom that's possible in this human life At least that's my understanding of his realization. And that we can be inspired by that, That we can see that as an example for us. We say, Oh yeah, This is the Buddha, And I can follow that path. On an inner level, A kind of more interior level, Refuge in the Buddha can be understood as taking refuge in our own potential our own capacity for awakening. You know, Taking refuge in the fact that we ourselves, Each one of us has the capacity to wake up and to actually do the work of waking up. That's kind of more the inner. Internal level of taking refuge in our potential to wake up. The second refuge, Which we are emphasising today, Refuge in the Dharma, Is You know, On one level, Let's. Taking refuge in the Buddha's teachings as a reliable path. To freedom. But also that we can actually embody these teachings. We can transform ourselves through these teachings. So that in that more internal way, We can take refuge in the teachings. And as I'll be talking about, It's more broader than just the Buddha's teachings. It's all of the teachings. That are that help us find freedom we can see as all of the wisdom teachings whatever the tradition And I'll talk more about that in a little bit. It's really taking refuge in the truth as well, The truth about taking refuge in life itself. So I'm going to talk more about, Obviously, About refuge in the Dharma. So I'll leave it there for now. Refuge in the Sangha is finding refuge in the community. It can be the community of practitioners. Committed to to the Buddha's teachings And on a more of an internal level, It's taking refuge in our. . . Interconnectedness with all beings and all of life. Seeing ourselves part of this web of life. The Buddha, You may have heard, He said, All of spiritual life is Sangha. All of spiritual life is community. And Dr. Martin Luther King recognized, He said, That we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Tied in a single garment of destiny. Tied in a single garment of destiny. He said, Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. He said this in his letter from. . . Birmingham Jail. Too. Pastors who were Not walking the talk, As it were, At the time, Back in the early 60s. So focusing today on the second of these refuges, Taking refuge in the Dharma. Two questions i want to ask first what do we mean What do we really mean by finding refuge in the Dharma? And the second, Why is it important? Why is it important or perhaps even essential to take refuge in the Dharma? Essential if we're going to realize freedom in this lifetime. For me, Taking refuge in the Dharma means too. Consciously recognize and internalize that the Dharma, That the teachings provide us with a pathway to freedom from suffering in this life. So it's Consciously recognizing this and really internalizing it in our lives. The Dharma. So we can, Again, We can say. . . The Buddha's teachings of freedom, And I'm going to focus mainly on the Buddha's teachings of freedom, Which we could call the Buddha Dharma, The Buddha Dharma. But the Dharma is broader than the Buddha Dharma. The Buddha Dharma is the Buddhist path. Freedom but it's not the only path to freedom And so, You know, When I think, You know, If I think of Rumi, His poem about welcoming the guests. You know, That for me, You know, That's Dharma. That's Dharma. That's kind of like that's a little nugget of a little jewel of the teachings. Welcome the guests, Even if they're a crowd of sorrows who sweep your house empty of its furniture. It's a kind of like, Oh, Yeah, These. What comes up for us can actually be welcomed as guests. And that's potentially freeing. So that's the Dharma. That's the Dharma. You know, When Rilke, The poet Rilke talks about always trust in the difficult, Always trust in the difficult. Again, That's a nugget, A jewel of teachings, Because when it shifts things around, We typically think the difficult is, Oh, That's in my way. That blocks me from where I want to go. But when we look at the difficult as this is the place of waking up. You know similarly you know make the obstacle the path The obstacle is the path. We turn it around. And in that turning around, If we really internalize it, That is a teaching of Dharma. You know, Obviously the teachings say of Jesus, You know, Love your neighbor. Turn the other cheek. You know, These again, They invite a kind of radical, Radically different way of looking at ourselves, The world and others. It's saying, Oh. I don't have to go get a bigger stick to hit them with. I can, That's the way. And obviously. In terms of relating to others, But it's more the inner letting go that I think is being pointed to in that teaching. You think of Mary Oliver, You know, Her poem, The Journey, One day you finally knew what you had to do and began, Though the voices kept shouting their bad advice, Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles, Etc. You know, How that, You know, Is for me is kind of a teaching of the Dharma, You know, Of how we can go from. A place of You know, Tightness and contraction and listening to all the noise of the world and believing that's the only way things are to seeing, Oh, We can embark on something new. We can listen to those internal voices. Again, This is the Dharma. I think of Carl Jung talking about how What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate. Know and again that we think oh yeah if we don't bring something into the light into the light of awareness we just keep acting it out unconsciously And we keep suffering. Again, That's a Dharma teaching. So I'm thinking, You know, I'm talking about the Dharma as. Any teaching and life itself, You know, The way life can kind of teach us lessons every day of the week. When the eyes and ears are open, Even the. . . Leaves on the trees teach like pages of the scriptures I think Hafiz said that or somebody said that Hafiz, Or one of those wonderful Sufi kind of poets, And not all Sufis, But some of them are other traditions. But anyway, All of these are teachings of the Dharma. I'm going to focus in. . . You know, For obvious reasons, On the Buddha Dharma, You know, And how that can support us. But I'm really talking about all of these teachings and how. . . Refuge in the Dharma is. . . Recognizing that taking refuge, It provides us a pathway to freedom from suffering in this life. So refuge in the dharma means being intentional about pudding. The teachings. At the centre of our lives. We'll realise the benefits of the teachings only if we make them a priority. And this is kind of the core of what I'm wanting to get at. The way I frame it in my own mind is the Dharma will support us if we support the Dharma. Dharma will support. What I mean by that is that the benefits of the teachings will be available to us insofar as we give them centrality in our life. If we don't then we're not going to be able to. . . To benefit or not to the fullness of what the teachings offer. The teachings can't just be something we go to in times of trouble. You know, When things are difficult, Oh, Now I'm going to go to the teacher. What do the teachings have to offer me that can help me get out of this mess that I'm in? Particularly if. . . Know the way we're living our lives is disconnected from the teachings you know If we're if we're not putting the teachings at the centre of our lives. What we will by default be putting other refuges at the centre of our life. And typically these other refuges will be things that lead us to suffering, Like if we take refuge in drink or drugs. You know, Those are a form of refuge. And we're thinking, Oh, Yeah, If I only have a drink or if I only have a drug or if I. . . You know, It may be taking refuge in fame and how our reputation. Oh, How are people looking at me? Are they thinking? Good things about me you know or it might be money you know i've got oh i've got to have more money and then i'll really be safe and secure you know, Our possessions. Or we take refuge in our beliefs, You know, And our opinions about things. And that can be one of the. . . Most difficult refuges you know because we can get really attached to our beliefs and we hold on to them I say that – The teachings won't be available to us. If we don't make them central and the reason for that is that The strength of our delusions will outweigh the strength of our practice. You know, If we're not putting the teachings at the centre, Then. . . Our unconsciousness will be much stronger than our consciousness, Much stronger than our awareness. And in times of difficulty. You know, I think the teachings won't be available to us or won't be available to us in a deep way. And I'm going to talk in some personal ways of how I came to understand this really strongly. In recent years. It said that. . . In Tibetan Buddhism that there are 84, 000 Dharma doors. Obviously, It doesn't mean that literally 84, 000, It's actually 82, 720. But 84, 000, That's obviously a symbolic number. But Dharma doors really mean teachings that help us to wake up. There were many, Many, Many different teachings. I highlighted some of the kind of non-Buddhist ones, And I could pick a hundred others as well, As probably you could too. But one teaching is at the very centre of all of the Buddha's teachings. And that's the Buddha's teaching on suffering and the end of suffering, The four noble truths. Two, The Buddha talked a lot about suffering and the end of suffering. He said, I teach one thing and one thing alone, Suffering in its end. He also, And there's a very well-known quote, He said, About the Four Noble Truths, He said, Friends, Just as the footprint of any living being, That walks can be placed within an elephant's footprint. So too all wholesome states or teachings can be included in the Four Noble Truths. So everything comes back to this teaching about suffering and the end of suffering. He also said, One who understands clinging and non-clinging. That's the second and the third noble truth. One who understands clinging and non-clinging understands all the Dharma. So essentially, If we really understand the teaching of the Four Noble Truths about suffering and how we find an end to suffering, That is all the teaching we need. I don't mean that the rest is irrelevant, But that is enough. To move us from suffering. To freedom. Really understanding and knowing the Four Noble Truths. Means not just understanding conceptually or cognitively, That we can find freedom by letting go of clinging. We have to know. Get to know these teachings. Very deeply. That when we cling to anything we suffer. It has to become really an embodied knowing, Knowing through our direct experience, Knowing in our bones, Really. Teachings have to go deep. So at the heart of these four noble truths is the recognition that when we cling to anything, We suffer, Whether it's clinging to our possessions, To our views and opinions, Clinging to the people that we hate. You know, That's another form of clinging. Whatever we cling to, Whatever we resist and push away, Whatever we identify with, We suffer, Or whenever we identify with anything, We suffer. There's suffering. This is this is the heart of the teachings. And when we let go of clinging. We experience freedom. You let go of, You know, It's very simple. I think it's simple to understand that I think we all know that when we get caught up, You know, Addiction is a very clear kind of extreme example of it, Of where we get into that, You know, Got to have. But there's many, Many other expressions of clinging. Including the pushing away things. I think we can get this and also get how when we when we kind of. Open our fists as it were, We kind of let go. Then we experience freedom. Some of you may be familiar with the story, And I think that this is true, That I think in India and maybe other Asian countries, They have this way of capturing monkeys. You know, Who are doing damage and stuff. And the way they do this is there's one of these big seeds. That has a hole in it. And they make the whole. Big enough, Just the right size for the monkey to put its hand in. And they put some juicy fruit in there. And so that when that monkey puts its hand in the hole and grasps the the juicy fruit. It tries to pull its fist out with the juicy fruit and it can't it won't let go but it won't let go of the juicy fruit doesn't want to let go of it so it gets captured And I love that image. And it actually, I believe it is, I think. I've never seen it personally, But I've heard that this is actually the way they can capture. Monkeys and we're not really that very different maybe different by a couple of million years but you know not very not very different you know when we hold on You know, In this way we suffer. And yet when we can open our hands, Enter. And to just withdraw ourselves from that thing that we're clinging to. Then um then we'll when we experience freedom And this is the heart of the teaching. It's kind of easy to say in a way. I mean, It's fairly simple and not too hard to understand. But when we have to do it in our own lives. When we have to let go of, Find a way of letting go of our anger or hatred towards a politician who we think is doing harmful things, You know, For some that may be an issue, You know, That it may not be quite so easy to do, Easy to understand. But not necessarily easy to do. So our task with each of these, And I'm highlighting. The Buddha's teachings of the Dharma and I'm highlighting within that know for simple you know because it's the central teaching and because you know to give an example the four noble i'm highlighting the four noble truths There are many other teachings that help us to wake up. I'll just give you a couple of other examples of major teachings that help us to find freedom out of the 84, 000. You know, One is, You know, Whenever we're suffering, And whatever we're experiencing at any time, That moment, That experience can be the doorway. To freedom from suffering. So, You know, One way of putting it is the present moment, Whatever we're experiencing, That can be the gateway, The doorway, The portal to freedom from suffering. We simply have to open fully to our experience. So what we were doing in the meditation of just allowing whatever is present to be here, To come and go, To see its impermanence, To let go of clinging to anything as I am mine. Letting go of the mental stories and narratives, And staying directly with our experience. This is the doorway to freedom. You know, This is what the Buddha. . . Spoke of as mindfulness as the direct path to liberation mindfulness as the direct path to liberation so that the present moment awareness in the present moment of our experience is is the doorway, Is the doorway to freedom. Eckhart Tolle put it this way, He said, You can always cope with the present moment. But you cannot cope. With something that is only a mind projection. You cannot cope with the future. So emphasizing that the present moment. So this is the teaching of the teachings of mindfulness. The four foundations of mindfulness. Is another central teaching that know is is a gateway to freedom we can include or to the heart practices, The practices of, You know, What are called the Brahma Viharas or the divine abodes. Loving kindness, Compassion. Appreciative joy and equanimity. These teachings are crucial. Because it's often said it's like. . . A bird needs two wings to fly, Right? Similarly, In our practice. We need, The teachings need two wings. They need the wing of wisdom and the wing of compassion. The Four Noble Truths is fundamentally the wisdom teachings, The insight, The understanding teachings. The heart practices are. . . The heart teachings, The compassion teachings, The other wing of the bird. So these are just some of the central teachings of the Buddha. Which we call the Buddha Dharma. Help us find freedom in our lives. Maybe it's a little freedom. Excuse me. Maybe it's a lot of freedom, Maybe it's complete freedom, As Arjun Char said. Let go a little, Experience a little peace, A little freedom. Let go a lot, You'll experience a lot of peace. Let go completely and you'll experience complete peace. Your struggle. With the world will be at an end. So what I want to do in the final part of the talk today is having laid out something of the kind of. This is what. . . Taking refuge in the Dharma. Means. Some thoughts on why why it's important to take. Take refuge in the Dharma, Take refuge in the teachings. I want to talk about a personal experience that really taught me the importance of taking refuge. In the Dharma. And it really taught me through failure through not being able to find refuge And so the. Insights that I gained through this experience came with a lot of difficulty. I had an experience a few years ago, Some of you may kind of remember some this time, Where I found myself overwhelmed by. . . The amount of work that I had taken on. And not knowing how. I would be able to do it all. I felt I just didn't have the resources to be able to respond to all the demands that I felt were coming my way. And what came up for me was a great deal of fear and anxiety. You know, What would you say if I were to say, Well, How do you work with with fear and anxiety when they come up? Or how do you work with anything? You know, Anger or grief or whatever. What do you do? You know, I think probably most of you said well The teachings tell us we. We should turn towards that experience and allow ourselves to really feel it. And be present with everything I've been saying in the last 25 minutes or so. That's the way of turning to our experience. And that's ultimately the way of finding freedom in the midst of whatever we're experiencing. But did I do that? No I had a better way. My response to this sense of kind of overwhelm and burnout and you know whatever what name i want to give it was to resist This wasn't something I wanted to have happen. And I tried to hold on for dear life and kept on pushing through. It was as though. . . You know, I thought if I keep on pushing. I keep on pushing forward. I'd somehow come to the other end of this unpleasantness and everything would be OK. Do you think that happened? But the more I pushed. . . The more tight, The more contracted. The more anxious and fearful I became. I remember very clearly having images in my mind of driving. On a free way. And seeing an exit sign that said exit here exit here get off Stop. Just stop. Okay. But did I stop? No, I didn't stop. I kept on pushing. And I kept on pushing, Literally until, In the end, I couldn't push anymore. And I just, You know, It's basically my body said no and I had to give up. This wasn't the kind of you know giving up that you might talk about as you see as kind of spiritual surrender. You know, Where we really do let go and we say, God or whoever it might be, You know, You're in charge. I'm letting go of this. It wasn't that kind of letting go. It was it was a sense of failure. And it came with a lot of. Shame. Yeah, Definitely a sense of failure. And, You know, I for a while I was in a very dark place, You know, Kind of a lot of feeling of depression. And one of the hardest parts about this experience was that I couldn't access the teachings. I knew them in my head. But I couldn't internalize them and I couldn't really practice them. I couldn't access the practice of meditation. I could kind of go through the. . . The what do you call it goes through the the words, Lost my word, You know, Go through the. . . As though I were doing it, But it wouldn't be real. Go through the motions, You know. But it wasn't really, I couldn't really meditate in a genuine way, Even though I'd been practicing. Almost pretty much daily for 30 years. I couldn't access the teachings. So it was a very, Very painful place to be. It wasn't that I'd given up on the teachings, But it was just that it was like. I was over here. On this land here and on the other side of the teachings with all that they had to offer. But there was a raging river in between that I couldn't cross. You know, That's just, You know, Give it an image. I could see how helpful, I could understand and had experienced in the past how helpful the teachings were and could be, But they weren't available to me at that time. You know, Over time, I came to see how my resistance to stopping, You know, That keep on pushing was a false refuge that I'd kind of. I'd taken refuge in thinking that I could push through. I'm reminded of, When I was thinking of this last night, I'm reminded of a quote from Beautiful quote from Anais Nin that you might be familiar with. She says, And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. That's the kind of positive end of it, Is when we realize that it's harder, It's more painful to stay in the tight place. Than to blossom. But where I was at this time was I didn't recognise that. I thought the place. . . Of refuge, A place to hold on to, Was that tight place. This was kind of the fearful place I was in that I would just hold on and I could just push through, Push through. You know, Whatever things earlier in my life had conditioned me to do that. You know, My mother was an example with nine kids, You know, Bringing, You know, Of that kind of determination. And it has a good side. Obviously, You keep going and you survive. But it also has a shadow side. And this I was stuck in the shadow of this. I was not, You know, On that quote, You know, From Anais Nin, The bud risking to blossom, You know, Risking blossom. Ultimately I found my way. Know to back to both you know psychological psychological well-being and and and to the dharma and to be able to access the dharma obviously you know i found my way back to that And I learned a great deal through the suffering. And one of the most important things I learned was that my suffering was avoidable. If I had truly taken refuge in the Dharma, In the teachings, In what life was telling me, And what all those signals that were coming to me of like, Stop, Get off, Get off. And yet I pushed and pushed. You know, I think a lot of the time we learn through suffering. Perhaps most of the time, Our learning, Our insight comes through suffering. But when we take refuge in the Dharma, We have the potential to avoid the suffering. The more I retrospectively, If I had invested more deeply. In the Dharma, In the teachings. And not allowed the conditions to arise to kind of become disconnected from them. Then I could have. Avoided that situation from arising now i in the larger sense i feel completely understanding i'm not beating myself up about it and i understand that that's what i had to learn and that's the way i had to go through it If I step up to a META level, A meta level, I can see that. You know, The more we invest in the centrality of the teachings. The more we're able to avoid, Well, The Buddha talked about preventing the arising of unwholesome states and to be able to really take the signals. And when you see the billboard that says, Get off here. You know, Please get off, Then to get off rather than, You know. Driving ahead until you hit the wall in the end. So I shared the story. In the hope that it will be helpful. You know, A helpful pointer to the importance of really taking refuge in the Dharma, Taking, Really investing our time, Our energy, Our heart and spirit. The Dharma in the teachings, The teachings of the Buddha, The teachings of the other wisdom teachings that help us find freedom from suffering. You know, The alternative is that we'll find force, We'll seek for and find force refuges, And we'll continue on that cycle of suffering. So where I want to finish. . . Is with maybe just a couple of minutes of reflection. For us all here on taking refuge in the Dharma. And if you want to, You can close your eyes for this and just let your attention come inwards. And I want to just ask the question, What would it mean for you to take refuge in the Dharma? To really centrality importance in your life We're living in, We all know we're living in very difficult and challenging times and we We need the refuge of the wisdom teachings and compassion teachings, The teachings of those who've walked the path before us and can point out the potholes and the exits. And remind us to pay attention. It's easy to. . . Recognize that on a cognitive level. But what I'm wanting to get at is what would it mean to let that understanding go really deep? For you. You know, What would taking. . . Refuge in the dharma mean to you would it mean changing anything would it mean doing anything different in your practice and i'm not asking this in any way from the standpoint of shoulds you know i should do this i should it's not should, You know, Not about shoulds at all but about What will serve me? What will serve me? To you know, To let go of holding on, To let go of clinging and to find greater freedom in in my life particularly in these very difficult times that we're living in where there's so much so much to trigger us so much to get us caught up in various kinds of dukkha So maybe just take a quiet minute to just sit with that. So thank you. Thank you for your. . . Kind attention and I hope that helpful, Maybe some food for thought, Grist for the mill.