The precepts can be understood in the context of illuminated heart-mind. We are guided not by “do’s” and “don't’s” but by the interconnected nature of being. This is not so much to be understood by the mind, but by the heart.
In awareness practice, we invite ourselves into more and more sensitivity to life--to the aliveness within us and our interrelatedness with all life around us. We cultivate this sensitivity by becoming very simple, slowing down and being willing to see things as they are at the level of simply being alive. From clear seeing, our acts need not be contrived to be "good" or "virtuous," because the acts that naturally flow from a mind of clear seeing will be compassionate and wise.
Every Law student studies the case in which Oliver Wendell Holmes advised that when we come to a railroad crossing, we should “stop, look and listen” in order to be safe. Great advice, not only for railroad crossings, but for all the crossings, large and small, in life. It is akin to the last words of the Buddha on his deathbed to his disciples: “Strive on with heedfulness.”
Sangha is the third jewel, the third refuge in the Buddha’s teachings. The traditional meaning of “Sangha,” is the community of practitioners who preserve and uphold the teachings of the Buddha: the enlightened Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, monks and nuns and householders who are practicing to realize the wisdom, ethics and meditation Path of Dhamma, moving toward truth.
Dhamma is the second jewel, the second of the three refuges in Buddhist practice. Taking refuge begins with asking the question, “where do I find safety?” When we take refuge in Dhamma, it means we seek and find safety in the truth of the way things actually are, warts and all.
In what do we take refuge when we take refuge in the Buddha? Like us, the Buddha was a human being, and our refuge in these qualities of Awakened Mind/Heart respects deeply our own potential—luminous, spotless, wise.
All Buddhist traditions invite taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. These Three Jewels provide a focus for commitment and reflection. In daily life, we are constantly looking for safety, refuge, in something—whether it is our ambition, career, house, money, neuroses or relationship.
We each have our measure of joy and of suffering, which the Buddha referred to as the Eight Worldly Winds: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. I suspect he named them meteorologically because, like these worldly winds, we are subject to the weather but cannot control it. Gentle breezes to gale force winds all unpredictably blow through our lives.
Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose teachings resound through time. He preached that each of us has the power to change the world and ourselves, to consider how one confronts social evil without creating further evil, division and enmity. This is not unlike Buddhadharma, both recognizing the universality of the human struggle for freedom.
What does it mean to say “not self?” I often hear the confusion of this penetrating teaching of the Buddha, ubiquitously described as the most transcendent and transformative aspect of his teaching.
