What Is the Ultimate Significance of Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels?

In the Jataka tales of the Sakyamuni Buddha, several sutras record the footprints and trajectory of the Buddha's cultivation across countless lifetimes. They introduce the Buddha's origins and family circumstances life after life, as well as his fellow cultivators and disciples on the path. What impressed me most deeply is that many sutras describe how the Sakyamuni Buddha and Amitabha Buddha, among numerous other Buddhas, were relatives and blood brothers for many lifetimes, or cultivated together in the same Buddha-land, mutually assisting, supporting, and protecting one another. They also recount how the Buddha, for many lifetimes, was together with his ten great disciples of the present life, in a master-disciple relationship, with names that were similar or identical. They further explain the karmic connections between the Buddha's present-life wife and his past lives, and the karmic ties between the Buddha's mother and his lives across past and future existences.

What do these storylines illustrate? They illustrate the karmic connections between Buddhas, the karmic bonds between a Buddha and his disciples, and the karmic ties between a Buddha and his family and relatives. When people form virtuous karmic connections, it creates a cohesive force that draws these individuals together. And having an extremely powerful bond, an exceptionally strong group to rely upon, being together with this powerful group life after life – this provides reliance in life and death, and establishes a sovereign refuge within the heart.

The Three Jewels are the life-saving straw. Sentient beings can only save their own lives by clinging tightly to this life-saving straw. Apart from the Three Jewels, sentient beings have nothing to rely upon; nothing else is dependable. On the path of birth and death, they cry out to heaven with no response, cry out to earth with no answer, left alone to bear their own karmic retribution. Forming connections with the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas means gathering with the Buddhas life after life, never separating from the Buddha.

In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha confers predictions of Buddhahood upon his disciples. These disciples cultivated together, formed karmic bonds, walked a largely identical great path, and attained roughly the same level of cultivation. When they attained Buddhahood, it was in quick succession, one after another. Karmic connection is thus of such paramount importance. Those with wisdom must seize the karmic connection of the Three Jewels, seize the karmic bond of an excellent group. Use this connection to establish one's reliance for life after life, propping oneself up to ascend step by step.

The group is extremely important. The group is karmic connection. Karmic connection is supremely important. Without karmic connection, what is there to discuss? What relevance is there to talk about? It is like the nearly two hundred thousand people who died in the recent lung disease pandemic disaster. They lacked the karmic connection to the Three Jewels. They died alone, are reborn alone again, with no reliance, no support, aimlessly adrift, miserable and wretched, lonely and isolated, drifting through the six realms with no end in sight. Is this not tragic? Therefore, taking refuge in the Three Jewels is of utmost importance. The Three Jewels are not only the reliance for the lives of sentient beings, they are also the vessel for their liberation. Only under the great tree of the Three Jewels can one find shade and coolness; the mind attains the stillness of Nirvana.