THE TRIPLE JEWEL

THE TRIPLE JEWEL

The Buddha knew it would be difficult for people to follow his teachings on their own, so he established the Three Refuges for them to rely on. If a person wants to become Buddhists take refuge in and rely on the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. These are known as the Triple Jewel. The Sangha are the monks and nuns. They live in monasteries and carry on the Buddha's teaching. The word Sangha means 'harmonious community'. The Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha together possess qualities that are precious like jewels and can lead one to enlightenment.

A refuge is a place to go for safety and protection, like a shelter in a storm. Taking refuge does not mean running away from life. It means living life in a fuller, truer way.

Taking refuge is also like a man traveling for the first time to a distant city. He will need a guide to show him which path to follow and some traveling companions to help him along the way.

• The Buddha is the guide.
• The Dharma is the path.
• The Sangha are the teachers or companions along the way.

There is a special ceremony for taking refuge with the Triple Jewel. With a sincere mind, one recites the following verse in front of an ordained monk or nun.

I go to the Buddha for refuge.
I go to the Dharma for refuge.
I go to the Sangha for refuge.

For a Buddhist, taking refuge is the first step on the path to enlightenment. Even if enlightenment is not achieved in this life, one has a better chance to become enlightened in a future life. One who take the precepts is called a lay person.

သုေမဓာ ႏွင္႕ သုမိတၱာတို႕ ဗ်ာဒိတ္ ခံယူေနပံု။

သုေမဓာ ႏွင္႕ သုမိတၱာတို႕ ဗ်ာဒိတ္ ခံယူေနပံု။

          ဘုရားအေလာင္း သုေမဓာရွင္ရေသ႕သည္ စ်ာန္အဘိညဥ္ရ၍ ေကာင္းကင္ ခရီးျဖင္႕ ၾကြသြားစဥ္ ဒီပကၤရာျမတ္စြာဘုရား ၾကြလာေတာ္မူရန္ "ရမၼာ"ျမိဳ႕သူျမိဳ႕သားတို႕ လမ္းျပင္္ေနၾက သည္ကို ျမင္ရ၍ ေကာင္းကင္မွ ဆင္းသက္ကာ ေနရာတစ္ကြက္ကို ေတာင္းယူ ျပင္ဆင္ ေနတုန္းမွာပင္ ရဟႏၱာမ်ားႏွင္႕ အတူ ဘုရားရွင္ ၾကြလာေတာ္မူေသာေၾကာင္႕ျပင္၍ မျပီးေသးေသာ ရႊံ႕ညႊန္ေပၚမွာမိမိကိုယ္ကိုတံတားခင္း၍ေမွာက္စင္းေနေလသည္။
          ထိုအခ်ိန္မွာ "သုမိတၱာ" မည္ေသာ အမ်ိဳးသမီးကလည္း ၾကာပန္း ရွစ္စီး တြင္ ငါးစီးကို ဘုရားရွင္အား လႈဘို႕ရန္ ရေသ႕၏ လက္သို႕ ကမ္းလွမ္း၍ သံုးစီးကို မိမိကိုယ္တိုင္ လႈဒါန္း ေလသည္။ ဘုရားရွင္သည္ ထိုသူ၂ေယာက္၏ေနာင္ေရးကို ဆင္ျခင္ေတာ္မူကာ --- "ဤရေသ႕သည္ ေဂါတမဘုရား ျဖစ္လိမ္႕မည္။ ဤ အမိ်ဳးသမီးကား ပါရမီျဖည္႕႔ဘက္ ျဖစ္လိမ္႕မည္။" ဟု ဗ်ာဒိတ္ေပးေတာ္မူသည္။

SUMEDHA AND SUMITARECEIVING A PROPHETIC DECLARATION

Hermit Sumedha, the Future Buddha, had attained thesix High Power.
While traveling by air he saw the townsfolk of Ramma clearing the pathway and came down to the ground, and asked to be permitted to clear a portion of the track on which the Buddha Dipankara was to travel. He was given a portion of it, and before he had cleared it, the Buddha Dipankara came along that way with a retinue of arahants. Sumedha spread himself out upon the mud with his face downwards, his body serving as a bridge so that the Buddha and the disciples following Him could tread on him.
At that moment a lady by the name of "Sumitta" arrived with eight branches of lotus flowers. She handed over to the hermit five of those bunches to be offered to the Buddha. The Buddha, with mind's eye of Buddha, saw that was in store for the these two persons in future, and made this prophetic declaration. "This hermit will become Gotama Buddha, and this lady will become his help-mate to help him fulfill the Perfections (Paramitas).

ဗုဒၵၥဘာသာကလ်ာဏယု၀အသင္း
မွထုတ္ေ၀ေသာ ရုပ္စံုဗုဒၵၥသာသနာ၀င္
မွ ကူးယူေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။ (ေရးသားသူ အဂၢမဟာဏိတ အရွင္ဇနကာဘိ၀ံသ)