New York Insight Blog

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.