“First of all the Going for Refuge, which is the basis of all yanas, Great and Small”

Tharpe Delam or The Smooth Road to Emancipation

As well as giving Sangharakshita initiation, meditation instructions and a new name, Rinpoche also taught him the preliminary practices to ati-yoga, regarded within the Nyingma tradition as the highest yoga or practice.

“After I had received the abhiṣeka of the Greatly Precious Guru, Padmasambhava … The following morning I went into town and on my way through the bazaar happened to see a Tibetan monk squatting at the roadside. In his lap was a small bundle of rather grubby xylograph texts that he was offering for sale. Since the monk was obviously in need of money, and since the texts were very cheap (so cheap that even I could afford to buy them), I at once bought them and returned with them to the Vihara, where I showed them to Kachu Rimpoche. His response was one of surprise and delight. They were Nyingma texts, he exclaimed joyfully, as he thumbed his way through them. Most of them had to do with the Greatly Precious Guru, and the fact that I had come across them so soon after receiving the abhiṣeka, and in such a totally unexpected manner, was extremely auspicious. It showed that I had a special connection with the Greatly Precious Guru, and with the Nyingma tradition, and that my efforts to realize the import of the teachings which the abhiṣeka had empowered me to practise would prove successful. Whether or not Kachu Rimpoche's ‘reading of the signs' was correct is not for me to say…

Tharpe Delam Tibetan Text
Bought by Sangharakshita from a Tibetan monk.

“Among the texts I had bought, and which Kachu Rimpoche had greeted with such enthusiasm, was one entitled Tharpe Delam or ‘The Easy Path to Emancipation'. This little work dealt with the general and special preliminaries to the practice of ati-yoga, the highest teaching of the Nyingmapas…  The first mūla yoga was, of course, the Going for Refuge and Prostration practice, the remaining three being the arising of the bodhicitta, the meditation and mantra recitation of Vajrasattva, and the offering of the mandala, after which followed the Guru Yoga.

“Having received further instruction from Kachu Rimpoche, I therefore took up the Going for Refuge and Prostration practice, as well as the other mūla yogas, and continued to do it regularly until my departure for England two years later. With the help of Dhardo Rimpoche, I moreover made a rough translation of the entire Tharpe Delam. Though I was able to do the Going for Refuge and Prostration practice for only two years, which by Tibetan standards was not very long, during this period I had a more intense and more sustained experience of Going for Refuge than ever before. I also arrived at a clearer understanding of the fact that ‘the taking of the Three Refuges includes within its scope the taking of all the principles of Buddhism,' and a clearer understanding, therefore, of the meaning and value of the act of Going for Refuge itself.”

Sangharakshita, The History of My Going for Refuge (CW2, pp.442-443)

The Going for Refuge and Prostration practice from the Tharpe Delam involves an elaborate visualization of a tree of lotus flowers growing out of a rainbow-coloured cloud. At the centre is Guru Padmasambhava, who is regarded as the embodiment of all the Refuges. He is surrounded by Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Arahants, Lamas, Deities, Dākinīs and Protectors. To this great tree, the practitioner prostrates, imagining they are doing so with all sentient beings. With each prostration, an elaborate verse expressive of Going for Refuge is recited —

“OM AH HUM, to the best of all Refuges I go. To the Lama the Buddha, the Lama the Dharma, the Lama the Sangha; to the Lama the Sri Maha Heruka; to the Lama the All-Performing King; to the Three Jewels and Three Roots in one, Guru Rinpoche, for Refuge I go.”

Initially, when Sangharakshita began teaching in the West, he taught this version of the Going for Refuge and Prostration Practice. He wrote about its effect —

“As those who have done the Going for Refuge and Prostration Practice will be aware, in the course of each session of practice one not only visualizes the Refuge Tree throughout; one also repeats the words of the (‘Tantric') Refuge-going formula, and prostrates oneself, as many times as one can, the sessions being kept up until such time as one has completed at least 100,000 repetitions and 100,000 prostrations, as some members of the Order have actually done. It is therefore not surprising that the practice should have a very powerful effect, even to the extent of bringing about a radical change in one's mental and spiritual outlook. Indeed, as the months and the years go by the practitioner may well find himself becoming so deeply absorbed in the experience of Going for Refuge that it is no longer possible for him to think of the Going for Refuge and Prostration Practice simply as one of the four mūla yogas (preliminary practices).

“…If he continues to think in such terms at all, he thinks of the Going for Refuge and Prostration Practice as being virtually a spiritual practice in its own right. Thus it may be said that the practice which I discovered shortly after receiving the abhiṣeka of the Greatly Precious Guru, and which provided me with further illumination on the topic of Going for Refuge, in fact represented a transposition of the act of Going for Refuge into the rich and colourful mode of the Indo-Tibetan Tantric tradition. As such, it also represented a restoration of Going for Refuge to something like its original place in Buddhism and in the Buddhist life.”

Sangharakshita, The History of My Going for Refuge (CW2, p.445)

That Sangharakshita came to see this practice as “a transposition of the act of Going for Refuge into the rich and colourful mode of the Indo-Tibetan Tantric tradition” which “represented a restoration of Going for Refuge to something like its original place in Buddhism and in the Buddhist life” is highly significant. We could say, that Padmasambhava played a key part in the emergence of one of Sangharakshita’s most distinctive teachings — the centrality of Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels; or Going for Refuge as the defining act of the Buddhist life. In time, Sangharakshita was to create a new Refuge Tree, a Refuge Tree with the Buddha Shakyamuni at its centre, a Refuge Tree whose symbolism clearly expresses the vision of the Dharma in the Triratna Buddhist Order and Movement.