The three esoteric refuges, the three Tantric refuges, represent those points in one's own actual experience, one's spiritual experience, if you like, where you actually encounter the Three Jewels.

– Sangharakshita, The Cosmic Symbolism of the Refuge Tree and the Archetypal Guru

“Everyday you have five things to practise: Keep up the effort to be mindful and aware; remain in as positive a state as possible; do not lose sight of your ultimate goal at any time; apply at every level whatever you have realised or discovered at the highest level of your being; do your best for other people, do what you can to help them. This is your spiritual life and this is your spiritual practice.

"But what was this [Triratna] Buddhist Order that after a year or more of preliminary work had suddenly blossomed lotus-like from the mud of the metropolis?  Essentially it was a body of people who had gone for Refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha and who, by virtue of that common spiritual commitment, now constituted a spiritual community - a spiritual community that symbolized on the mundane level, the same transcendental spiritual community or Sangha which was the third of those same Three Jewels to which they had gone for Refuge." (The History of my Going for R

"The quest for holiness, which the study of the Dharma subserves, is a quest for spiritual wholeness, for complete integration of the ‘personality’ not with any subjective principle merely, but with Reality." (A Survey of Buddhism)

"Morality is, as it were, the words of that most perfect of all poems, the holy life, the language which makes intelligent the secrets of spirituality.  Meditation and Wisdom... are its rhythm and its imagery." (A Survey of Buddhism)

"Morality is, as it were, the words of that most perfect of all poems, the holy life, the language which makes intelligible the secrets of spirituality.  Meditation and wisdom, the two remaining stages of the Way, are its rhythm and its imagery."

(A Survey of Buddhism)

“What we need today, perhaps more than anything else, is vision that is penetrating, unblinkered and undistorted.  We need the Perfect Vision communicated by the Buddha… This is indeed a challenge that the Buddha lays before us, a challenge that has great implications for the way we live our lives.” 

‘Going for Refuge represents your positive emotional response - in fact your total response - to the spiritual ideal when that ideal is revealed to your spiritual vision. Such is its appeal that you cannot but give yourself to it.’ (Going for Refuge)

‘We are in the realm of the spiritually positive, a world glowing with colour and flashing with light.’ (A Survey of Buddhism)

“If one can feel oneself as a member of the [Triratna Buddhist Community] working out that myth [of the Bodhicitta], that will give one a much truer idea of what is actually happening or what one is actually involved in.  It has to emerge as different people start becoming aware that the Movement is more than it appears to be.  And that will only happen when they start becoming aware that they are more than they appear to be.  They will become aware that they are playing a part in that myth and that their physical activity is only a bodying forth of that.&n