Learning to be the refuge

Not too long ago, a dear friend of mine died from cancer. It was a long and challenging path for him as well as for his friends and family. Even in those challenging times, he took the time and effort further his Buddhist practice, the same practice he’d discussed in great depth with youth groups and student clubs, with friends and co-workers, and wrote about extensively. It was at this hardest moment that he shared with us all his final blog post: Be The Refuge.

When I read that, I read a calling a calling to keep Aaron alive in personal practice. While his body may be no more, and while I may never get to see his bright and welcoming smile again in person, I and everyone that cherished him got an opportunity to keep alive both his practice and his spirit. For that, several of us have decided to write about how we are following his final written advice and sharing our ways of being the refuge.

While we may not be living through the same experiences as Aaron had, we always have capacity and opportunity to be the refuge for ourselves and for others. This perhaps is the best lesson we can take away from Buddhism. Knowing that we exist with each other and in part for each other. Knowing that others depend on us, even when we most want time to ourselves. For those reasons, we must develop our resolution to always be our own refuge and a refuge for others.

I follow the ask in Be The Refuge by reminding myself daily two important things: 1) Everything is Impermanent and 2) Everything we are Lasts Beyond Us. The first is one of the core teachings I’ve learned from my many years of practice within many Buddhist traditions. It impacts every decision we make when interacting with each other and with every life event that takes place, free of any human cause. Every feeling we have will pass, both good and bad. Every memory we have will fade, both good and bad. Every action we take will fade, both good and bad. We ourselves will change and fade, even if we can’t recognize it.

But the second point reminds me why we must chose to be the refuge for ourselves as well as for others. If everything was impermanent and ended exactly when we died, where is the reason to be honest? To be generous? To be wise? To do any of the steps in the Noble 8 Fold Path? Each practice has a unique way of capturing this seed for morality, I however explain it by recognizing that even though the most visible parts of ourselves have limitations and eventually die, our views, intentions, speech acts, actions, livelihood, efforts, mindfulness, and concentrations live far beyond us. These things don’t stay behind in whole concrete ways that are easy to recognize. Rather, live beyond us in tiny little fragments we hand over to others in our life. Our friends and family. The colleagues and classmates we make. The random strangers we pass by.

As we make new connections, the ones that persist take a part of ourselves and keep them far past our last interaction. Those little mirrors lasting in the souls of others represent our future lives. It’s not our current mind and body form that comes back, its those little things we hand over to others that continue being passed over again and again, person to person. Combine those little remembered fragments and whatever we were when our bodies still existed would exist again, but only as long as those mirrors are kept alive through practice. Without practice, those views, intentions, speech acts, actions, livelihoods, efforts, mindful acts, and concentration acts can all die, just our bodies and egos can. They can change and flip between patterns that cause suffering or relieve suffering.

So we must remember where we learned each of those 8 steps in the path, actively chose which steps we want to keep alive and pass forward, and remind ourselves that in every action we take that we are passing some step forward to someone else, keeping alive some fragment we copied over from someone else. Remembering myself of both impermanence and the ways in which fragments of us can live beyond our bodies, I remember to catch by breath and to Be the Refuge for myself and for others. It was through knowing these cause and effect patterns that Aaron shared with me some of the most important ways I’ve lead my life. It’s through these reminders that I’ve kept those practices alive and hopefully passed them onto others.

Now its our opportunity to further our practice and write about it, just as Aaron did.