In Pursuit of Mysteries

Refuge Vows

I was pondering the refuge vows today a bit. There is the vow to not take refuge in worldly deities. When His Holiness was explaining this, the main bit was about deities of this world but the specific example was deities such as those that people make blood offerings to (such as animal sacrifice) being forbidden. I know that this is a more complex situation than that and I thought people might have some thoughts.

A friend of mine who is a magician but who has been a Tibetan Buddhist for about 25 years as well wrote the following to me almost two years ago in a discussion we were having on refuge (I’m purposefully not giving his name here and removing his Guru’s name):

In “Refuge”, one vows to foresake worldly divinities (vs transmundane), so you would have to make up your mind on where you stand with that first, whether what we do as magicians (when we relate in whatever fashion to Deities) is in fact taking some form of refuge, and whether or not they are transmundane. Its a kind of grey area that Buddhists have formulaic answers to, and doesnt *quite* stand full analysis. Most western Buddhists tend to think that any god whatever, non-buddhist, is a mundane worldly divinity. This doesnt match up to experience, personally. Buddhism hasnt rigourously examined Western religions and pronounced judgement on any of them to my knowledge, but some teachers have their own take on it. My original Lama, XXXX, dialogued with Jesuits in the late 60’s, Thomas Merton (a Cistercian/Trappist) among them, and pronounced that Christ was infact an enlightened principle and a reliable guide. Trungpa tended to sneer at anything western.The idea is that a Worldly Divinity, being part of the cycle of existence, isnt a reliable guide out of Samsara, the ongoing process of birth-death-rebirth. Buddhists assert that Buddhas, Enlightened Beings, have in fact made it out, so they and their emanations, like Senge Dradok, are indeed reliable guides, or “Refuges” from the “vicissitudes of Samsara”. Worship of a mundane Deity can in fact give powers, knowledge, but is more likely to further chain you to the Cycle. If you recall Western Mysteries assert that existence has purpose and meaning and the Buddhists assert the opposite, and think about it a bit, they are really talking about the same thing but from different sides of the coin.