The Great (and empty) Buddha
Some reflections on Buddhist Refuge
If you follow Buddhism and try to study its many aspects, you very quickly come across the term ‘to take refuge.’ According to Buddhist scholars and teachers (and Wikipedia), the three elements of refuge are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Buddha being the historical Buddha — Gautama Buddha — who lived in India some 500 years before Christ. The Dharma being the teachings of the Buddha, and the Sangha being the community of like-minded people that come together to practice Buddhism.
To ‘take refuge’ in these ‘three jewels’ is a basic tenant of Buddhism — that is, you become a Buddhist by believing the practice as laid out by Gautama Buddha, by following what he taught, and by hanging out with like-minded people on the path.
Outside of these basics, are there more aspects to ‘taking refuge’ that are not so easily apparent? I would say yes, and layout three areas below that show how the term ‘refuge’ involves:
· Commitment
· Avoiding extreme views
· Displaying compassion
One could say that these things result from practicing the Dharma, and are therefore just a natural outcome of taking refuge. In other words, one cannot take refuge without commitment and without avoiding extreme views, and one must by design display compassion as a result.
That said, since most of us who study Buddhism do not always display the compassion that is supposed to arise from the practice, discussing these topics as aspects of taking refuge may be of some value.
A commitment as an aspect of refuge means, to me, that you are committed to being rigorous in your approach to self-analysis and not let yourself fall into the trap of believing you have a relative value compared to anyone else. In other words, believing you are superior (or inferior) to another is probably the most pervasive trap of any human being; both are equally related to the human ego.
In taking refuge there is a commitment to self-analysis — AKA introspection — in other words, one commits to self-analysis as the foundational framework for one’s inner work, and does not turn outward to try and prove how if only everyone else got on the same page and was as wonderful as themselves — or that if everyone revered the same Guru or God that they do — then the world would be a great place and we could all celebrate world peace. As we’ll find out in the next few paragraphs, it could be that such a viewpoint falls into extremist thinking and results only in conflict with one’s fellow humans.
Avoiding extreme views, therefore, becomes one of the most powerful aspects of Buddhist refuge in that by avoiding extreme views one also avoids the conflict that arises from them. A good example of extreme views is the opposing views of eternalism and nihilism.
What I’ll outline below puts the eternalist/nihilist extremes in a somewhat unique light, as most Buddhist scholars would say eternalism is a belief that something (usually God or an eternal soul) can last forever, while nihilism is a lack of belief in cause and effect (the law of karma) and/or that there is such thing as reincarnation.
I’ll take a somewhat different angle; for the sake of this brief essay, and perhaps entertainment, let’s frame the eternalist/nihilist argument by comparing the opposing views of a belief in God and an adherence to atheism.
For one who has taken refuge in the Buddha’s middle way, both of these views are equally conceptual. In other words, the belief in God and the belief that there is no God are both concepts. In reality, on analysis, both concepts are inherently ‘empty’ and do not hold up under analysis. By ‘empty’ in this case, it is meant that the actual existence or non-existence of God can not be proven; it is actually a logical impossibility to prove the existence or non-existence of God.
To quote from The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation:
“In general, all things mentally perceived are concepts.”
This, the text goes on to note, includes the notion of gods and demons, and of anything mentally perceived — even the ideas expounded in the text itself (and one could extrapolate, even the concept of taking refuge).
To put it another way: both the idea of ‘God’ and ‘No God’ are concepts that can not be definitively located as actually existing things, but only as ‘dependent arisings’ — the result of causes and conditions that lead to the concepts themselves. To put it simply— can you show either to anyone at dinner? You can’t, and no one has tried as far as I know, except perhaps Jerry Falwell Jr.
For one that believes in God (such as Mr. Falwell), there are certainly many, multiple ways to ‘prove’ that there is a God, but there is, in reality, no logical proof of God no matter how hard he tries to convince you. It is a matter of faith. Conversely, the atheist finds as many arguments to ‘prove’ the non-existence of God but the same holds true — there is no logical way to prove that God does not exist. Atheism, in this sense, is also a faith.
Believe it or not, anything, even a ‘thing’ such as a rock or chair, on analysis can also be said to be ‘empty’ on an absolute level — a ‘dependent arising’ — although these things certainly do appear to exist in a common-sense way. But I’ll stop there as I don’t want anyone I know who might read this article to get mad and throw a rock or a chair at me to prove it exists.
At any rate, the Buddhist, ultimately, admits defeat in their effort to determine whether there is a God or is not a God, throws up their hands, and takes a long walk in the park to listen to the birds' chirp as the wind blows through the trees. Or perhaps they sit in a chair in the park and do the same thing.
By admitting defeat, in a sense, the Buddhist admits that the logical mind is defeated in its attempt to find either that God is or is not, coming up empty-handed in the process. Put differently, the Buddhist will claim that the result of the question ‘is there or is there not a God’ is an impossibility to answer. What is possible to conclude is that both answers are equally conceptual, that both the atheist and believer in God adhere to concepts about the existence or non-existence of God.
Some might say the Buddhist actually believes that both the atheist and the believer in God are equally deluded. This is certainly a fair criticism and can certainly be true of some Buddhists.
That said, an honest Buddhist will also say that their own perspective or ‘middle way’ is also a concept. Therefore, the honest Buddhist will be the first to admit that they are also in the camp of the deluded and ask the atheist and believer in God over for a cup of coffee, tea or a cappuccino to admire the beautiful sunset rather than get mad at each other for believing in God, not believing in God, or believing in a middle way approach.
In short, while the atheist and the believer in God might ramp up war games in preparation to destroy the infidels, the Buddhist and/or tolerant people are looking beyond the duality of the question and noticing something quite different.
As a side note, because they are noticing something different and not ramping up an arms race between themselves and everyone else, the Buddhists tend to get run out of their own country (such as Tibet under Chinese rule) or bombed into oblivion (such as Laos during the Vietnam war).
But back to the point. What the Buddhist notices is that they are beginning to feel compassion for the atheist and believer, as well as for themselves, for being equally deluded in their attempts to justify concepts as actually existing things.
This brings us to the last item in our topic list, that is, displaying compassion. The interesting part of Buddhist practice for those that actually practice it is that such a life analysis results in a naturally arising compassion.
I was in Japan recently and will use an experience I had on that trip to illustrate my point. In Kamakura, Japan, there is a large bronze statue of the Buddha that tourists love to take photos of. One such photo is the main image of this blog post.
You can not only take a photo of the Great Buddha, but you can go inside of the Buddha statue itself (for a small donation) and notice that the inside of the Buddha is hollow.
This experience engendered in me a certain mental meandering. Outside of the Buddha statue, when taking one’s photo outside, the image of the Buddha seems quite real and the essence of the statue quite substantial. What that essence is, well, could be up for grabs, but let’s say you believe the literature surrounding the Kamakura garden — obviously written by experts much better at philosophy than myself — and assume that the Buddha is meditating in Nirvana.
Now, ‘meditating in Nirvana’ is, to me, immediately a code phrase for ‘forget it, kid, you’ll never understand what the Buddha is contemplating so you might as well give it up, buy the 20 yen ticket, go inside the Buddha statue and call it a day.’ So I did just that.
Inside the Buddha statue is empty space. It could be said, then, that the literature was actually wrong. The Buddha is not really contemplating Nirvana at all; rather the Buddha is hollow, empty, and that what the viewer reads into the image of Buddha says as much about the perceiver of the statue as the statue itself.
So, in going along with this mental meandering, I concluded that the Buddha statue is depicting the Buddha feeling infinite compassion for both himself and for everyone else for attempting to find Nirvana, but ultimately being unable to, as he found Nirvana itself to be an empty concept, and was left holding the meditative bag, as it were.
What he was left with was the ‘thatness’ or the ‘suchness’ of non-conceptuality, which, of course, itself can become a conceptual trap once that wisdom descends into thought, forcing one immediately back to the naturally arising compassion that is a state of being rather than a mental state of analysis — that is, the compassion of the heart that can take hold and actually dominate over the mental concepts engendered by the ‘superior’ mind.
To the Tibetans, such a naturally arising compassion is an important aspect of what is called bodhichitta — the awakened mind.
The heart, by the way, happens to be in the middle of the body — a sort of physical middle way. To the Tibetans, the heart actually is the mind.
My conclusion on that trip to Japan and contemplating the Kamakura Buddha was that the Buddha is sitting not in a state of Nirvana, but rather in a state of compassion. In fact, I was forced to conclude that Nirvana may indeed be that state of compassion.
While this may have disagreed with the literature, it did nonetheless at least put me on equal footing with the Buddha and buttress my insistence that (per my earlier comments) that no one is superior or inferior to another, and that the Buddha would be the first to admit it. In other words, I could also feel compassion, and therefore the Buddha and I were on equal footing in that sense.
Why is this important? It could be because by grasping to concepts as reality — as ‘really real’ — we engender numerous arguments among ourselves as to the validity of our viewpoint(s). Some create political parties and other organizations around certain viewpoints and defend them against others who have organized around opposing viewpoints.
Yet others provide goods and services to opposing viewpoints and make money from the transaction(s) (or advertising in the case of media) even while claiming they are merely being good capitalists and at least they are not being biased by providing both sides with what they want.
By grasping to a particular viewpoint as ‘really real’, we will more often than not devalue and de-humanize those who have opposing views.
How can refuge in a Buddhist perspective help this situation?
For me, a Buddhist perspective allows us to admit the folly of angry, finger-pointing human conflict and the reality that we are all equally in the same boat, or certainly on the same small planet in infinite space, spinning around a small star in a very large galaxy, which is itself but a small speck in a very large universe, which is, in turn, a small speck in an even larger multiverse.
Somewhere out there an Alien Buddhist (or whatever name that given civilization has assigned to their perspective) is meditating compassionately, and asking us to come along for the ride.
D.R. Thompson is an essayist, playwright, and producer. He is a 30-year+ meditator and has studied with Namkha Drimed Rinpoche, the Dala Lama, Chetsang Rinpoche, Dr. Baskaran Pillai, Dr. Frederick Lenz, and many others. His play, Tibet Does Not Exist, was lauded by noted Buddhist Robert A.F. Thurman; both Thurman and the Dalai Lama wrote forewords to the published play. As a filmmaker, he co-produced the documentary Tibet in Song (director Ngawang Choephel), that won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Photos courtesy of Adobe Stock Images and Diana Takata.
