Taking Buddhism as Refuges (皈依)

Today I got up at 3am (not by choice, but by my jet lag), and started getting ready for today’s ceremony of “Taking Refuges” (皈依). The English term still sounds funny to my ears; it somehow feels derogotory, but it could very well be just me.

If you can read Chinese, the whole ceremony was published at Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山).

The main reason driving me to come at this specific time was due to the 7 Day Chan Retreats (禪七), not to become an official Buddhist. However, as I was purchasing my plane tickets at Eva Airlines’ website, its computer system was down for the very first time. I kept on trying to get a departure ticket that was closer to the Chan Retreats date, but the computer system wouldn’t budge. Finally I sighed and selected the date that would enable me to catch the ceremony, the purchase went through. It was a little weird, but that was exactly what happened and I couldn’t explain why.

But, boy oh boy, over 2,500 became official Buddhists today! And there were several hundred of friends and relatives waiting outside of the hall, and over 100 volunteers, and numerous monks and nuns… I’m not too fond of big crowd, and my jet lag and caffeine-free headache and the overhead AC started taking a toll on me…

Finally Master Sheng Yen (聖嚴法師) showed up after all the standard procedure and some proper Buddhist manners have been introduced. We were not allowed to take any photos, so the above one was taking out from DDM’s website. He is well respected, and that is a big reason why so many people showed up today. I was surprised by his sense of humor, because his books tended to be on the dry side. Serious and wise, yes, but dry.

Of course, a lot of people didn’t know what “Taking Refuges” really meant. Tons of Buddhists out in the world, but only relatively few would study sutras. This strange behavior created a lot of weird superstition phenomenon that gave Buddhism a bad name. Well, to be fair, sutras are not easy to study or understand, that I agree. Sutras were written in Old Chinese with numerous Sanskrit “technical terms” to make them almost impossible to understand. However, the new generation of Buddhists are doing their best to “modernize” sutras and make the teachings easy to implemented at our everyday life. The Buddha’s teachings are truly excellent and answer every problem of our modern world, if only if we can get passed the difficult language barrier and get the jewel. If you are not a Buddhist, that’s fine, because Buddha is not a god and he even told us the 33 “heavens” (33天), including all the well-known religions. Like I said, if you can get passed the language barrier, you’ll find that the kind Buddha already told us everything that we ever want to know.

To end this ceremony, everyone got a metal lunch box with vegetable and tofu and rice. Not a great one, but it was a tough job to feed almost 3,000 people all the same time and this was not as bad as I had imagined. (Oh, no, I didn’t put an equal sign between “vegetarian dishes” and “suck”.)

Mentally I didn’t feel anything different though, probably because I knew that I hadstarted changing since the day I took Buddhism seriously. Today it just marked the day as an official milestone, a milestone that I couldn’t have imagined just 3 months ago.