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On Taking Refuge in the Dharma

On Taking Refuge in the Dharma

Last updated on: June 15, 2026 at 10:29 am by James Ford

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On Taking Refuge in the Dharma 2026-06-15T10:29:07-07:00 James Ford

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Zen teacher bowing

(Here I continue the feature of sharing talks and essays by teachers within our Empty Moon Zen community. This is a talk by Dharma Holder Tom Wardle. A householder teacher, Tom works as an Executive Coach. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Hult International Business School. He is also a graduate of the Zen Peacemaker’s Seminary for Socially Engaged Buddhism. Tom is passionate about koan, lay practice, and the integration of the dharma into daily life.)

Most of us come to practice to improve our lives. Something seems off. Life could be better, unhappiness abounds, and so we look for ways to correct this. Things aren’t exactly how I’d like them to be, so I wrestle with reality itself trying to contort it to fit my preferences. I cling to things that make me happy, and I chase after things I think will make me happier still, while I try hard to avoid the unpleasant things in life, but none of this actually works, I just end up frustrated and exhausted.

Perhaps the problem is me, so I look for ways to become a better person, to reconfigure myself into a mighty achiever so I can conquer life. Often, this leads us to meditation. The benefits are well documented, and Zen is kinda cool, so we walk into a Zen center and learn to meditate. We hope that if we do enough meditation, we’ll become a better version of ourselves, a version that will do the thing, get what we want, and be more successful. Maybe meditation can make us more attractive, purging what we don’t like about ourselves so we can win friends and influence people and whatever else your version of this fantasy happens to be.

Maybe it’s not so grandiose.

Maybe it’s a simple life of contentment that you fantasize about.

Maybe it’s just things not hurting quite so much anymore.

What ever yours happens to be, we all come to practice with fantasies about how our meditation practice will change us, but these fantasies tend to break down pretty quickly because you meditate and then nothing happens.

We might feel some transient peace or relaxation. We might even make sitting into a regular habit, but typically very little changes. We may notice some benefits, but the core problem remains the same: life is a constant struggle and we aren’t getting what we want.

So what went wrong? Why haven’t all our problems gone away? Why do we still struggle?

We struggle because we are still engaging the world in the same way. We continue to navigate our lives by our preferences, chasing our desires and trying to line things up just the way we would like them to be. We are still playing the same game, and it’s a losing one.

You see, my life is a very personal thing. Everything feels like it’s happening to me. This is a totally natural assumption that arises out of the body. All of my myriad senses feed me a constant stream of information, and everything I experience happens to me, so obviously it’s all about me, right?

More to the point, I have feelings about the things I perceive and experience: some I like and some I do not. At the most fundamental level, I experience pleasure and pain in response to the things I encounter: Pleasure good; Pain bad. Moving toward pleasure and away from pain seems the obvious solution, at least until you actually try to do it.

That makes it sound like a rational decision, but most of the time, it isn’t. That movement away from pain and toward pleasure is usually instinctive, a response that arises so seamlessly with our experiences of the world that we don’t even notice the gap. It doesn’t feel like a response or reaction, it feels like a description of reality itself: some things are good, others bad.

But I meditate every day why aren’t I winning life? what’s missing?

Maybe nothing’s missing. Maybe the problems that I see aren’t actually problems at all. Maybe there is entirely something else going on.

When you become a Buddhist, you take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Often that’s about as much attention as those three get while we hurry on with the more important work of meditation. And look, meditation is important. Zen literally means meditation, after all, and we have that creed about being a “special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words and letters.” This can lead to the distorted view that dharma study is unimportant for Zen practice, maybe even counter-productive. What matters is personal experience, so don’t waste your time with lots of reading and obscure vocabulary, get your butt on the cushion!

The Dharma isn’t in the scriptures and ancestral texts.

Those writings are maps, the Dharma is out here in the world. It’s between you and me right now, it’s within each of us, flowing through and around everything. The challenge of studying the Dharma isn’t learning obscure vocabulary, it’s seeing it out here in the world. It’s not enough to understand the concepts, you have to actually find these things arising in your own life. That is the practice of study in Zen. Connecting the maps in our scriptures and ancestral texts to the world we inhabit is the practice of taking refuge in Dharma.

You have to look for it and see it in your own life, just like the Buddha did. You can and should verify it for yourself, but this is where it gets really tricky because I have stories about who I am, what’s going on and why, how things should actually be, who the villains are and who the heroes, etcetera.

Here’s the thing : Those stories are complete bullshit.

They are driven entirely by the self centeredness of my experience, an experience that is based on selective perception and incomplete information. But still, it feels vividly real. I actually feel things based on my stories, so they are very hard to give up.

These distorted stories that we believe about ourselves and the world, these stories that we inhabit, that we actually live in, these stories are samsara. This is where we are trapped, wandering in circles, chasing the same things again and again, all for nought.

It’s like that old bumper sticker: It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.

Dharma is a tool to take apart our stories and see through them. It can help us tell a new, different story, one that might actually be more useful than the ones we currently tell.

So what do we need to know to tell this new story?

Let’s start with karma. This one has seeped into the zeitgeist, so there are a lot of strange ideas out there about karma and the consequences of tipping at the coffee shop. Simply put, karma means “action”, and there is really only one thing you need to understand here: everything happens for reasons. Call it causes and conditions, and use it to hit the reset button on all of your BS stories about why something is the way it is and what that means. Just causes and conditions, beginningless and unknowable. Let go of your whys.

Hopefully that opens up a little working space for you, so let’s go deeper. If we are talking foundational Buddhist teachings, the Four Noble Truths are a great place to start. They were literally the first thing the Buddha taught after his awakening, so let’s give it a go:

The first truth is dukkha, and while this is conventionally translated as “suffering”, that rendering loses much of the nuance. Dukkha includes suffering, but it also includes discomfort, disquiet, imperfection, angst, and feelings of incompleteness; it has many flavours, all at least a little bitter. Dukkha is so important that it is not only the First Noble Truth, it is also one of the Three Marks of Existence that are shared by all things. Whether experiencing physical or mental pain, loss, or existential angst, we inevitably tell stories about why it is happening, what or whom is causing it, why it should end, and so on. You have your routine and I have mine, but the important thing is to notice how those stories carry with them long to-do lists to make things right, with some tasks for ourselves and some for others, but it is all about aligning the world with our preferences. Whether tacit or explicit, the assumption is that if would go the way I think it should, then my dukkha would go away.

When you actually say it out loud, it sounds kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it?

When we remember that dukkha is inherent to existence, we can let go of the assumption that we shouldn’t feel certain things, or that certain feelings mean something is wrong and must be corrected. When we loosen our grip on that story, then we can tell a new one, one without villains and heroes or associated to-do lists: “Ah, right! This isn’t happening for reasons, it is happening because it is the very nature of existence! Dukkha, right here in my own experience.”

Why is dukkha inherent to existence? Because of impermanence, another of the Three Marks of Existence. Everything changes. Nothing lasts. It can be profoundly helpful to remember that the universe is fundamentally unstable and feelings of lack are the norm, not an anomaly.

The second Noble Truth goes deeper: We experience dukkha because we want. We have preferences for how the world should be, including ourselves and our experiences. We want for stability, security, and comfort in an unpredictable, unstable world. This wanting, called tanha or thirst, can show up in three ways: craving, clinging, or aversion, all different forms of the same thing. These reactions arise endlessly, inevitably, and they always carry with them a false promise: If you get what you want, everything will be better.

Again, sounds a little silly when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?

And so it should, but what is even sillier is how we constantly forget how silly it is! Yeah, this is in the dharma, but it is also vividly in our own experience. How many times have you gotten what you want only to find yourself not entirely happy once you got it? I know, I know… but if only it came in red…. Dukkha reminds us that even the red one with all the bells and whistles wouldn’t satisfy us, and when we remember that, it can be a little easier to let things be as they are.

The first and second Noble Truths contain that subtle invitation, which is made explicit in the Third Truth: What if you just let it rest? What if everything is actually OK, even though it feels like it isn’t? What if you don’t actually need to do anything at all? This is the Truth of cessation, and it is the Good News of Buddhism.

The Fourth Noble Truth lays out an Eightfold Path for getting to cessation, but you don’t really need the whole list because there is a unifying theme: pay attention. Pay attention to how you live, what you do and say; pay attention to what you give your time and attention to, where you invest yourself and how you move in the world; most of all, pay attention to the stories you tell.

We are meaning-making creatures, so those stories arise endlessly, but we don’t have to be ruled by them. We tend to want the stories to all stop so we can be free from them, but that isn’t what Zen offers us. That freedom, freedom from, is conditional, so it is very fragile. Zen offers us something much more useful and profound: freedom in. Freedom right here, in the midst of all of our stories, wants, and heartaches. Studying the Dharma can be a powerful way to experience that freedom, just remember that the Dharma isn’t in the text, it’s in you.

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