The first step toward living honestly with the human predicament is recognizing that all conscious beliefs, all scientific theories and religious revelations, all thoughts and concepts as well as the words that express them, are symbols. This blog post is a symbol. And as C.S. Peirce wrote, “Symbols are particularly remote from the Truth itself.” They are a means of directing attention, but since they do not contain the reality they direct attention to, they can also misdirect it (intentionally or not).
Beyond this recognition, there are many ways of living honestly. A symbol expressing one way was written by Shohaku Okumura in his book Living by Vow (2012). Its immediate context is a chapter about this triad of vows taken by Buddhist practitioners:
I take refuge in the Buddha, vowing with all sentient beings, acquiring the Great Way, awakening the unsurpassable mind.
I take refuge in the Dharma, vowing with all sentient beings, deeply entering the teaching, wisdom like the sea.
I take refuge in the Sangha, vowing with all sentient beings, bringing harmony to all, completely, without hindrance.
(Okumura explains: “Shakyamuni Buddha, born in India about twenty-five hundred years ago, is our original teacher. He awakened to the reality of our life. Both his teachings about this reality and the reality itself are called Dharma. Sangha is the community of people who study the Buddha’s teaching and follow his way of life.”)
Here is the text:
We must wake up to the reality of the impermanence of our lives. Because of impermanence, our death is inevitable. We must find the best and most peaceful way of life. Success, wealth, and fame are not significant in the final stage of our lives. The important point is to return to the matter of life and death, to wake up to the reality of this body and mind, and on that basis create a way of life. This, I think, is the meaning of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.
You don’t have to become a Buddhist and take refuge. Buddhism is only one of many paths, one way to wake to the reality of our life. When we become a Buddhist due to various causes and conditions, we follow the path of the Buddha. We seek to manifest the universal life force which we have been given. We live on this earth with everything we need as a gift from nature. It seems that our society doesn’t live in accordance with nature. It acts like a cancer, independently, in its own way. When a cancer becomes too strong, the body dies. When the body dies, the cancer also must die. Cancer is paradoxical. Modern civilization is similar. We have no direction. We just try to live in an ever more convenient way. We chase after prosperity. We live separate from nature and build an artificial world around us. As we get stronger and stronger, we destroy more of the environment. When nature dies, we die.
How can we go back to nature, to the vital life force? This is the essential koan for us, the question we have to work on. In a sense this whole universe is like a hospital. We are all sick. How can we recover from this human sickness? The Buddha’s teaching and the Buddhist Way can be one of the paths to recovery. The Buddha is the doctor who guides the healing process; dharma practice is the medicine he prescribes; the sangha, and all living beings in this universe, are nurses to aid our recovery. This is what the text [an old Buddhist scripture titled Daijō-gi-shō] means by “These three treasures are the final place to return.” They release us from the suffering of a life based on egocentricity and return us to the original, wholesome way of life.
—Shohaku Okumura, Living by Vow (pp. 76-77).
