By Laura Bennett

Good morning, everyone.

As many of you know, our retreat is coming up soon, bringing with it one of my favorite traditions: the tisarana ceremony. For those of you who’ve been to retreat before or have taken refuge, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, or who are still deciding if you want to participate in tisarana this year, I want to spend some time this morning talking about what tisarana actually is — where it comes from, what it means in our particular community, and what it has meant to me. And then, I’d love to open it up and hear from some of you who’ve already taken refuge, about what that experience was like for you. 

What Is Tisarana?

Tisarana is a Pali word. It means something like “triple gem” or “triple treasure” — some people translate it as “three jewels.”  It’s a ceremony where a person formally says, out loud, in front of their community: I am walking this path. I am taking refuge in the three treasures of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. 

It is an ancient ceremony, and people have been doing some version of it for well over two thousand years.

I do want to be clear and say that you don’t need to participate in tisarana to be a Buddhist. You don’t even need to call yourself a Buddhist. If that word doesn’t sit right with you for any reason, because of where you came from, because of what religion has meant in your life before, because it just feels like a label that doesn’t fit, that’s completely fine. What actually unites us here isn’t a shared belief system or a shared label. It’s a shared willingness to walk in the direction the Buddha pointed us: toward healing, toward kindness, toward waking up a little more each day.

When Sensei Christopher would talk about tisarana, he would often remind us that the Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. I think that’s important to point out. Even the Buddha wasn’t Buddhist; there was no such thing. The word “Buddhism” came later, mostly from Western scholars trying to categorize something they didn’t fully understand yet. The Buddha was simply someone who woke up, and who spent the rest of his life showing others how they might do the same. So when we say we’re “taking refuge,” we’re not signing up for a religion in the way that word gets used elsewhere. We’re simply saying: this resonates. This feels significant to me. 

Sensei Christopher often highlighted that that’s really the only qualification for tisarana–not certainty, or perfect understanding. Just resonance. If you are wondering whether you want to participate in Ti Sarana this year, ask yourself–Does this resonate with me? In order to answer that, it’s probably helpful to know what exactly Tisarana, or taking refuge in the three jewels actually means. 

The Three Jewels

As I said, Tisarana means triple treasure, or three jewels, and it’s these three jewels that we are taking refuge in—The Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

I think of these as three legs of a stool. You need all three, or the whole thing gets wobbly. They are interdependent. I do want to spend a minute on each one, because I think it’s worth understanding what we actually mean when we say we’re taking refuge in each of them.

Taking Refuge in the Buddha

When most of us hear “the Buddha,” we likely picture a depiction of the historical man named Siddhartha Gautama, the prince who sat under a tree and woke up. That’s true, that’s part of it. But “Buddha” also simply means “awakened one,” and there isn’t just one. So taking refuge in the Buddha isn’t only honoring a man who lived twenty five hundred years ago, it’s placing our trust in awakened mind itself, and the fact that this kind of clarity is possible for us, too.

This also means that refuge in the Buddha was never meant to be a rescue. He doesn’t reach down and lift our suffering out of our hands for us. He points us to the truth of how things are, and trusts us to walk there ourselves. As Robert Thurman, a longtime teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, put it: “when we take refuge in reality, that is what endures.” So, taking refuge in the Buddha does not mean taking refuge in a man. It means taking refuge in truth, in reality, because that’s the only thing sturdy enough to hold us. 

I like how Thanissaro Bikkhu puts it. He says: “To take refuge in the Buddha means, not taking refuge in him as a person, but taking refuge in the fact of his awakening: placing trust in the belief that he did awaken to the truth, that he did so by developing qualities that we too can develop, and that the truths to which he awoke provide the best perspective for the conduct of our life.”

Taking Refuge in the Dharma

The second jewel is the Dharma–the teachings themselves: the ethical guidelines, the meditation practices, the whole roadmap for living with less suffering and more clarity. Underneath it all is the simple claim that most of our suffering does not come from our circumstances. It comes from how tightly we grip them, it comes from wanting things to be other than they are, it comes from bracing against change.

Taking refuge in the Dharma means committing to loosen that grip, again and again, not just when it’s convenient. Noticing our habitual reactivity, and choosing, over and over, to come back to what’s actually true in this moment. Not perfectly, but consistently.

Pema Chödrön describes it simply — she writes that “taking refuge in the Dharma has to do with finding open space, not being covered in armour.” And I that’s the Dharma jewel in a sentence. It’s not a rulebook to master, but an ongoing invitation to keep taking the armor off. To keep returning to the truth, the miracle of what is. 

Taking Refuge in the Sangha

The third jewel, the Sangha, is the community that holds and lives out these teachings together. Historically, it meant monks and nuns, but over time, it grew to include lay communities like ours–people with jobs and bills and complicated lives; people practicing side by side instead of apart.

This expanded, lay sense of sangha, where it really is about regular people practicing side by side, pushing each others buttons, being mirrors for one another, revealing our shadows and our light, is especially central to the lineage that our own practice draws from: Jodo Shinshu, or Shin Buddhism. Shinran, the founder of Jodi Shinshu, taught that within the sangha there’s no real hierarchy. Everyone walking the path together is a fellow spiritual friend, a fellow traveler, sharing this unrepeatable life. 

That’s really the spirit of this community. We’re lay-led. We don’t have gurus or roshis, no one is on a pedestal with special access to awakening. Our teachers are teachers because we’re willing to keep being students–that’s the whole qualification. So when you take refuge here, you’re joining a room full of people doing their best from inside their own confusion, who’ve decided to do that together instead of alone. 

Thich Nhat Hanh put it simply: refuge doesn’t ask anything elaborate of us. His advice was to “not do anything, just be an ordinary person, and live your life in an authentic way.” It’s about showing up, honestly, as we are.

Refuge in Something Larger Than a Person

I want to share a passage from Dharma Breeze by Nobuo Haneda. In this passage, he reflects on something that Shinran once said. Shinran once said that taking refuge in Amida Buddha means, ultimately, taking refuge in all Buddhas. Haneda unpacks this beautifully. He writes:

“Amida Buddha is the all-encompassing spirit itself. When we go to see Amida Buddha in the Pure Land, we just meet the spirit of a perfect student. In his mind we find only innumerable Buddhas whom he is studying and worshipping. We do not find in him even one of his own ideas or thoughts… Thus Amida is a container of all Buddhas. He encourages us to discover innumerable Buddhas, visit them, and study under them just as he has done himself.”

I love this because it takes away any temptation to make taking refuge about worshiping some hero, or about finding the right person to save us. Even Amida, in this reading, isn’t a savior standing apart from us. He’s a mirror of pure studentship. He points us onward, not to himself, but toward deeper studentship, toward being a humble student of the way, and of life. And I think that’s exactly the spirit of what we do here. When we take refuge in the Buddha, we’re not looking for someone to carry us. We’re looking for a way to become the kind of student who keeps discovering more teachers, more teachings, more reasons to keep waking up. Everywhere and in everything, we hear and feel the Buddha, we learn from the Dharma. 

What Taking Refuge Meant for Me

As Christopher Sensei has said: “In going for refuge, we do not come out of the world per se as much as from our habituated way of thinking and being. It is coming out of our reactivity and our story-making.” [End quote]

That’s what I found myself facing the summer that I prepared for my own Tisarana. 

I took refuge at our retreat two years ago. It was about a month or two after I had open heart surgery.

Now, to be clear, you don’t need major surgery for this to matter to you. But that was my context, and I think what I went through in preparing for tisarana, in writing my spiritual biography beforehand, might be useful to hear, even if your path here looks nothing like mine.

That summer, as I sat with what was to come– the fact that my chest would be opened, that my heart would actually be stopped for a period of time, that machines would keep my body running while that happened–I realized I had a choice. I could let fear take over completely. Or I could surrender to what was true. I could entrust myself to something larger than my fears and my delusions. I could take refuge (really take refuge, not just as a concept but as a lived practice) in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

That experience put me face to face with how fragile life actually is. And strangely, it brought me fully into the present moment, because there was nothing else to do. There was no controlling the outcome. There was only what needed to be done, one step at a time. And underneath all of it was this understanding that there is no escaping the truth of our mortality, the truth of our impermanence–mine, yours, all of ours. That truth is exactly why I take refuge. Not to avoid it, but because facing impermanence honestly required something to hold onto that wasn’t going to collapse under the weight of my fear.

Every Sunday, we recite a line together as a sangha:

“With openness of heart, we entrust ourselves to the oneness of life.”

That line carries all of this for me. Every time I say it, I’m back in that summer again — when my heart was literally and figuratively cracked open, as I learned to trust life as it unfolds. That’s what taking refuge means to me. It’s not a one-time ceremony. It’s a way of being I keep returning to.

I wrote something during that season, and I want to share it with you:

I searched for answers 

now I feel there is 

nothing to be 

known or unknown, only 

presence to experience 

boundless love to embody.

In a search for answers, I 

continue to arrive 

here 

Now 

no-where to go.

Even as I may be led by 

the way of the buddha, it is light 

I follow, not a man 

it is the peace of boundless 

love I seek to embody, 

not a savior i seek 

to be carried by

I take refuge in the dharma, the buddha, and the sangha 

not to find unsolvable answers, not to seek certainty, 

but to ignite in belonging as we light 

the way of the buddha 

the way of oneness.

An Invitation

And for those of you who are considering tisarana this year, and maybe feeling a little unsure–I want to say that that’s completely normal. You don’t need certainty. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to notice whether this resonates. Whether something in you is already saying yes, even quietly.

With openness of heart, we entrust ourselves to the oneness of life. 

Namu Amida Butsu.