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