So today I would like to start a short series of talks around the idea of taking refuge.
And in this Buddhist tradition there are three refuges.
One is that the first is the refuge in the Buddha or the awakened one.
The Dharma or the truth of the way things are.
And the Sangha,
Our community of practitioners.
And refuge has a lot to do with our heartfelt involvement with this practice.
That we're wholeheartedly involved.
The expression that's used for going for refuge in the Pali is Gacchami.
It's the Pali word Gacchami.
And it literally means to walk.
And what I like about the idea of this is that we bring our whole selves to it.
To walk we have to bring our whole selves to it and really through it.
We walk all of ourselves.
And as Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us we're walking each other home.
But this ancient word Gacchami also refers to understanding.
So to go for refuge also means to understand something important.
Another meaning is to have an intention,
An orientation for one's life.
For what you want to do with this life.
And for those of you who have made this a regular practice on some level this coming together every week represents a shared intention to follow this path of practice.
And we might all do it a little bit differently.
But we're all heading in the same direction.
And that direction is commonly referred to as the triple gem of the Buddha,
The Dharma and the Sangha.
So when the Buddha started wandering around India shortly after his enlightenment he encountered several men who recognized him to be kind of an extraordinary being.
And they asked him are you a god?
And he said no.
Are you a reincarnation of a god they asked.
No he replied.
Are you a wizard?
No.
Will are you a man?
No.
So what are you they asked.
And the Buddha simply replied I am awake.
I am awake.
That is what the Buddha means.
Awake.
So in taking refuge it doesn't mean that you become a Buddhist.
The Buddha wasn't a Buddhist.
He was awake.
He was a human being just like us who through the power of his own inner discipline,
His own intrinsic intelligence discovered the truths that he later taught.
And he never called them Buddhism.
That was kind of a 19th century of colonial creation,
The ism.
So what he shared for 45 years after this awakening is known as the Buddha Dharma,
The teachings of awakening,
Things that he realized and encouraged those who were interested to check out for themselves.
Whether or not these teachings that he realized were true for them.
So right from the beginning he's saying don't just go and join this club or adopt a belief or become a follower but through your own direct experience see for yourself if this is true.
And if you discover that what I'm saying is true and you discover it through your own experience what you may find is that something is born within you and it's not just a feeling that you have.
It brings some unshakable confidence in this practice.
So it's a very personal relationship these refuges what they mean to you and what they represent.
Sometimes like today it's refuge in the breath,
Refuge in being still.
If the mind is quite busy refuge in the feet.
Sometimes if the heart is really in a lot of pain and sorrow it's refuge in community.
As Sandy shared refuge in nature.
Whatever is in harmony for you that's where you can rest.
That's the shelter.
That's the refuge.
So the idea isn't that I'm going to give you refuge and you have to do something to like make a commitment.
People don't like to make commitments.
It's hard for them.
It's much more about giving voice and expression to something that actually resides within you.
So the first jewel is refuge in the Buddha.
And we wouldn't be here together as a group if it wasn't for this person some twenty five hundred years ago.
So it's important to recognize the impact of this person and how the Buddha's awakening shaped many cultures.
So who was he?
Who was the Buddha?
You know we we know very little about the Buddha.
And we can actually say that there are there's two Buddhas.
We can assume that there was a human being who walked on the earth who had his own challenges.
The records talk about him having a bad back and getting sick and having food poisoning.
And it's because of his challenges that motivated him to go on this quest.
The other Buddha is the Buddha of the tradition where he becomes more of a mythical person.
He represents ideals that are illustrated in stories and in art.
We had no idea what he looked like but we have all seen images of the Buddha that idealize this idealized version of perfection.
You know all of the statues he's upright and serene.
He's not hunched over with a bad back.
And the Buddha he died at 81.
But the idealized version of the Buddha they don't show him as an old person.
They show him radiant and young looking like he just had a day at the spa.
So very idealized.
So we have these two sides of the Buddha.
The Buddha who is the person and the Buddha who was this tradition.
The tradition of stories and myths and both have value.
I find a lot of value in the Buddha as a human being not any different than any of us.
So whatever he was able to attain should be available to us as well.
And when he talked about himself he didn't call himself the Buddha.
He didn't call himself Gotama which was his family name.
And he didn't call himself Siddhartha because no one called him Siddhartha until about 500 years after he lived.
That's part of the storytelling tradition.
He called himself Tathagata.
And the best interpretation of what this word means it means the one the person the one who has gone thus.
The one who has gone thus.
So what does that mean?
It's kind of like I am what you see.
There's no need to define what I am.
No need to say that this is who I am.
I can just stand here upright tall free without apologizing for myself or defending myself or asserting myself.
I'm like this.
That's how he wanted to be known.
I'm like this.
Not really in human terms right.
So the Buddha means awake and in taking refuge in this capacity to realize this Buddha within this awakening within.
You know we have all of us have this capacity to experience the fruits of being awake.
The fruits of presence of love of compassion of balance and joy.
The capacity to move what we talked about a little bit last week the you know the eight worldly winds to move with praise and to move with blame with gain and with loss with pleasure and with pain with fame and with shame with contentment and discontentment with sadness and gladness certain ways of being serene and balanced with these mind states that pull us.
So when we're taking refuge in the Buddha we're taking refuge in our own capacity.
The Buddha within what we're actually looking for is ourselves how we find ourselves how we find this Buddha is by stopping stop running around and looking for it and we settle back and see what happens when we awaken to what's actually going on here and we let everything be the cause to awaken to this Buddha within.
We let everything be the cause.
You know typically ordinarily we go for refuge in food or sleep or television or drugs or sex or alcohol anywhere but here right.
We go to the past in some way or we go to an imagined future where everything is going to be better.
Rarely do we stay right here but like the poet Rumi put it the cure for pain is in the pain.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
So I'll stop here today and may the Buddha of Buddhism this tradition points you to the Buddha that is in you.
Thank you.
