The Three Jewels

The Three Jewels are the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha: the three in which a Buddhist takes refuge. They answer a very practical question. When you notice that you are stuck, and that good intentions on their own are not getting you out, what do you turn towards? In Tibetan they are called könchok sum, the three rare and supreme ones. Rare, because it seldom happens that a buddha appears, seldom that the teaching survives unbroken, and seldom that anyone runs into it during their own lifetime.

Why jewels?

The image comes from a world in which a precious stone was the most valuable thing a person could own. A jewel could lift someone out of poverty, and it did not wear out, however long you carried it. Those two qualities are the whole comparison: here is something that can genuinely change your situation, and it does not lose its worth.

The Buddha comes first. Not as a god, and not as someone to worship, but as a human being who fully realised the nature of mind and in doing so showed that it can be done. The Dharma is what he taught, and more to the point, what you do with it. The Sangha are those walking the same road: in the widest sense every realised practitioner who has gone before, and in daily life the people sitting next to you on the cushion.

An old comparison lines them up as a guide, a road and travelling companions. Nobody can walk the road for you. But without someone who knows it, and without company along the way, most of us take a wrong turning somewhere.

Taking refuge

Taking refuge is the step by which someone formally becomes a Buddhist, and it consists of little more than an admission: this is what I am going to turn towards. What you give up is not your common sense. It is the hope that comfort, being right, or the next plan will carry you in the end.

In Vajrayana that outer refuge in the Three Jewels stays exactly as it is. Something inner is added to it: the lama, the yidam and the dakini, known as the three roots. The lama does not replace the Buddha. The lama is the form in which you meet the Buddha in this life, in flesh and blood, with a voice you can actually understand.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro begins here. The first of the five uncommon preliminaries is taking refuge, with prostrations, one hundred thousand times. We gather for it every Saturday in Hoofddorp.