Step Three: Part Two

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him

Happy New Year, dear readers. I trust that all is well with you or that you’re bringing care and creativity to working with any “bumps” in your path. It could be that both are the case; it’s probably the case that both are the case.

Last week I reflected on Step Three, which reads:

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

At the time, I had not intended more than one post on Step Three. I had planned to focus on the “turning of our will and our lives over” to a Power greater than ourselves; already had I said some things about my own understanding of a Higher Power. You can read that post here. When I sat down to write, however, I became fixed on the step’s first three words: Made a decision. I’m grateful for that—whether or not reading the reflection helped you, writing it helped me. I see things a little differently now; my boat is in a slightly different location in the ocean.

So today, I want to spend time with the middle—or we might say the heart of—Step Three. It’s not God. Rather, it’s the turning that happens within ourselves. The willingness to take those first steps in a different direction.

We made a decision to bring a different way of living into being. Specifically, we decided “to turn our will and our lives over” to something other than ourselves. From one perspective, this is another instance of getting out of our own way or, as Dogen Zenji writes, letting “myriad things come forth and illuminate the self.” From another perspective, Step Three marks taking refuge in something other than ourselves. But what does it mean to “take refuge” in something?

The words are sarana-gamana in Pali and Buddhists chant them in the Tisaraṇa (Three Refuges):

Buddham saranam gacchami
     I go to the Buddha for refuge.
Dhammam saranam gacchami
     I go to the Dhamma for refuge.
Sangham saranam gacchami
     I go to the Sangha for refuge.

A refuge is a shelter, a place of protection, or a sanctuary. It is a place of peace and safety. And the act of taking refuge is the act of returning to that place, that shelter. The Latin word refugere, from which we receive refuge, means “to flee or fly back.”

This last recalls a familiar scene from a young child’s first day of school. The parent or guardian approaches the threshold of the school’s entranceway with their child, only to stop there and encourage the child to walk the rest of the way—to the entrance, to meet their teachers and fellow classmates who gather out front—by themselves. It’s the human version of a young bird’s first flight from the nest into the wide-open sky. Whether some birds in their first departure suddenly change direction mid-flight and return to the nest I don’t know. Some children, however, do turn around, their eyes betray discomfort, and they “fly back” to the threshold. The bare or pant-covered leg clutched, eyes now closed tight. The child has taken refuge in their parent or guardian.

Kobun Chino Roshi, in a Dharma talk on the Three Refuges, opens with the following:

Continually alert, and sometimes nervous, you think, “Am I doing alright? Is it alright to go this way?” When you totally admit you are as you are, and totally trust in being, this is Triple Return to Three Treasures: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.

Sometimes—perhaps much of the time—our situation is not all that different from the young child on their first day of school. We too, having left the nest and flying about in the sky’s vast expanse, find ourselves wondering, “Am I doing all right? Am I doing this—my job, my relationship with my partner, my Zen practice—right? Is it OK for me to continue in this direction?” Or, if you’re me, you find yourself asking with urgency, “What am I doing here?!” Note the presence of an exclamation mark. The questions are not raised in a perfunctory way. There is grip to them. You are nervous or uncertain—or even afraid. Often I am.

Photo by Matt Walsh on Unsplash

In these moments, where can you flee? Where is that place of protection? What is your refuge? Kobun invites us to consider our refuge, not something outside of ourselves, but just ourselves. “When you totally admit you are as you are,” he says, that is taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Later, pointing in the same direction though with a different finger, Kobun stresses the importance of having “indestructible confidence in yourself as the Triple Treasure.” For “any single phenomenon, any single being, is a perfect realization of Triple Treasure.” Each one of us is “perfect awakening,” “the original face of truth,” and in “perfect harmony” with everything—and all of this always. It’s an intriguing interpretation of what it means to take refuge in the Three Treasures.

When reflecting on Step Two’s mention of a Higher Power, I wrote that I felt a tension between the way it’s traditionally understood and my understanding of it.

It is with the Treasure of Buddha that, if only on the surface, there seems an incongruity with Step Two. For the Step suggests that this Power, whatever it is, needs be something other than me, outside of me, different from me. Yet part of what it is that I take refuge in is part of me—that potent potentiality because of which “I am totally free, liberated,” as Taizan Maezumi Roshi would say.

And what has been offered above is even stronger: the whole of what I am taking refuge in is myself as a perfect realization of the Three Treasures. “Blasphemy!” I can hear some shout, and not without reason. For it was “my own best thinking” that earned me a seat in an A.A. meeting. It was trying to do things “my way” that landed me in a treatment center. I cannot be trusted to recover on my own; I need the care, guidance, and support of something else, I need to “turn my will and my life over,” I need to surrender to a Higher Power. I’m being a little dramatic here—but only a little.

Sometimes I distinguish between the small, constructed self and the Big Self; between the ego and buddha nature; between what I believe that I am and what I in fact am—entirely empty and, at the same time, entirely formed. The distinction is important for me, as it’s how I reconcile Steps Two’s and Step Three’s language with Buddhist teachings. When I made the decision to take refuge in the Three Treasures—a decision that I make daily, sometimes multiple times a day—I did not decide to seek refuge in a collection of Post-It Notes.

Where I do flee for protection is, in a sense, not-knowing. That’s the turn that I made; it’s because of that turning that I could at first crawl, then walk, in a different direction. What “kept me sick” was a strong sense that I knew what I was, what I could be, who others were and would be—that I knew all or most of what was possible in this life. That sense brought with it feelings of being cornered or trapped; I would dance that peculiar dance suggested by Frost’s poem, Revelation. I still do too, by the way. Please don’t suppose that because my vision is a little less cloudy that old patterns of behavior find themselves far away. The difference these days is that I embrace those moments of nervousness and uncertainty. With urgency and delight I ask, “What am I doing here?!” It feels playful.

Quotations from Kobun Chino Roshi’s Dharma talk on the Three Refuges are taken from “Embracing Mind: The Zen Talks of Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi.”