The Refuge Tree and Going for Refuge
We have now looked briefly at the Refuge Trees of some different schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Now that we have seen them, the question arises, how are we going to relate to them? There are several ways to do this. Some people appreciate them simply on an aesthetic level, looking at them in the way in which an art student might examine a painting in a museum. Those who are interested in Jungian psychology often see them as expressions of the Jungian archetypes. The gurus and arhats are aspects of the Wise Old Man, the dakinis are anima figures, the dharmapalas shadow figures, and so on. However, relating to a Refuge Tree in either of these ways is not to relate to it as a Refuge Tree at all. It only becomes a Refuge Tree when you go for Refuge to it.
Going for Refuge, committing yourself to the path to Enlightenment, is not something you do only once. Rather, it has to be repeated over and over again, as you develop. Through doing so, you acknowledge the Refuge Tree not just as an exotic picture but as a blueprint for what you can become - a vision of all the energies of your psyche transmuted and put at the service of the highest possible ideal. This vast array of figures represents the ocean of the unfolded wisdom, compassion, and energy of Buddhahood. If you make the effort to develop the potential inherent in every man and woman, it is a display of the riches of the treasure-house of your own mind. Recognizing this, you keep on committing yourself, ever more deeply, placing more and more reliance on the Three Jewels, until you yourself have become the path, and embody the Three Jewels in yourself.
One traditional meditation for deepening and strengthening this commitment is the Going for Refuge and Prostration practice (which, as we saw in Chapter Three, is one of the Foundation Yogas). In this practice you begin by visualizing the Refuge Tree in the sky in front of you, with all the Refuges, exoteric and esoteric. In addition you visualize your father and all men to your right, your mother and all women to your left. Any enemies you may have are in front of you, and your friends are ranged around immediately behind you.
In this way you generate the feeling that you are not committing yourself to gain Enlightenment for yourself alone. Part of the Enlightenment experience is the realization that you are not inherently separate from other beings, so how can you aim to emancipate yourself from the wheel of suffering and leave them still trapped? Hence, from the Mahayana point of view, your aspiration to gain Buddhahood must be based on a deeply felt desire to do so in order to be of maximum usefulness to all sentient beings. The Tantric approach, as we have seen, is to make ideals as concrete as possible, so it urges you not just to feel the desire to take all beings with you on the path, but actually to do so imaginatively. Thus you visualize all other beings also committing themselves to the path to freedom around you.
In most forms of the practice you next recite a short verse expressing your aspiration to go for Refuge to the guru, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, until you have attained Enlightenment. Not only this, you imagine all other sentient beings wholeheartedly reciting the verse with you.
Then you make full prostrations74 to the visualized Refuge Tree, each time reciting another verse expressive of your Going for Refuge to all the Refuges. When this practice is performed as part of the Foundation Yogas it is customary to perform a set number of prostrations every day, until you have accumulated a total of 100,000. At a rate of 100 a day, this will take three years to complete, so it is quite a commitment of energy
If you perform the practice regularly, the effect is very definitely cumulative. The more time you spend with this great vision of all the attributes of Buddhahood, the more the energies of the depths of your being are stirred. After a while, you start to feel that with each prostration you are throwing your self more deeply into the spiritual life. To start with it feels awkward; most Westerners are not used to expressing strong emotion. The idea that you should feel such devotion for something that you would just want to throw yourself face down in front of it is a strange one for us.
However, the more you do, the more natural it becomes. The stiffness of pride and the ingrained feeling that you often find in the West that 'nobody is any better than me; my opinion is as good as anyone else's', gradually dissolves away. You feel extremely happy and fortunate to be living in a universe in which there are beings much wiser and more loving than you. It becomes a relief to have an ideal to which you can aspire, for it is not an unattainable goal to which you are prostrating. There is a path which, step by step, prostration by prostration, you can follow. As you follow it, you become more fulfilled. Life gains deeper meaning. More than that, you begin to have something to offer to other people. You feel yourself part of the solution to the world's difficulties, rather than part of the problem.
As you carry on, launching yourself forward in the direction of Enlightenment, even more happens. Your feeling of being a solid self, building up a rather sketchy mental image, changes. You begin by describing the whole thing to yourself artificially: 'the dakinis should be on this tier', and so on. You feel as though you are playing a game, painting a picture. With time, though, the figures in front of you come to have a greater and greater effect. You feel yourself in the presence of something. You feel less that you are creating a picture, and more that you are contacting another level of reality.
Gradually, the great array of figures may take on at least as much reality as the 'I' which is supposedly creating them. The reality they embody is shining, brilliant, loving, wise. The distance between you and them steadily decreases. Finally, you feel no separation at all. You become your own refuge. You understand that all these figures are simply expressions of aspects of the Enlightened Mind. In experiencing those states for yourself, the path comes to an end. In realizing the same states of mind as the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and great gurus, you and all of them, in the graphic language of Zen, 'breathe through one nostril'. At this point there is nothing to do but work for other living beings - who are no longer conceived of as 'other' or 'separate'. In Going for Refuge more and more deeply, you have become the Refuge Tree.
