Dharma Talk: The Gift of Refuge

Let's stop all the bottom chat. Namaste, boo. Welcome. Good to see you all. Are you too close? We all started quite close. No, it's good. I just— it's good for my neck, so I have to kind of look around to see everybody. So as well as being a talk as part of today's celebrations, this talk is also part of a series running through the year where we're taking bits of the liturgy and speaking about them. So Satya did a talk about the precepts recently. This is about refuge. Then we've got talks about the bodhisattva vow and about the three virtues. They've got a talk each. 'No blame, be kind, love everything.' So there's little flyers with those dates on in the hallway. We're not doing them in the order that they appear in the liturgy because we had the idea after we'd already started doing the talks. And in the run-up to this one, I found that I was quite nervous, more nervous than usual. And I, I didn't clock that for quite a while. I was just sort of in it. And what it felt like was really wanting to make sure I was prepared. So the sort of content was living in my head, and, or maybe I could add this in and say this, and what about this, and I must look that thing up, and that kind of but it was with me a lot of the time in, in a way that was leaving me a little bit jangled. And then I had some time open up, um, this week, so I was just sitting and doing some Kwan Yin chanting, and I noticed Oh, there's this nervous quality in me. I wonder what that's about. I'm just sitting here now. Maybe I can kind of be curious about it and see what's going on. And I had a sense of myself sitting in the present moment, but I, I could feel in my neck and back and shoulders. There was a lot of tension. I'd got a slight tension headache. There was really a lot of sort of crunchiness. So that's where I started bringing my attention to. And I had this sense of like, oh, my body is working really hard to keep me upright. It's putting a lot of energy into keeping me upright. More than is necessary. So I wonder what is— if there's something pushing me down, if I'm having to lift up against something because there's some other part of me that feels weighed down and really just wants to sort of collapse, and then everything else is like, no, we can't let that happen. You need to be like this, and suddenly there's all this crunchiness. And as soon as I asked that question, I had this vision of a sort of cloud above my head settling on me and weighing on me that I was pushing up against. So the next question is, well, what's in the cloud? And what It was, uh, it was a lot of stuff around Buddhist lineage, around legitimacy, around whether I was allowed to teach or not, around how other people would view me, the Buddhist world. And some of the context for this, right, is that we left the Buddhist order that we used to be a part of, and I'm estranged from that teacher. And in the past, that gave me gives me a sense of legitimacy, is traditionally the way that Buddhists work. The Buddha told his disciples they were entitled to teach. They told their disciples, so on and so on and so on, all the way to the present day. That's the fantasy, right? And different schools have their lists to show from this person in the present, these are all the individuals going right back. To the Buddha. Historians have looked at some of those lists and said, well, this person died years before this person was born, so that, like, we know those lists aren't 100% accurate, right? But I was sitting with a lot of that, oh, people are going to say that I shouldn't be teaching. I think because we're stepping into doing more teaching with this series and the online stuff. And I do know other ordained Buddhists, including some quite senior ones. I was talking to a Zen master this week who's been ordained for 45 years, you know, and she's always been really supportive. And years ago, many, many years ago, I was involved in a Tibetan Buddhist group. And I did a— I took refuge. I was never really that into Tibetan Buddhism, but it was the only group that I could get to. I didn't drive back in those days. I took refuge with them. I received an empowerment, um, to practice the Medicine Buddha practice. And as part of that empowerment ceremony, you take the bodhisattva— you formally take the bodhisattva vows. A little bit like we did with the refuges this morning. And in that tradition, as part of taking refuge and the bodhisattva vows, you also take refuge in the human, in the human teacher. The guru is very strong in Tibetan Buddhism. And I was told, like, if you leave this tradition, if you break that vow that you've taken to stay loyal to this guru, that's a few lifetimes, many lifetimes in hell to kind of work off that bad karma for breaking those vows. So all of that stuff was in this cloud. I was like, oh, that's just— no wonder it feels quite heavy. But I've been doing this kuan yin chanting all along. And I had this sense of Kuan Yin being much, much bigger than me and much, much bigger than the cloud. Not just taller, but like the, the kind of vastness of the space around me, around the cloud, how that was completely illuminated by the light of Kuan Yin, by the light of Amida Buddha.. And as I tuned into that sensation, very quickly the tension started to ease from my neck and my shoulders. The kind of bubbling anxiety in the background began to recede. And I was curious that, well, why, why is this weighing hear, like, something in me still wants to impress all of these people, the traditional Buddhists, the Buddhist police maybe, who are keeping an eye on it. And something in me said, yes, because you want someone to see that you're doing a good job. I was like, oh, well, it is important to do a good job. Like, that's a reasonable motivation. It's important to respect you and the space and the tradition. But why, why is there something underneath that motivation? Oh yes, if we do a good job, then we'll be loved. I was like, oh, okay. But look, this love is already here. You don't need to do anything to receive it. And, and then the final bits of tension eased away. And I felt really relaxed and I thought, oh, I don't need to think about this talk anymore. Well, probably I do need to think about it a little bit because I hadn't decided what I was going to say. I was like, oh, this is a kind of new— this, the depth of being relaxed and, and of really feeling like it's okay was really profound and new in the context of leading up to a retreat day or leading up to doing a talk or a presentation. Normally there's a bit of my mind going, oh, what if this happens? And what do I need to adjust this? And, and today I was like, oh, I'm just feeling relaxed. What could possibly go wrong? But you know, I don't need to worry about everything. In order for things to go well. That was a very powerful experience of taking refuge. That's a way of describing what happened to me. Refuge isn't just something that happens when we say those words in the practice session, or when we go in front of the Buddha like many of you did this morning and said them in the ceremony. Is something that happens over and over again in our practice. It is the main practice of Pure Land Buddhists, falling out of refuge as foolish beings and into some state of fear or anxiety or greed or ill will, which are just versions of fear and anxiety, and then remembering, oh, there is something else here as well. The Buddha is also present. Ah, something relaxes. What happens throughout many lifetimes? Recently I've been reading a book called The Sound That Perceives the Whole Universe by Uchiyama Roshi. Uchiyama Roshi was a Zen teacher in the 20th century. He died a few years ago. This book was written in the 1980s, but it only just got translated into English very recently, and it's about how he did Kwan Yin chanting his whole life. He was a disciple of Kodo Sawaki, who was known to be a very disciplined, even strict Zen teacher. He didn't have a temple. He did a lot of his practice in the park. When they would do sesshin, uh, they would sit in meditation for 24 hours, one day after another. They were allowed to sleep for 2 hours, but they had to sleep in the zazen position in the shrine room. So it was pretty hardcore Japanese Zen. Buddhism. Anuchiya Maroshi, one of these disciples, was a pretty modern thinker. He'd read a lot of Western philosophy. He was pretty anti-religion. He talked about being anti-religion quite a lot. He didn't like religion for the sake of it, didn't like psychological religion or mythological religion, and yet he wrote this book describing this kind of deep connection that he had with the Kwan Yin practice, which is a kind of devotional religious practice. So just after the Second World War, there wasn't much food around in Japan. Many of Kodo Sawaki's— Roshi's disciples had gone to other places. I think there were maybe 3 of them. Left with him, and it became clear that there wasn't the temple— could— well, they didn't have a temple, but the community couldn't sustain that many monks. So the three disciples decided to go and do, um, to make charcoal up in the mountains. That was something they could imagine doing to bring in a bit of money or to look after themselves. It was something that was needed. So they got on a train and a bus and then walked into the middle of nowhere, into these snow mountains. And they lived really in one room above a barn with no heating and just a few candles for light. And they said, when it snowed, we thought, ah, snow day, we don't have to go and work today. And the local said, it snows almost every day. You just have to go to work. And the forest they were going to was on the north side of the mountain, so there's no sunlight, it's windy, it's snowy. At some point, this is kind of narrow bridge across a river that they had to sort of walk across. They'd go with the hand tools to cut down the wood, and then they put them in the charcoal things which have to be watched overnight. Then they'd get the charcoal out. He said, often I burn myself whilst getting the charcoal out. Like they didn't have a good system for any of this stuff. And it was pretty miserable. Sort of almost becoming these, my senses almost becoming these like, uh, machines. Like this is what we do. We get up, we're cold, we're hungry. We go out, we do this, our fingers go numb. I nearly chopped the end of my finger off. Oh, get it burned, come back, fall in the stream, you know, day after day after day. Pretty miserable. I think it's, um, it's that the teacher from Hawaii whose book I was reading this morning. So when— who is it? Oh, um, oh God, you're asking. Anyway, I was reading a really lovely book by a Hawaiian Zen teacher, and she talks about this, like how important— the normal one. Yeah, Roshi Norman Wong. How it— how important, like, the quality of being human is, and how easily we fall into actually being mechanical robots, just kind of doing one thing after the other with no real aliveness in us. I, I don't know, but I— it— when I read that account, it feels like they'd fallen into some of that state. Not all the time, I'm sure. And then one morning, Uchiyama Roshi wakes up he's depressed, he's miserable. He realizes that he doesn't want to get out of bed and go and do this work anymore. And spontaneously he starts chanting the Kwan Yin mantra, or Kanseron in Japanese, Nama Kanseron. He had no connection to this practice, but his mom used to do it, and she had, she used to have like a Chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra printed out that she would which is the chapter that describes how Kuan Yin will save you if you fall into a fiery pit, or if you're set upon by bandits, you just call upon Kuan Yin and you'll be saved. His mom used to recite that prayer all the time. So there's something in the back of his mind. He finds himself, he says, and as I did this, I relaxed. Like, oh, He said, I didn't feel completely better, but I felt better. He describes a kind of force coming over him, yeah, that changed him. Later on, or in many of his teachings, he talks about the closed hand, the closed mind of thought, and the closed— and he does this with his hand— the closed hand of thought. And that, that zazen, which is mostly what he taught his whole life, gives people the experience of the hand opening, of the mind opening, of something relaxing, like the experience I had a few days ago. Ah, I'm okay. There's all of these thoughts that keep me jangled and tight. And actually there's also something, there's some other power or force. Ah, ease. Some ease appears. So he wrote and asked his mom, can you send me a copy of that prayer? And he did. And he just carried on doing that. Not just through the time when he was making charcoal with his friends, the two other disciples, but once he came back into life in the city. And he said for him, saying Nembutsu, when we say Namo Amida Butsu, Amitabha, when we say Namo Kanshin Bosatsu, we say in Chinese Namo Kanshin Bosatsu, The same for him, exactly the same as meditation, because they both somehow conjured this other force that brings relaxation and ease. Satya Robyn, whose book I've been reading about, uh, emptiness meditation, talks about the mind contracting. And I think sometimes we feel that in our whole bodies when we're not in a place of having taken refuge. There's a tight— like this. In our minds, but in different places in our bodies, we become smaller. We take refuge. Maybe the fingers just uncurl a little bit the first time, you know, but we keep dipping ourselves back into that, into that energy, that force, into the Buddha's light. Slowly it becomes easier and quicker that the hand completely opens, that the body opens. That the mind relaxes. And we're not relaxing like, um, you know, Jyotirkanit used to— I heard Jyotirkanit Rosh used to say, if you want to be really relaxed, just look at the dog lying in the sunlight. That's the most relaxed you could be. That's not what this experience is, because it's awake, alert, open, present and also relaxed. The Buddha used to make lots of lists, and, um, one that you'll see crop up again and again if you read the Pali Canon is, is And I guess in the Mahayana as well, is the list of 5 wrong views, ways of thinking or believing, um, that stop you becoming awakened, or we would say that stop you taking refuge. Or you could say views that we take refuge in that aren't wholesome. You could take refuge in this energy of the Buddha's loving kindness, or you can take energy in something like these 5 wrong views which produce this more contracted experience. And the first one is the idea that we have a fixed sense of self or soul, that somewhere we can discover something about ourselves that isn't changing at all. And this was a big deal in the time of the Buddha, where the, the kind of mainstream— really, a lot of the mainstream religious practice was about bringing the part of you that doesn't change back into into the body of God. The Buddha meditated very carefully and said, well, I can't spot anything in me that doesn't change. And even, even the kind of that force, that energy of loving kindness that we take refuge in, and that appears in us sometimes, if we really pay attention to it, Like, I trust that it's always present behind everything else. That it says in the, in the Statement of Faith that we all have a loving heart. That's true. But I also sense that, well, my loving heart feels different. It can feel joyful when there's something to celebrate. It can feel moved to sadness when there's something sorrowful around. It can become wiser over the years. Certainly our bodies change and our thought patterns change. As much as we might look back at ways we used to behave and say, 'I'm still doing that thing I used to do,' um, we won't be doing it in exactly the same way our whole lives. Well, maybe we will for this lifetime, but we'll get a bit of respite. The next lifetime. So that's one of the wrong views, and it connects to the second set of wrong views, which is, uh, eternalism, the idea that I will just go on forever, or nihilism, the idea that I will finish completely when I die. And neither of those things are true, right? Something of us remains, ripples out into the world, even if it's just the energy of our habit patterns going into other beings. We don't disappear completely, but neither do we carry on in the forms that we've got now. And this all can sort of feel a bit like, well, yeah, I guess that's true, but so what? In a way, what does it bring me paying attention to those things? What it brings me paying attention to those things is it brings me some of that quality of softness, and it, it brings me, uh, a sense of expansiveness because A lot of a fear-based response is not wanting anything to change, right? Even if things are awful, at least I know where I am with this awfulness. Or things are lovely and I really want this loveliness to stay. Or I want to believe there's something special about me, that, that Casper is a is a being that exists and is solid. And that, that something of the— that thinking that I might carry on forever brings some big-headedness, right? It can do. So noticing that my body changes, that my thoughts change, that they don't end, but that there is this fading away into a different fall. It brings a kind of softness around that. It undermines the big-headedness, and it creates connection with other beings, because that isn't just true for me, it's true for everybody. We're all in this flow of movement together. Causes and conditions come together to produce this particular being in this moment, and something sustains itself and changes a bit along the way and at some point it dissolves and separates. And that's true for all living beings, and it's true for mountains, and it's true for the whole Earth and the universe and the moon. What I haven't spoken much about is what we actually take refuge in. We know it's the Buddha. It's easy to get our heads around a Buddha who lived and died 2,500 years ago because we recognize, oh, I know what a human being is. Many of us here have a sense of what the kind of felt experience of an other power is, something that moves us and moves into us and brings that sense of relaxation and feels like, oh, this isn't to do with my small mind, it's something other than that that brings that sense of ease. But there's two different ways of thinking about what that is, and they show up particularly in Shin Buddhism, which is a the popular form of Pure Land Buddhism. I mean, it's not popular anymore, but it was the most popular form of Pure Land Buddhism. And the first is this idea that we talk about a lot, right? That there's me, the foolish being, and there's the other power, Amida Buddha, that I take refuge in. It's a relationship. Between two things. Me, the foolish being full of greed, ill will, delusion, full of that crunchiness, weighed down by all of that, the things in those cloud, or whatever it is on a different day-to-day basis. And then that Kuan Yin that was bigger than that, that was more spacious. And I left feeling afterwards that it was all around me, almost like I was sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool. I didn't need to hold myself up because I was being supported on all sides. Here I am, and here's everything that's supporting me. And that's a really important spiritual experience, the experience of being in relationship to another power. And There's also a view in some modern Shin thinkers that what Amida stands for is oneness. Satya and I studied at the Oneness Center of Bright Dawn Buddhism a few years ago. It's a popular idea that there's no separation between me and the rest of the universe, that in fact we are the same thing, and that all of that somehow is the Buddha. Kiyosai Amanshi said everything shines with a light of its own. And this is like that— there can still be some element of relationship in that, like, oh, I can become enlightened by an experience of reading a text. That's like a light shining. I can become enlightened by the frog hopping into the pond, like in the Basho poem, or seeing a sunset, or even, as a teacher said to me once, you know, the bodhisattva might show up as this chipped mug that I'm holding. You might suddenly feel like a real tenderness and care because it's chipped, and that's the Buddha appearing, right? Who knows what it's going to be? For Patakāra, it was noticing the drizzles of water going down into cracks in the earth, and each length of stream being a different length, and realizing like, oh, that's like human lives she was grieving. They're all different lengths. That's just like, it's how the world works. We can be enlightened by all sorts of experiences. There's still some element of duality there because it's still me being woken up by the world, right? But there's also the spiritual experience of me waking up and the whole world waking up, and all of us together some felt sense that what is— that the Buddha nature, not just the light of the Buddha being boundless, but the Buddha nature itself is boundlessness, moves in me and through me and is me, and is also the chairs and the trees and the tables and the sky and the moon. And this is a harder thing to speak about, right? Because we— the language of relationship is easy, and the language of oneness is hard. But there is something profound in that experience as well. And the more and more we can let go of wrong views the idea that we are permanent, or the idea that we disappear completely. And there's other wrong views, um, refusing to understand cause and effect, that one thing leads to another, and particularly that good impulses lead to good impulses in the future. Particularly believing that I know better than everyone else, like that is That's one of the wrong views that lots of people get stuck in, including myself. The more of those we can drop away, the more we come into this sense of everything being enlightened together. And maybe it doesn't last long, but what it brings us is that sense of ease and relaxation, like the hand that was clenched unclenching. And even if we've had that experience of oneness, what we tend to do is go back into the world of relationship, because that's kind of how human brains work. But it's easier to feel connected to people, to feel caring for people, knowing that we're all part of this dance. Of things coming together and falling apart and coming together again and falling apart. And that sometimes that coming together produces this individual or this individual, but ultimately there's just this kind of vast, awe-inspiring movement of everything together, which is the movement of love itself. In the world. So taking refuge can be remembering that as well. And the last wrong view that I want to touch on, because I think it's quite interesting, is sometimes translated as taking refuge in ritual and ceremony and the precepts. Like, oh, well, we do all those things. Sometimes it's described as taking refuge in the wrong sort of ritual, like doing animal sacrifice. I'm like, yeah, sure, I can get on board with that. And the wrong precepts, like Angulimala, who was told by his teacher that if he killed 108 people, he'd become enlightened. Like, that's not true. So in those cases, it's pretty easy to see, yeah, I shouldn't take refuge in those things. But it is often— I haven't examined the Sanskrit closely or the Pāli closely, but it is often just translated as ceremonies and precepts. I'm not sure there is— and there's something in that, right? Because those things can be supportive, but we shouldn't confuse them for the movement of our hearts. And minds. The reason we come into the shrine room is to let ourselves be moved, to become more open, to become more respectful. I sort of trust if you keep doing things over and over, like, there is some value to faking it till you make it, but at some point You have to know that you're here to take refuge in the Buddha of Infinite Light, not in, oh, this is the exact way that we're supposed to be doing this. And when I was first a monk and I'd come out of my drama degree fairly recently, I really wanted all the rituals to be perfect in the same way that I really wanted the shows I I'd produced at university to be perfect. And they weren't. They were pretty good, but they weren't perfect. But no, this is how your feet should go. This is the exact spot you should stand in. We all should move at the same time. And I tell you, there is something very beautiful about ritual when it's done that way, and it can move the spirit, but you shouldn't confuse that the discipline of that for taking refuge in the Buddha, which is a qualitatively different experience. Maybe just invite you to sit for a moment And notice any place in your body or mind where you can feel a kind of contraction or holding on or a fizziness. Places where you're not separate from your suffering, to echo the phrase from this morning. And then notice any place in or around your body where there is more sense of ease, spaciousness. Maybe just even the tiniest spot. And then maybe just allowing those sensations to notice each other, like, oh yeah, maybe there is some contraction, but there's also some other quality present. Some spaciousness, some ease, some groundedness as well. Namaste. Thank you very much. So in a moment we're going to move into a creative workshop that Rahavani is facilitating. Uh, if you're here in person, which will actually— anything that's around, you know, that the intention is the kind of being moved by what you've experienced this morning, that the creative act can somehow allow you to express that or process it or be with it in a different way. So Instead of asking questions or going into small groups, we're going to do something— we— you don't have to, but you'd be invited to do something artistic. Namaste.