Taking refuge

Taking refuge means turning to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha as what you genuinely rely on. It is the step by which someone enters the Buddhist path, and in Tibetan Buddhism it is also the first of the five uncommon preliminaries of the Ngöndro. The Tibetan word is kyabdro, literally "going towards protection". That second half of the word matters. There is movement in it: refuge is not something you possess, it is something you do, and go on doing.

Protection from what?

The word refuge makes many people think of running away, of a shelter where nothing can reach you. That is not the meaning. Nobody who takes refuge is spared anything. You still fall ill, you still lose the people you love, and life does not become any tidier.

What is at stake is how we respond to all that. Chasing after what feels good and pushing away what does not, year after year, without pause: that is what turns ordinary discomfort into real suffering. The Dharma protects against that, and against nothing else.

Meanwhile we are all taking refuge in something already, usually without calling it that. In work that is going well, in a relationship, in health, in money, in being right. There is nothing wrong with any of it, and it is not weakness. It is simply that none of these things can carry the weight we hang on them. They change, and then you are left holding nothing. Taking refuge in the Three Jewels is a sober recognition of this, and a decision to rely on something that does not shift with circumstance.

Refuge in the Ngöndro

In the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro, refuge is the first practice, and it goes together with prostrations. You visualise the refuge field: the lineage, the teachers, the buddhas and the texts, all of them present, and you bring your whole body to the floor. A hundred thousand times.

None of this is meant symbolically. Prostrations are the body's answer to what the mind has decided, and they do exactly what pride refuses to do: they put you lower than what you are turning towards. On cold mornings when you would rather not, you notice that this works.

What remains is direction. At the start of every practice session we take refuge again, in a few lines of text. Short, daily, and it sets the course afresh each time.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling we gather for this every Saturday in Hoofddorp. Anyone who wants to see first what the practice involves is welcome to join in; anyone who wishes to take refuge formally with a teacher can say so.