Dharma

Dharma is the Buddha's teaching and the practice of it. It is the path that leads out of suffering, and the reality that path points towards. The Sanskrit word comes from a root meaning "to hold" or "to bear". It holds you at exactly those moments when you have nothing left to hold on to yourself.

The word does more than one job in the texts. It can mean the teaching, the reality the teaching points at, or, in philosophical writing, a "phenomenon": one of the smallest units our experience is built from. When we use the word here, we usually mean the first. What the Buddha taught, passed from teacher to student ever since without the thread breaking. Tibetan translators chose chö, a word carrying the sense of correcting, of turning something around. Dharma is something that works on you.

The second of the Three Jewels

Taking refuge means taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The Buddha found the way, the Sangha walks it alongside you, and the Dharma is the way itself. Of the three, this is the jewel that depends most on you. An old comparison calls the Buddha a doctor and the Sangha the people who nurse you, which makes the Dharma the medicine. Medicine left in the cupboard cures nobody.

What the Dharma asks of you

Not much belief. A great deal of investigation. Teachings are taken in through three stages: you hear them, you turn them over until the words are no longer somebody else's, and then you practise. It is at that third stage that something shifts. As long as the Dharma stays knowledge, little changes. Once it becomes practice, the way you look at your own mind begins to change.

That also makes the word less solemn than it can sound. Dharma is not something you believe. It is something you do, with body, speech and mind, usually in small steps and over many years.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling this takes a concrete shape. We meet every Saturday for the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro, and on Guru Rinpoche Day and Dakini Day for tsok. Anyone who wants to get to know the Dharma is welcome to join us.