Refuge Without Flight: Āśraya, Skyabs su ’Chi, and Resting in the Groundless Ground

Refuge Without Flight

Āśraya, Skyabs su ’Chi, and Resting in the Groundless Ground

The Sanskrit idiom for expressing what is often translated as “I take refuge” is far more supple and multivalent than the familiar formulas śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi or śaraṇaṃ vrajāmi might suggest. These expressions are venerable and authoritative, deeply embedded in ritual, liturgy, and doctrinal memory. Yet their very familiarity has allowed certain assumptions to pass unnoticed, particularly assumptions carried not by doctrine but by grammar itself. Both gacchāmi and vrajāmi are verbs of locomotion. They encode motion across space. They imply departure and arrival, a movement from one locus to another. When joined with śaraṇa, they naturally evoke a scene in which a subject leaves a place of vulnerability and proceeds toward a place of safety.

This grammatical imagination has proven remarkably durable. In many contexts it functions perfectly well, especially within ritual settings where intentional movement and verbal declaration are themselves transformative acts. Yet when these phrases are filtered through modern English translations, their spatial metaphor is often intensified. “I take refuge” comes to suggest flight from danger toward protection. The English word “refuge” itself carries the shadow of displacement. It is inseparable from the figure of the refugee, one who escapes from threat toward safety, one who survives by leaving behind.

As a result, the grammar of the English phrase quietly installs a dualistic topology. Danger is here, safety is there. Fear is behind, protection lies ahead. Saṃsāra becomes the place one leaves, refuge the place one arrives at. When this imagery is unconsciously imported into Buddhist thought, refuge begins to feel like an act of strategic relocation, a metaphysical evacuation from a hostile terrain into a secure enclosure.

Yet it is far from clear that this oppositional movement is what the Sanskrit semantic field most deeply intends.

Even within the Sanskrit tradition itself, the language of refuge is not exhausted by verbs of going. Alongside śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi, one repeatedly encounters a different grammatical gesture altogether, a gesture so simple that it is easily overlooked. The verbal form āśraye appears in devotional, philosophical, and contemplative contexts, often translated loosely as “I take refuge in” or “I resort to.” But the verb itself does not describe movement. It does not narrate a journey. It does not specify a departure point or a destination. Instead, it names an orientation, a stance, a mode of resting.

Here the entire scene changes.

To say āśraye is not to say “I go.” It is to say “I rest,” “I rely.” There is no explicit motion away from anything. There is no elsewhere implied. The grammar does not stage a drama of escape. It articulates a relation of support.

This difference is not merely stylistic. It is grammatical, and grammar here quietly shapes phenomenology.

The root śṛ does indeed include the sense of seeking shelter or protection. But when prefixed with ā- and nominalised as āśraya, its semantic field expands in a striking way. Classical lexicographical sources present āśraya as that upon which something rests, that on which it depends, that in which it inheres, that to which it is annexed. It can denote a seat, a dwelling, a locus, but also the subject of predication, the bearer of qualities, the condition that sustains manifestation itself. It names not only a shelter but a ground, not only a refuge but a basis.

In Sanskrit grammatical thought, āśraya is the support in relation to which something else functions as āśrita, that which is supported. The relationship is not primarily spatial. It is structural and relational. Heat is the āśrita of fire, while the object in which heat inheres is the āśraya. A predicate rests upon a subject as its āśraya. A quality requires an underlying locus. Without an āśraya, nothing can appear, endure, or be known.

Seen from this perspective, āśraya is not a place one enters. It is that without which entering itself would be unintelligible. It is not a shelter constructed against threat, but the very condition by which anything stands, appears, or is sustained at all.

When one says āśraye, therefore, one is not grammatically saying “I flee.” One is saying something closer to “I repose,” “I rely,” “I lean into,” “I rest upon.” The verb gestures away from motion and toward relaxation. It implies not departure but settlement. Not escape but intimacy.

This subtle grammatical shift becomes decisive when such language is read from within the contemplative tradition that is already wary of movement as a metaphor for realisation. In Dzogpachenpo, movement is almost always secondary. Going, striving, progressing, escaping all belong to the grammar of the ordinary mind that seeks something other than what is already present. Recognition does not travel. It does not arrive. It does not improve its position.

From a Dzogchen perspective, therefore, āśraye does not describe a practitioner leaving saṃsāra behind in order to arrive at refuge. It describes the relinquishment of the habit of standing elsewhere. It names the easing of the compulsion to seek support outside what already supports.

Seen this way, the English word “refuge” begins to tremble. What English hears as protection from danger, Sanskrit often hears as resting upon a basis. What modern ears imagine as asylum, the older grammar suggests as ground. What looks like a movement of self-preservation begins to sound like a gesture of trust.

This difference becomes even more pronounced when we attend closely to how āśraya functions across disciplines. In philosophy, it names the locus in which qualities inhere. In logic and grammar, it is the subject that bears predicates. In contemplative contexts, it gestures toward the basis upon which experience unfolds. In none of these usages is the emphasis on fleeing from threat. The emphasis is on dependence, support, contiguity, intimacy, inseparability.

It is precisely here that the language begins to resonate deeply with Dzogchen sensibility.

Dzogchen repeatedly speaks of the gzhi, the ground. Yet it is equally insistent that this ground is not a ground in any ordinary sense. Mipam the Great, with characteristic precision, speaks of it as gzhi med pa’i gzhi, the groundless ground, or the baseless base. This phrase is not a paradox for rhetorical effect. It is a careful refusal of reification. The ground is not a foundation one can step onto. It is not a substrate beneath appearances. It is not a support that could be grasped or pointed to. It is the ever-present condition of appearance and knowing itself, empty and luminous, unestablished and yet never absent as:

ka dag
“Primordially pure”

lhun grub
“Spontaneously present,” “self-arising,” “effortlessly manifest”

thugs rje
“Compassion,” more precisely “compassionate resonance” or “responsive compassion”

To imagine refuge as movement toward such a ground would already be a misunderstanding. One cannot go to what has never been elsewhere. One cannot arrive at what has never been departed from. One cannot enter what has never been outside.

One can only rest in it.

Here the Sanskrit āśraya becomes quietly luminous. Not as a doctrinal import from another system, but as a grammatical intuition that already knows something about how resting differs from fleeing. To take āśraya is not to construct a safe zone. It is to let what already bears experience be what it is. It is to cease insisting on another support.

The Tibetan expression skyabs su ’chi is often rendered as “to go for refuge,” but its own grammar is gentler than that translation suggests. The particle su marks directionality or orientation, not necessarily physical motion. It can indicate inclination, turning toward, allowing oneself to be oriented. To go into skyabs is not inevitably to relocate. It can also mean to entrust, to yield, to let oneself be held.

When read through Dzogchen eyes, skyabs su ’chi does not describe a frightened being running toward protection. It describes a weary tightening loosening. It describes the mind relinquishing its habit of seeking a better ground than the one it already stands upon. It is not a drama of survival but a quiet undoing of distrust.

From this perspective, refuge is not preparatory to realisation. It is already an expression of it, though often unrecognised as such. The ritual language of refuge articulates, in conventional terms, a truth that Dzogchen makes explicit. There is nowhere else to stand. There never was.

Thus what is translated as “taking refuge” may be more faithfully heard as “having recourse to”, “resting into”, "or “relaxing back into” the groundless ground. It is not an act of defense but an act of intimacy. It is not an escape from saṃsāra, but a release of the distrust that one has ever been outside the basis of experience.

The gesture is therefore not one of flight, but of recognition. Not a movement away from fear, but the easing of the very structure that makes fear feel necessary. Refuge, in this light, is not something one does in order to be safe. It is what happens when one stops insisting on safety elsewhere.

To say āśraye is to say: “I rest here.” And here was never other than the groundless ground.