Going for refuge is the act by which a person becomes a follower of this tradition rather than an admirer of it. Refuge here does not mean rescue: what is taken is not shelter from difficulty but a direction — the Buddha as the one who found the way, the Dhamma as the way itself, and the Sangha as those who have walked it.

The book prints no title for the passage; the name used in this app records where it sits, in the sequence for the observance day. The same words are used at every other occasion when refuge is taken, so nothing here is peculiar to the Uposatha except its position.

The homage is printed in full at the head, three times, and each refuge is then said three times over. Nothing is abbreviated, and the file follows the page.

The central word is a verb. คัจฉามิ — I go. Not I believe, not I accept, not I agree with. Something is being done rather than assented to, and it is done in the first person singular: in a hall of a hundred people, each one says I.

The second and third rounds are marked only by ทุติยัมปิ and ตะติยัมปิ, for a second time and for a third. The words are otherwise unchanged. Saying a thing three times is how this tradition marks that it has been formally done and not merely spoken, and the device recurs throughout the book.

Its position explains why it matters. The precepts that follow are undertaken by somebody who has just said where they stand. Without the refuge, eight rules kept for a day would be a set of resolutions; with it, they are the shape of a day given to something in particular.