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Skillful Actions and the Three Refuges

Greetings, good morning from Redwood City^[1]. So here we are. I'm happy to be here. For the moment, I don't feel too much like talking, but I will start the talk today.

What I want to talk about is the Three Refuges, or the Three Jewels. The wonderful thing about these three is they're both a refuge and a support for us, and also jewels and treasures that we can experience or have for ourselves, and treasures we can share with others.

Two Fables: The Caterpillars and the Monkeys

To talk about these three treasures and refuges, I'd like to tell you two fables.

The first fable has to do with a group of caterpillars who somehow ended up on neighboring plants—maybe some of them on the same plant, on neighboring leaves. They spent the life they had so far munching on the leaves, and they felt very contented to be in a little community of other caterpillars. They knew that it wasn't strange to be munching green leaves, and it wasn't strange to be crawling the way caterpillars crawl across the leaves. They knew that they were ordinary caterpillars living ordinary lives, and they had the support of their community around them.

Then one day, one of them had this kind of irresistible urge and explained it to the others: "You know, I really have this urge to wrap myself up in thread, kind of cocoon myself, just kind of see what happens, and be quiet for a while."

The other caterpillars said, "No, no, no, that's pretty selfish of you. We have this wonderful life here, we're sharing it and eating together, and for you to kind of withdraw from us and go into this kind of cocoon and just disappear—that must be the height of selfishness. You're only thinking about yourself. You shouldn't do that; you have to stay here in community with us."

But the irresistible urge to cocoon had the upper hand, and so that is what this caterpillar did. The others were a bit annoyed, some of them even angry. But then, after some time, what had been a caterpillar emerged from the cocoon as a butterfly. The other ones saw it and said, "Wow!" They felt the urge too, and so they cocooned and eventually they all became butterflies together. They met each other as butterflies and flittered around. Now they were not caterpillars; they were butterflies.

The second fable concerns a group of monkeys living in the jungle. They pretty much watch over themselves. This is not a social group of monkeys; they compete for food, they fight, they compete for territory, and they're always jockeying for position. It's each one for themselves, in a way. The food is a little bit scarce in the jungle, which is maybe part of the reason why they are the way they are.

They happen to live underneath a cliff. It's not a very high cliff—maybe it's 20 or 25 feet high. They see up on the cliff there's a valley that goes back and is flat, and there are all these banana trees there with very ripe bananas. They try jumping up the cliff, but they can't get very high. They try getting little sticks to stand on, but they can't get high enough. Nothing works for them to get up there, each one trying for themselves.

Then one day, one of the monkeys says to the others, "You know, why don't we band together? Maybe together as a group, cooperatively, we can find a way to get up there." Initially, he met with a lot of resistance: "No, that's not our way. That can't be done. I can't trust you, and I'm going to do it my way. I don't want to lose my freedom by coming together and doing something in a group." There was all kinds of resistance to this idea.

But after a while, maybe because they were hungry enough, they decided to try the suggestion of that first monkey. The monkey said, "Okay, now six of you line up in a straight row facing the cliff. Now four of you jump up on their shoulders. Two of you jump up on their shoulders. And now one jump up on their shoulders." Lo and behold, one monkey could climb up them like a ladder and jump up onto the cliff. From the cliff, they could help the others to get up. Pretty soon they were all up. One way or the other, all managed to get up into this valley where the bananas were. They had all the bananas they could eat, and they started appreciating each other. They discovered what it's like to work together, thinking, "This is nice." Then they started living a cooperative life together in this wonderful paradise of a valley.

The Buddha and the Sangha

These two fables—one represents the Buddha, and one represents the Sangha^[2].

The Buddha represents a process of freedom. It's a process of dropping down and cocooning ourselves in a certain kind of way. Especially in meditation, it is a stepping away from our social world, our social life, our concerns, and even our responsibilities. There are times we get criticized for this—that it's selfish, that it's somehow abandoning people. But there is a process of really going inwards, settling, and finding peace here. It is about learning how to settle and be present in a full, dynamic, and insightful way that is uninterrupted, undistracted, and unpreoccupied by other things. This deep inner work can go so deep that the person can go in and get turned inside out, becoming free, able to fly like a butterfly. To become a Buddha is to become free. So that's one way.

The Sangha represents the story of the monkeys. The Sangha is the support, the cooperation, and the mutual interactions that we have with each other on the path of practice and the path of life. It's about learning to develop this freedom, developing the ability to be cooperative, to be in community, and to develop relationships where we mutually support each other—like the monkeys that supported each other to get up the cliff. This is one of the great life tasks, and this is part of what the Sangha is.

These are two opposed movements that a person can take. One movement is to go inwards, to be apart from this outer world, just be in the inner world, and find a transformation there into something quite profound and beautiful. The other movement is to be involved with other people, connected in an important way, cooperating and relating to people in a rich way.

These two different ways of being are sometimes held in opposition to each other. Some people are very much into community life, like the caterpillars, and they get upset when someone steps away from that. Some people are so involved in their individual lives that the idea of cooperating and being involved with others is what they resist. At different phases of life and different times of practice, each of these movements is appropriate, and they shouldn't be held in opposition to each other. They each have a place.

The Dharma as Action

Now, what is the Dharma^[3]? The Dharma is a bridge between these two actions: the action of cooperation and being with people, and the action of settling ourselves, cocooning ourselves in the depths of practice. The Dharma stands between those two.

What is the Dharma? The Dharma is many things. I couldn't think of a fable to tell you for it, because the Dharma shouldn't necessarily be concretized in the way a fable does. But one of the meanings of Dharma—and there are many meanings—is conduct. It is action. Many people associate Dharma with teachings, with spiritual truths about nature and ourselves. But one of the very important meanings of Dharma is action. The Buddha said that actions are our refuge. He said that because the Dharma is our refuge; the Dharma is found and expressed in how we act.

Some people think of the Dharma as teachings, as something to believe. There is some degree of provisional belief that goes into these teachings. Some people think that Dharma is about discovering what's true, and there is truth to that—we are discovering some deeper truths about life. But there's a tendency to make the beliefs and the truths too important, maybe because in Western religions, beliefs and truths are considered crucial. In the Dharma, the most profound meaning of how it supports us is that it has to do with what we do, the actions we undertake. We are supported by our actions.

If we want to change and be transformed, real change doesn't happen from beliefs, and it doesn't quite happen from truths. Change happens by how we live that truth. Even if we see truth, it is our actions that really begin to transform us in a deeper way. We learn by doing, and we learn the Dharma by doing in such a way that we get the feedback loop: "Oh, this works. This is good. This is true."

To live a life that's full of greed—always wanting intensely, getting up in the morning thinking, "What can I get now? I have to work and get more money and produce"—that is an action. That produces a very different life than a life where the action is not to be greedy, not to be in a hurry, but to live with relaxed generosity instead of frantic greed. Those two have a very different effect on the whole psychophysical being. They transform a person in a particular direction. We are changed by what we do regularly. Being carried along in greed, and being in a community that supports that, begins to profoundly change who we are.

This is what we find in the genesis of group violence and hatred. It often happens in small steps where a little bit of it is accepted and becomes normative. As it becomes normative, people become more patient and accepting of something a little more extreme. More and more, you have people doing horrible things to each other because the group they're in has slowly normalized it and seen it as acceptable behavior. This is how they describe things like the genocide in Rwanda or in Germany during World War II.

Kusala Kamma: Skillful Action

What we do is so important. In Buddhism, we understand that doing things with non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion—living a life that is skillful—is one of the fundamental ideas of the Dharma. It has to do with skillful action, or kusala kamma^[4] in Pali. This refers to actions that are beneficial, useful, and wholesome for ourselves.

We learn to recognize that there are skillful and unskillful ways of doing things, speaking to others, acting in the world, and relating to ourselves internally. How we think about ourselves and how we talk to ourselves can be harmful or unharmful. It's not just about believing this as a teaching or taking it as a truth and leaving it at that. That's not really the Dharma. The Dharma is to turn our attention inward and see how that works for ourselves.

We must recognize within ourselves, "If I speak to myself this way, by the end of the day I'm going to feel very discouraged and depressed. If I am able to put that self-criticism and self-hatred aside, I'll get through today very differently. So I'm going to spend the day letting go of those thoughts every time they come up, and I will substitute an equal amount of loving-kindness for myself." That letting go and substituting with goodwill can have profound effects. Those are all forms of doing.

We learn what a skillful doing is, what a beneficial doing is, and what helps us. We start seeing what we're doing. One of the things we learn to do in the Dharma is to let go of a lot of the doing which is not beneficial.

In Western Dharma circles, there is often an emphasis on being rather than doing. Sometimes a talk like the one I'm giving today that emphasizes action is troublesome for some people. It sounds like, "Oh, now I have to get really busy. I have to do a lot. My whole life is an obligation of doing, getting, and accomplishing, and here we get another message like this." But to do the doing skillfully is to recognize how to act in a way that allows us to settle and get peaceful.

A lot of that is an undoing. It is letting go of all the deleterious movements of the mind, speech, and body so that we can begin settling^[5]. There is a lot of shedding and settling that goes on—shedding extraneous thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Cocooning ourselves can look like doing nothing, but it involves a lot of undoing—the doing of undoing—that allows us to get really quiet and still. It allows this inner metamorphosis to happen. Making space to be quiet is a kind of doing.

A classic idea in Buddhism is the idea of the karma that brings us to the end of karma. In ordinary terms, this means the actions that bring us to the end of action. For example, the action of letting go, becoming quieter and stiller with fewer thoughts in the mind. This doesn't make us dull or numb; we become clear and present in a fuller way. This is a kind of doing.

Balancing the Movements of Practice

Skillful doing is seeing where the movement towards freedom, peace, and happiness lies. Sometimes the answer is to cocoon. Sometimes the answer is to be involved with others—to cooperate, to support others, and to participate in the mutual, social nature of human life. We support each other.

Some people are introverted and don't engage actively or extravagantly, but we live in a world where a tremendous social network supports our lives. Most of us do not grow our own food, collect our own water, or prepare everything ourselves. Whether as introverts or extroverts, we must find the right way to participate in that network. Not as an obligation, but by seeing skillfully how it is beneficial, how it supports us, and how that brings freedom.

For people who are used to cocooning and discovering freedom there, going into community life is where they begin to expand and test that freedom. They get to see where they are still not free and bring their practice to that. For people who live a lot in community life and navigate it beautifully, going into cocooning for a while is very important. Then we see what we are overlooking—where the attachments and clingings are, or what underlying beliefs are operating that may not be healthy to have.

Going back and forth between these two modes is one of the important movements of Buddhist practice down through the ages. Understanding that sometimes we cocoon and sometimes we are in community, and figuring out the balance for that, is the task of the Dharma.

The Mirror of the Dharma

Let the Dharma be the mirror. It is the attention that allows us to recognize what is skillful and not skillful, what is on the path and what is not on the path. It shows us what is onward-leading to freedom and what is backward-going. The language of ancient Buddhism is that the Dharma supports us so we don't fall backwards, and it supports us to go forward.

How do we do that? It's not magical thinking. It's not like there's this Dharma out there that you can magically trust to take care of you. The Dharma is enacted by how we live our lives and what we do. The Dharma is not for the inactive; rather, the Dharma is for those who are active enough with mindfulness to discern for themselves which actions are skillful and unskillful. It is recognizing how to act in beneficial ways.

We must recognize when we act with tension, hurry, expectations, self-judgment, or critical self-monitoring. That is not really skillful. Then, to be upset with oneself for doing things unskillfully is even more unskillfulness.

To find our way to skillfulness is to say, "Oh, look at that. That was harmful to myself. I just criticized myself, and that was an ouch. Okay, let me have some goodwill here. Let me be generous and bring some compassion to this. Let me see how I can open my hand, open my heart, and open my mind to how I am." Allow something to settle, allow something to undo, and allow something to relax deeply.

Most unskillful actions of the body, mind, and speech involve some degree of tension, stress, or strain. They involve shutting down, getting narrower, or getting darker. Recognizing that and learning to relax the strain and tension is the movement towards greater freedom and skillfulness.

Skillfulness has the opposite qualities. Skillful action brings qualities of ease, calm, relaxation, openness, goodness, and wholesomeness. It feels good to do the wholesome, skillful thing. We see the Dharma and are supported by it when we look at our actions and recognize, "Oh, that doesn't work. That brings a lot of tension and is actually harmful to myself, but this other way is less harmful."

Continuity of Practice

What is required of us in finding the path is an ongoing mindfulness. This monitors and sees the choices we're making about our bodies, our actions, our speech, and our mind, in order to choose what is wholesome.

Some people will feel that maintaining ongoing mindfulness means they will be busy with a lot of work. But as soon as it becomes a lot of work and busyness, it's not wholesome. We are not in a hurry. It's like a marathon; we're not going to race^[6]. We're going to take our time, pace ourselves, and settle in. The continuity of practice is something we settle into.

It becomes who we are, rather than something we have to keep doing. It's not so self-consciously done. It becomes second nature, like riding a bicycle. At first, it's very self-conscious and takes a lot of effort. But at some point, if you do it for long enough, it becomes second nature and you don't have to think about it; it's just what you do.

The True Nature of the Refuges

The Buddha that we take refuge in is really our own capacity to go inward, to be transformed, and to come out as butterflies. The Sangha that we take refuge in is the support that comes when we work cooperatively with others and practice together.

The Dharma is the mirror. It is the way in which we see the nature and quality of our actions, and the consequences of those actions, so we can differentiate between what we should keep doing and what we should let go of. We are supported by that onward-leading action.

These three movements and approaches form the orientation and guidance of a person who has gone for refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. It is not magical thinking; it is truly trusting that it is within ourselves that we find the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

So may you enjoy your actions, and be wise about how you live them. If you are not, your mind, body, and speech will still act, but out of unconsciousness, and not necessarily in ways that are beneficial for you. But if you do the beneficial thing, it just gets better and better, more and more wonderful. So may the refuges support you.

Thank you.