Refuge

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body and focus your attention there. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change the rhythm: Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Experiment to see what kind of breathing feels good right now and try to keep your mind right here. Every time you breathe in and out, remember to stay right here.

This is a quality called mindfulness. You set up something you want to do and keep remembering you want to do that. Other thoughts will want to come in, you’ll start thinking about other things, but you don’t want to travel with those thoughts. You want to stay right here and learn how to depend on yourself.

We took refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha just now, but you have to remember that the Buddha also said, *“Attā hi attano nātho”: *The self is its own mainstay. You have to learn how to depend on yourself.

What does that mean? It means you try to take the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, and you imbue yourself with them. The Buddha was a person of wisdom, a person of purity, a person of compassion, and you try to develop those qualities within you.

The Buddha said that if you want to take the Dhamma as your refuge, you must establish mindfulness. Mindfulness is not just being aware of what’s coming up. It means remembering that there are certain things you’ve got to do. As the Buddha pointed out, if you want to get past suffering, you have to learn to comprehend suffering, you have to abandon the cause, and you have to realize the cessation of suffering by developing the path.

So, there are things you’ve got to develop right now and things you’ve got to let go. You’ve got to keep in mind that the establishing of mindfulness is based on, as the Buddha said, right view and strong virtue. This is why we take the precepts every week: to remind you that virtue is your foundation. When you focus on the mind, you want the mind to be honest, you want the mind to be sincere, you want it to be harmless.

When the mind is in good shape like this, then it’s easier for it to watch what it’s doing. Otherwise, if you do things that you know are harmful to other people, then when the time comes to sit down and be quiet, that harm is going to appear to you and it’ll be hard to settle down. It’s either like an open wound, or else you deny it, which is like a big scab. Neither way will it be a good place to sit down.

So you try to observe the precepts, the five that were given just now, and you’ll find that you live a harmless life, a blameless life, and that becomes a good foundation for mindfulness.

As for right view, that’s basically the view that your life is going to be shaped by your actions, by your choices right now. So you want to be very careful about what you choose to do. If you don’t believe in that principle, then it’s hard to see any importance in mindfulness, hard to see any importance in the practice. If you feel that you don’t have any choices, or that your choices don’t matter, it’s hard to make the effort to really do something well. But if you believe, as the Buddha said, that you do have choices and your choices do matter, you’ll want to make the best choices possible. You’ll want to be careful about what you do. That’s how you develop a good refuge inside, how you can learn to depend on yourself inside.

So, it’s important, when you take refuge, that you understand what it means. You think of the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, and you ask yourself, “To what extent have I developed them within me?” If there’s more work that needs to be done, well, do it. Take satisfaction in what you have been able to do, but don’t just rest there. As the Buddha said, you have to appreciate the goodness you’ve done, but at the same time realize there’s more to be done, and keep on training. In that way, you can depend on yourself for a long time to come.