Tag: Buddha Nature

Before becoming the Buddha, the Buddha is said to have lived 500 lives as a Bodhisattva. That is, as a compassionate, loving, and wise being who seeks the liberation from suffering of all other beings.

In the Lotus Sutra, [probably the most influential of all of the sutras for Chinese Buddhism, and hence Zen] it is said [by implication] that all beings will become Buddhas. It might be at an inconceivably distant time in the future, but all beings, without exception, even the least promising ones, will become Buddhas.

If you, albeit in the very, very far future, are going to become a Buddha, that’s the most important thing that could ever possibly happen to you. In a sense everything prior to that, including your life now, pales into insignificance. 

So in a sense, if you’re going to become a Buddha at some point in the future, you’re already a Buddha now. Thus we have the Chinese doctrine of the Universality of Buddha Nature which became an established feature of Chinese Buddhism prior to the formation of the Zen School in the 8th century.

Furthermore, if every being without exception is going to become a Buddha, then every being without exception is a bodhisattva now. That doesn’t mean you’re a bodhisattva,  it means that all beings you encounter are bodhisattvas.

All beings are teaching you.

This is the opposite of the spiritual inflation which is implied by thinking of practice as being a means by which you advance towards Enlightenment: you gradually elevating yourself out of the grime of the world and the unwelcome company of ‘unevolved’ beings.  It’s the opposite. All  beings, all the time, are teaching you, are moving you further towards your eventual Buddhahood. The world is not mud, but light.

They may be teaching from their wisdom; they may be teaching from their stupidity; they may be teaching from their love; they may be teaching from their hate; they may be teaching from their ignorance; they may be teaching from their antagonism towards you. It doesn’t matter: it’s all teaching.

It’s all compassion.

Contemporary Zen people are often quite embarrassed by apparently archaic talk of Buddha Nature. So we just get a lot of chuntering on about being ‘present’ and ‘grateful’ and ‘here and now’.  It’s Hallmark Zen. But the fact is, whether it seems ludicrous or not, if you can accept, even for a moment, that this is true—Everything Changes.

Buddha Nature is said  to  exist  in  two  forms. When it’s covered over  by kleshas,  the defilements, it’s called tathagatagarbha—Buddha embryo or womb.

When  those defilements  don’t exist anymore,  it’s called Dharmakaya. Dharmakaya  is the universal  body of the Buddha, the Body which encompasses  all of existence. The Dharmakaya is  said (in the Nirvana sutra for instance) to have four qualities: self, bliss, eternity  and purity. 

When we hear that,  it doesnt sound like Buddhism. In fact, it sounds like the  complete opposite of. everything  that  we’ve been taught about no self, impermanence  and  suffering. Indeed those four  qualities are the opposite of the four qualities which we’re told  characterises samsara: suffering, the belief in a personal, continuing  self,  impermanence  and the kleshas,-—the  mental impurities. 

In her book ‘Buddha Nature’, Sallie King says   that the Dharmakaya isn’t  about establishing a new self. Rather, it’s a creative and appropriate response  to Nagarjuna. Her argument is  that  Nagarjuna’s method  of subjecting all concepts  to  destructive analysis  leaves us with a  conception of emptiness  which is negative.

In his time – and now too – Nagarjuna  is often criticised (unfairly and incorrectly) as a nihilist,  because  the  positive  side of his teaching  is ignored, because it’s not explicit in his principal writings. It’s there by  inference.

In that way, it’s quite similar  to  the Buddha, who  doesn’t describe  the  state  that the meditator is in  when they leave their  misconceived  conceptual world—when they leave  their adherence to a fixed sense of self—it’s simply  left  for the practitioner to  discover, because explication would leave the practitioner still mired in a conceptual position. 

Likewise, when  Nagarjuna clears away  all the  erroneous,  conceptual structures he doesn’t tell  us  what  the ground, which is left, looks like. The suggestion Sallie King makes is that after Nagarjuna, the emerging Mahayana tradition took a  turn towards  talking about emptiness  in positive terms to remedy this misunderstanding which led to nihilism. Compassion was further emphasised, for the same reason.

The various sutras that we associate  with that  were turbocharged in impact because of the fortunate coincidence (for  them) of their appearance in the  early centuries of the common era. This coincided with the reception of Buddhism  in China.  Because the  positive language of those sutras  was much more in keeping with the positive view the Chinese had of the world (rather than  a quite pervasive  view  in the Indian spiritual traditions that  the world was something that we require  to be liberated from), these sutras thrived in their new environment.

Careful analysis of  the texts has made it clear that people no one thought that the Dharmakaya or the Tathagatagarba  was a ‘something’, contravening  emptiness. Rather, it was a positive  interpretation of emptiness, so for  instance, in the Buddha Nature Treatise, there’s the following passage,”Buddha Nature  is the thusness  revealed by the dual emptiness of person  and things.  If one does not speak of Buddha Nature then one does not understand emptiness.” The author is clear that you need to  see these concepts  through the lens of Emptiness. 

And if we also see these concepts  through the lens of  Practice  then it seems to  me that  Dharmakaya, the universal  body of the Buddha, is an experientially accurate way  of describing our experience  sometimes in Zazen—of non-separation, of the the split  between  ourselves and the world  and the internal splits that we have dropping away, which Isso Fujita calls one piece Zen. 

The term  ‘Buddha Nature’ first appears in the  Tathagatagarbha  Sutra  and in a number of subsequent sutras, most famously the Nirvana Sutra and thence, via the Lankavatara Sutra,  into  Zen, hence the most  famous koan about whether or not a dog has Buddha Nature

The Tathagata Sutra  is a really interesting sutra. It’s very short  and it’s not discursive. It has an instruction, then eight  similies  for Buddha Nature.

  The introduction was apparently added  later.  In it, the Buddha is giving  a talk to a large number  of  named  bodhisattvas. He performs a kind of conjuring trick, miraculously creating the appearance of a multitude of beautiful lotus flowers in the sky. Within each lotus flower,  there’s a Buddha.

After the initial vision, the lotus flowers suddenly wither, giving off a  foul stench. 

The  similes used are interesting  too:
The first is  honey  in a cave or a tree  surrounded by  a swarm of  bees;
The second  is a kernel of wheat  that has not had the husk removed;
The third  is gold in a pit of waste;
The fourth  is an unknown treasure underneath a poor person’s house;
The fifth  is the core of a fruit which  can then develop into a  magnificent tree;
The sixth  is a gold statue  wrapped in filthy rags;

The seventh, which probably gives the  sutra its name,  is (and I’m quoting) ” an impoverished, vile and ugly woman, hated by others, who bears a king  in her womb”; 

The last one is a golden statue which has been in a  foundry, so has a dark casing.

All of these similes refer to the kleshas. ‘Klesha’ literally means poison  and in this context means  a mental state that clouds the mind. There’s lots  of them: ignorance,

self-centeredness,  attachment, avoidance,  and fear, and many others.

Klesha is often translated as ‘adventitious  defilements’.  This is typical of an elevated way of translating which, focusing on apparent accuracy of meaning,  distances us  from the emotional  sense  of the term translated.  In a similar way, is-ness is often rendered as thusness, and we lose the sense of “well, it doesn’t (independently and separately) exist but it doesn’t not exist either, so what do we call it?”; a human sense, that you can imagine real people actually saying. This does seem to happen in  translation quite a lot. For example, when Ernest Jones translated Freud he rendered ‘Ich’ (‘I’)  as ‘Ego’, with predictable consequences. 

Given the ubiquity of euphemism, my  guess is that the pit of waste is really a pit of shit. The  dirty robes/rags are probably something similar. Despite that, the emotion in these similes remains clear: 
the angry swarm of bees protecting the  honey is  anger; 
the kernel of wheat inside the husk that is unknown is ignorance, 
the the pit of shit is disgust; 
the treasure beneath the poor person’s house is ignorance again,  
the core of the fruit, ignorance again; 
the gold statue wrapped in filthy  rags, disgust again;
the impoverished  vile woman, disgust;
a golden statue  wrapped within a dark casing,  ignorance;
and the initial  image  that  we have about these flowers giving off a foul stench is obviously disgust as  well.

These are emotions that we  generally don’t want to go anywhere near—just like we wouldn’t want to go near a  pit of shit, we don’t want to go near our disgust, our  anger and  so on. 

If we pay  attention to the emotions which are invoked by these similes  then I think we can understand  how the Tathagata,  far from being some  quaint  Chinese medieval  device, is actually a very  good  description  of Zazen.

When we’re sitting we’re aware of this  kind of  dynamic  emptiness – this treasure – at our centre.We’re also  aware of all our surrounding  nonsense: our  fluctuating thought babble, emotions, images and all the rest. All of which  are just coming and going  and which  we can see  doesn’t  really  exist. That’s where  the introduction is  helpful, because it is saying  that  these stinking  lotus flowers,  these  kleshas don’t exist either, because they’re  all taking place within the Buddha’s  conjuring trick. 

If you  understand all of that,  then it seems to me that the Tathagatagarbha is a  very helpful and practical way  of looking at  our practice  and  our experience  in Zazen. 

How did Chinese –  and hence Japanese – Buddhism get to the universality of Buddha Nature?

How did that broadening happen, so that people were eventually able to say, around the 8th century, that all beings have Buddha Nature?

Later, Dogen creatively reinterpreted that formulation as all beings are Buddha Nature. Everything is Buddha Nature. Not just certain sentient beings, sometime in the limitless future, but everything, now: trees, clouds, sky, everything. 

Arguably, the belief is there from the beginning, but in a slightly obscured form.

The three trends which constitute Chinese Buddhism are Madhyamaka, Nagarjuna’s approach—the whole emptiness perspective; Yogacara—mind only; and Tathāgatagarbha—the idea that within each of us is this essence of Buddhahood.

These are all Indian perspectives that come to China, the first two as specific schools. None of them thrived long term in their original form. Chinese Buddhism incorporated them into the specifically Chinese schools of Tiantai and Hua-yen in the 6th and 7th centuries, which in turn birthed the Zen school of meditation and the Pure Land school of devotionalism and other power. (That’s why Zen is often mistakenly seen as standing apart; you have to go through several layers to understand it, and it’s easier to talk superficial ahistorical nonsense)

In these three Indian perspectives we can see, in unstated form, this universality of Buddha Nature. 

In Madhyamaka the overriding  idea is that everything is empty, nothing has an independent, subsisting self,  everything arises and ceases depending on causes and conditions. Although ‘emptiness’ was expressed as something disruptive and new, one can see how that perspective is identical with the  original Buddhist perspective as taught in the 12-fold chain and so on. Why?

Because who is a Buddha if not someone who not just sees dependent origination, but lives it, and all that that implies?

The idea of the universality of Buddha Nature is also there in the three natures of the Yogacara school. The first nature is the imaginary nature. All the qualities that we impose on everything that we see— the smoothness of the cup, the softness of the air, all of that constructed world is the imaginary.

When a person is able to see the dependent arising of everything, that is the second nature—the dependent nature.  When that person –  paradigmatically in meditation: the ‘yoga’ in Yogacara means meditation –  is able to experience in their being this interdependent arising, not as something external, not as something thought, but something involving all of them, all of their experience, there’s a potential pivot to the third nature.

And that third nature is Suchness, which arguably, although it’s not stated in this way, is congruent with and supportive of the gradual shift towards the universality of Buddha Nature, although ironically the School fell out of favour in China because of Xuanzang’s denial of this. 

Alongside all this, there’s a change in what’s meant by Buddha Nature. Originally Buddha Nature, Buddhahood was something to be achieved in the future, after a great deal of effort and practice. We can see that, on the surface anyway, in the text of The Lotus Sutra, where predictions were made of people being buddhas in future lifetimes.

But saying that everything has Buddha Nature or that Buddha Nature is everything changes it fundamentally.  

Rather than thinking of Buddha Nature or Buddhahood as being, as it were, a picture of the biggest wave in the ocean, each living wave, now, is the full manifestation of the ocean.   

The Chinese Zen masters are particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation because they use apparently ordinary, down to earth language. A good example of that is Master Baso’s famous expression “ordinary mind is the way”. He doesn’t mean that your farting, meandering, karmic mind is the way, he doesn’t mean ‘everything is Zen’, or any of the other peculiar western formulations. 

To understand this expression we have to see that wrapped up within that expression is the whole golden age of Chinese Tang Dynasty Buddhism, and specifically the development of the Tiantai and Huayan schools, which in due course created Zen. 

When he says ‘mind’, we need to understand that mind means everything. It is not just your mind, it is everything. And that everything has two aspects: a phenomenal aspect, and a thusness aspect.

 The metaphor which the Chinese use to describe this, or at least one of the metaphors, is the metaphor of the waves and ocean. The ordinary fluctuating mind is seen as being like the waves, and if you are just at the level of the waves, if you are, as it were, perpetually drowning in your own waves, then that is all you are going to see. What we need to understand is that the waves –  individual phenomena – are not separate from the ocean – thusness – and in seeing that we can see that our ordinary mind is not something that we need to get rid of, but which needs to be reconfigured as part of a greater space. We don’t need to change our position, we just need to widen our view.

In meditation, if I am simply focused on my ruminating mind, that is entirely different from understanding the depth of the ocean and the height of the sky. It is entirely different from understanding that underlying my fluctuating ordinary mind is the depth of the ocean, the depth of my spine, the depth of this body, practicing. Underlying this fluctuating mind is the sense of this body practicing, this head without conscious effort reaching upwards, and this vast space of emptiness within above and around us, just like the ocean has great depth and the sky has great height. 

The Huayan school used the metaphor to show the interdependence of all things: there is no ‘ocean’ existing prior to or behind the waves, just as there is no emptiness apart from form. Each wave, extending everywhere, is the whole ocean. Because it is the whole ocean, each wave is all waves. Each wave is the pivot around which the whole ocean turns.

Your life is not nothing.

In the Courtyard of Master Joshu’s temple was a cypress tree. One day, a monk asked Joshu

“Does the cypress tree have Buddha nature?”

Joshu replied, “It does”

The monk asked, “When does it acquire Buddha nature?”

Joshu said, “ When the sky falls to the ground”

The inclination is to interpret his answer as something like this:

Buddha nature isn’t an attribute that can be acquired by individual things, or people. It is a mythopoetic way of describing the dynamic wholeness of all being.
So, it’s not that you, or anyone else, has Buddha nature. Rather, you and everything else are Buddha nature. In Joshu’s answer, “sky” means emptiness, so what Joshu is pointing to is different from an abstract understanding (and hence separation) of form and emptiness. Rather, it is the real experience of both, interwoven in the fabric of full dynamic functioning, or dependent origination, or Buddha nature.

But I think an interpretation like this falls into a classic zen error. We purport to debunk and leave the house of Buddhist theory, but actually never leave, remaining within a weird zen shaped annexe, perhaps called “concrete reality”, perhaps called something else.

We can’t understand practice through theory, but we can understand and explain theory through practice. But without theory, we would never start practice. But it’s not a catch 22, it’s a spiral.

In the exchange, when is the “When”?

When we practice. In your actual experience, when you are sitting, isn’t it as if your face, your head, your torso are hanging in space? And isn’t it as if your pelvis, your legs, your feet are part of the great ground? And isn’t this the sky falling to the ground? The ground falling to the sky?