Taking Refuge: How the Three Jewels Work in Daily Buddhist Life

Where the refuge formula comes from, what the commentaries say it protects against, how a refuge is kept or broken, and how Theravada, Tibetan, and Chan teachers read the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha.

In the weeks after his awakening, according to the opening chapter of the Vinaya’s Mahavagga, the Buddha was sitting under a tree at Uruvela when two merchants travelling from Ukkala, Tapussa and Bhallika, stopped to offer him food. After he had eaten, they went for refuge to the Buddha and to his teaching and asked, in Bhikkhu Brahmali’s translation, to be accepted “as lay followers who have gone for refuge for life.” That is all: two refuges, not three. There was not yet a single monk, so there was no community to take refuge in. The text records that “by means of the double refuge, they became the first lay followers in the world” (Mahavagga 1.4).

Later, at Isipatana near Varanasi, the father of a young man named Yasa heard the Buddha teach and declared that he went for refuge to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the community of monks. The Vinaya marks the moment carefully: he was the first person to become a lay follower by means of the triple refuge (Mahavagga 1.7). Yasa’s mother and former wife followed the next day, the first women to do so (Mahavagga 1.8). The phrase every Buddhist now learns, Buddham saranam gacchami, “I go for refuge to the Buddha”, repeated for the Dhamma and the Sangha and then said a second and a third time, grew out of these small scenes.

A formula that did several jobs

In the earliest community, the three refuges were not only a lay declaration. The Mahavagga describes monks bringing candidates from distant regions to the Buddha for ordination, tiring everyone out, and the Buddha allowing the monks themselves to give both the going forth and full ordination by having the candidate shave, put on robes, squat with joined palms, and recite the refuges three times (Mahavagga 1.12).

That method did not last for full ordination. Later in the same chapter the Buddha rescinds ordination by the three refuges and replaces it with a formal act of the Sangha, a motion followed by three announcements (Mahavagga 1.28). The refuges survived as the entrance to novice life: when the boy Rahula follows his father asking for his inheritance, the Buddha has Sariputta give him the going forth, and rules that novices are to be ordained through the three refuges (Mahavagga 1.54). The same words therefore mark a lay person’s commitment, a novice’s entry, and the opening of almost every Theravada ceremony, from temple chanting to the renewal of the five precepts. The formula can also serve as a public declaration of identity: on 14 October 1956 at Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar received the refuges and precepts from the monk U Chandramani and then administered them, with twenty-two further vows of his own, to a very large gathering of followers.

What a refuge is supposed to do

The Dhammapada explains why people seek refuge at all. In Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation, verse 188 reads: “So many go for refuge / to mountains and forest groves, / to shrines in tended parks; / those people are driven by fear.” Such places, the next verse says, are “no sanctuary”. The refuge that works, according to verses 190 and 191, is the one in which a person going to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha sees the four noble truths with right understanding.

The Samyutta Nikaya gives the same idea a battlefield image (SN 11.3, the “Banner’s Crest”). Sakka, lord of gods, tells the gods under his command that if they panic in battle against the titans they should look up at his banner. The Buddha observes that this may or may not help, because Sakka himself is not free of greed, hate, and delusion. A monk frightened in the forest should instead recollect the Buddha, or failing that the teaching, or failing that the Sangha: “Then your fear and terror will go away.”

The Pali commentaries, compiled in Sri Lanka around the fifth century CE, build their definition on this function. They gloss sarana, “refuge”, with a verb meaning to crush or kill. In Bhikkhu Bodhi’s rendering, going for refuge “crushes, dispels, removes, and stops their fear, anguish, suffering, risk of unhappy rebirth and defilement.” Nyanaponika Thera points out that the commentator offers this for exposition, not as a real etymology. The claim is about what a refuge does. Bodhi adds two requirements of his own for anything that could serve as one: it must itself be beyond danger, and it must be accessible.

Kept, corrupted, or broken

The commentaries then treat refuge with the precision of a legal text. The highest form is the supramundane refuge of a person who has reached stream-entry, the first stage of awakening; at that point, Bodhi explains, confidence in the Three Jewels can no longer be shaken. Everyone else takes a mundane refuge, which the commentary divides into four kinds: surrender of oneself to the Three Jewels, accepting them as one’s guiding ideal, accepting discipleship, and homage by prostration.

A mundane refuge can be corrupted by three things: ignorance, doubt, and wrong view. The commentary counts death as a blameless end to it; the blameworthy breach comes only when a person goes for refuge to other religious masters, regarding another teacher, teaching, or community as a higher reliance than the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. The commentary translated by Nyanaponika is careful about what does not count. A lay follower who bows to a senior relative, even one who is an ascetic of another faith, does not break the refuge. Bowing to a king out of fear does not break it, nor does paying respect, as to one’s teacher, to a non-Buddhist from whom one learned a science, art, or craft. What matters is the object of ultimate trust, not the gestures of ordinary social life. Conversely, honouring the Buddha merely because he is a kinsman, or out of fear of his influence, does not amount to taking refuge at all.

Not a saviour: the common misreading

Outsiders often assume that “going for refuge” means placing oneself under a god who will do the saving. The tradition names this very idea as a corruption. Bodhi lists among the wrong views that defile refuge the belief that the Buddha is a god with the power to save, that the Sangha is an intercessory body, or that the act of going for refuge is by itself a sufficient guarantee of deliverance.

The texts point the other way. In the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the aging Buddha tells Ananda: “live as your own island, your own refuge, with no other refuge. Let the teaching be your island and your refuge, with no other refuge” (DN 16, Sujato). He immediately explains how: by meditating on body, feelings, mind, and principles, keen, aware, and mindful. On this reading, taking refuge in the Buddha means trusting that awakening is possible because one person achieved it; refuge in the Dhamma means practising what he taught; refuge in the Sangha means relying on those who have walked the path, a point our piece on spiritual community explores. The refuge is less a shelter one enters than a direction one faces.

One refuge, several readings

Buddhist schools agree on the three objects and disagree, sometimes sharply, about how to hold them.

In Tibetan traditions, refuge opens the preliminary practices (ngöndro), often recited while performing prostrations in large numbers before a visualized assembly. Patrul Rinpoche’s nineteenth-century manual The Words of My Perfect Teacher devotes a full chapter to the subject, titled “Taking refuge, the foundation stone of all paths”. It distinguishes motivations of lesser, middling, and greater beings, urging the greatest: taking refuge in order to bring all beings to buddhahood. In its visualization the practitioner’s own root teacher appears at the centre in the form of the great Vajradhara of Oddiyana, understood as embodying all the buddhas, so that the teacher becomes part of the refuge itself.

Chan went the other direction. The Platform Sutra attributed to Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, asks listeners to take refuge in the Three Jewels of their own nature: the Buddha as awakening (jue), the Dharma as correctness (zheng), and the Sangha as purity (jing). Where the Pali commentaries stress an external and exclusive object of trust, this reading locates all three within the mind. The Platform Sutra supports this by appeal to scripture, saying the sutra tells one to take refuge in the Buddha of oneself, not in some other buddha.

Refuge on an ordinary morning

Bodhi’s advice for lay practice is plain. Going for refuge should not happen once and fade; he recommends reciting the formula daily, ideally twice, and at minimum once with each refuge said three times, before a shrine if you have one. He adds that reciting it before meditation gives needed inspiration to sustain the effort.

A practical way to test the commentaries’ claims is to notice what you actually rely on when afraid: a phone, an opinion, a particular person’s approval. The Dhammapada’s list of mountains and groves is not only about ancient shrines. Saying the refuges slowly, and meaning each line as a statement of trust rather than a password, is a small daily correction of that habit. The Dhammapada itself, read a few verses at a time, is a good companion for the second refuge.