Triratna and Trisharana

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 6 pages

Triratna or Ratnatraya, the Three Jewels, is the technical term for the formula Buddha, Dharma and Sangha — the latter two rendered in modern interpretation as religious law and priesthood. Esoteric philosophy regards that as a very loose rendering. The words, the file argues, ought to be pronounced as in the days of Gautama — Bodhi, Dharma and Sangha — and interpreted as wisdom, its laws and its priests, the last in the sense of spiritual exponents or adepts. What happened instead is traced: Buddha being regarded as personified Bodhi on earth and a true avatara of Adi-Buddha, Dharma came gradually to be regarded as his own particular law and Sangha as his own special priesthood.

The judgement that follows is pointed — that the profane of the later teachings have shown a greater degree of natural intuition than the actual interpreters of Dharma, the Buddhist priests. The people see the Triratna in three statues: Amitabha as Boundless Light or universal wisdom, an impersonal principle which is the correct meaning of Adi-Buddha; Avalokiteshvara as the supreme lord of the Bodhisattvas; and Maitreya as the symbol of the terrestrial and human Buddha, the Manushya Buddha. Even the uninitiated who call them the Buddhas of past, present and future are closer than the scholars, and a philosopher of the Yogacharya school would put it plainly: that Dharma is not a person but an unconditioned and underived entity combining the spiritual and material principles of the universe, from which Buddha proceeded by emanation.

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