The fundamental aim of Buddhism is Enlightenment for the sake of all beings. Traditionally Buddhists express this aspiration by ‘Going for Refuge’ to the Buddha, his Dharma (teaching) and the Sangha (spiritual community) – or the Three Jewels, as they are called.
The Refuges
The Buddha is seen as a ‘Refuge’ not because he will help us to escape life and its difficulties, but because his example and teaching represent practical and reliable responses to our sorrows in the face of life. They can help free us from attachment to ‘false refuges’ — those mundane things we look to for happiness and security, but which are ultimately incapable of providing them. The Buddha’s vision and example are fundamental.
In seeking to follow the Buddha’s path to Enlightenment, Buddhists try to understand all the teachings that express his wisdom, from the whole of the Buddhist tradition throughout time. These are collectively known as the Dharma, and are revered as the best guide to reality there is.
Of course, if we are to practise the Dharma we need the example of others who have done so before us. And we also need the guidance of personal teachers who have a more experienced perspective than our own, as well as the friendship of fellow practitioners. Taken together, all ‘Dharma farers’ of the past and present who offer these kinds of supports are known as the Sangha or spiritual community, and Buddhists also give central importance to this aspect.
So the defining act of a Buddhist life is to go for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha: it is the act by which one becomes a Buddhist, and every day around the world millions of Buddhists chant the Three Refuges, committing themselves to living out these ideals.
Although this is a common and vital teaching across the whole Buddhist tradition, it is not necessarily the case that all Buddhists actually do make the Three Jewels the central element in their lives and practice. Around the path to Enlightenment taught by the Buddha numerous religious forms, institutions, and cultural practices have developed over time. While these may well be means through which individuals can follow the Buddha’s path, Sangharakshita
suggests that sometimes the forms have become unhelpfully fixed as ends in themselves. His own take on this is that what matters more for Buddhists who want to make progress on the path is inner commitment.
So our community sees our task as Buddhists today being to discern what in the Buddhist tradition genuinely does support Going for Refuge, and then to put it into practice in our own lives. This is the task Sangharakshita has set himself in his own exploration of the Buddhist path. He believes Going for Refuge is what unifies Buddhists of all schools, that it is, in fact, what makes one a Buddhist at all.
Listen to the Refuges as chanted in the Triratna Buddhist Community in the West and in India.
Over the centuries, as the Buddha’s teaching reached each new country, it adapted to the prevailing culture – and often these countries had no contact with each other. As a result Asian Buddhism is extremely varied. Most of these traditions have now come to the West and present westerners with a bewildering variety of teachings, practices and forms.
Rather than adopting one specific form, Sangharakshita, founder of the Triratna Buddhist Community and Order, was keen to clarify what all Buddhist schools held in common: the essential principles and practices that run through the whole tradition. He suggests the key unifying factor is the historical Buddha and his experience of Enlightenment.
All Buddhist schools aim to teach a path to freedom from suffering that will help practitioners become more like the Buddha. The differences between them are basically a matter of means, not ends – however different they may look from the outside.
Sangharakshita’s approach is based on the perception that the diverse Buddhist tradition has an underlying unity.
This lies in the act of Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels, and in basic teachings of the Buddha, such as the Four Noble Truths, Conditioned Co-production, karma and so on. He believes people in the modern world are heirs to the whole of Buddhism. This is why the Triratna Buddhist Community does not restrict itself to one form of Buddhism but draws inspiration from the entire tradition. Sangharakshita’s attitude is not simply eclectic, however. He has a coherent approach to practice, which draws on particular techniques and teachings in a way that supports individual growth.
The Triratna Buddhist Order and Community is a worldwide movement of people who try to engage with the Buddha’s teachings in the conditions of the modern world. Neither monastic nor lay, we are simply Buddhists, at varying stages of commitment and understanding, adopting to the best of our ability in our lives the ethical standards of the Dharma.
Triratna is a Sanskrit term meaning ‘Three Jewels’: the Buddha, Dharma (his teachings) and Sangha (the community of all those who follow the teachings). The founder of the Triratna Buddhist Community and Order, Sangharakshita, considers the defining act of a Buddhist to be Going for Refuge to these Three Jewels. This is the central principle or orientation of the Triratna Buddhist Community and everything we do. At our Buddhist Centres we teach meditation, study the Buddha’s teaching together, engage with the Arts, support each other through life, and engage in our local communities. We also promote projects in which Buddhists can live and work together, and explore how to turn our work into a spiritual practice.
In the Buddha’s time there was no mass media to compete with — no internet or television. And the Buddha never had to be concerned about globalisation or global warming. So we believe it is vital to explore and establish how his teaching of human potential is still crucially important, how Buddhists can be socially engaged and contribute to a better world. In the last 48 years the Triratna Buddhist Community has changed a great deal. Sangharakshita has now handed on responsibility for our community’s spiritual vitality to his followers and we are entering a new phase of growth and consolidation: learning from and building upon our history, and developing into a broad-based, mature and experienced spiritual community playing a significant role in bringing Buddhism to the West.
Ours is an ecumenical movement, aligned to no one tradition or school, but drawing selectively on the whole stream of Buddhist inspiration. We now have Buddhist Centres running activities in 27 countries around the world. For details, see our ‘find us’ section.
When a session of practice of any the four ‘active’ aspects of the System of Meditation is over, it is important to ‘just sit’ for some time before finishing. Just Sitting is a space of non-action in which anything can emerge. Often the fruit of the previous practice only emerges when you stop ‘doing’ it. And Just Sitting is the non-doing space in which that may (or may not) happen. Just Sitting also allows assimilation of what has just been done, and provides the necessary counterpoise to activity and effort. Just Sitting is a matter of simply ‘being’ with whatever happens in awareness, without attaching to it or rejecting it.
Especially when done as a meditation in its own right, Just Sitting enables the qualities of the previous four stages of the System of Meditation to emerge.
The third stage, of Spiritual Death, is not of course the end of the process. After you have been integrated, made your mind positive and refined, and ‘died’ spiritually, the question arises – ‘What is there? What is left? What comes into being?’. What comes into being, in Sangharakshita’s system of meditation, is a new being, the new you – a new being based not on selfishness, but on wisdom and compassion. That new being is the Bodhisattva. So the meditator is reborn (not literally, of course, but metaphorically) as a Bodhisattva. He or she becomes something quite new, quite different. Instead of being driven by ego it is the Bodhicitta that comes through you: this is the stage of spiritual rebirth.
This term may be slightly off-putting, but it isn’t meant to suggest physical death. What ‘dies’ are all our illusions and delusions about who we are and how things really are. This is usually spoken of as ‘insight practice’ (vipassana). Insight can be cultivated through a huge range of meditation, mindfulness and awareness practices. All of those already mentioned have insight dimensions. Others widely practised in the Triratna Buddhist Community and Order include reflections on the three lakshanas (‘Characteristics’, or ‘Marks’) of conditioned existence.
The first, impermanence, involves contemplating the transitoriness of all composite things. Then comes contemplation of unsatisfactoriness: reflecting that seeking security or meaning for our life in such transitory things will inevitably lead to being let down and consequent suffering. Finally, reflection on insubstantiality involves contemplating that there is no ultimately existing, graspable ‘essence’ in anything. Contemplations such as this can lead to a loosening of the human tendency to grasp onto life, and opening up to the ultimate mystery of our true nature.
‘Positive’ emotions are essentially those that are not self-centred. They are more outgoing and orientated towards others, though their positivity naturally includes ourselves. The most fundamental of these positive emotions is metta — a Pali word which means unlimited loving-kindness or benevolence. The development of metta (Metta Bhavana) is generally the first practice taught to cultivate this aspect of the system of meditation.
Metta Bhavana is one of a traditional set of four practices that cultivates different aspects of positive emotion. When, with metta, we encounter pain and suffering, the well-wishing naturally becomes compassion. When we encounter happiness, it becomes sympathetic joy; we delight in someone else’s good fortune. When we contemplate all the ups and downs of human (and non-human) existence, the positive emotion becomes equanimity; this is a steady, empathic and unshakeable positivity, which embodies deep insight into the human condition.
Achievement of a reasonable degree of integration and positive emotion (samatha) is the basis for the next two aspects of the system, involving the cultivation and realisation of insight.
