24 Sep
2018
Posted in: Practice
By    Comments Off on What I Take to Heart

What I Take to Heart

As I said in my talk yesterday at Sunday Sangha, for about 10 years now I have made a daily practice of chanting many of the traditional Pali chants, including the Homage and Refugeswhich are usually translated into English as:

Homage to the Blessed One, the Noble, the Perfectly Enlightened One. 

To the Buddha, I go for refuge.
To the Dhamma, I go for refuge.
To the Sangha, I go for
refuge.

However, since those words don’t have a lot of meaning for me, I’ve come up with my own “translation” of them, so that when I chant in Pali, what I’m “saying” in English is:

I honor the innate potential for a human being — someone like me — to awaken to the deepest and most profound level of understanding of what leads to suffering and what leads to its end.

I take to heart the potential for this awakening in me.
I take to heart the lawful nature of things as they are and the teachings that can bring my own heart/mind/body into harmony with these laws.
I take to heart the teachers whose presence in my life have inspired me to awaken and who have shown me the way.

***

(That’s me, in the photo above, paying homage while in Burma/Myanmar.) 

Comments are closed.