BUDDHA NATURE AND BODHICHITTA
According to the mahayana, we are basically wretched, soaked in our own egotism, neurosis, and confusion, but at the same time we possess what is known as tathagatagarbha, or buddha nature. Tathagata means “one who has gone beyond.” It refers to the buddhas of the past, present, and future, who have all gone beyond fixation. Garbha means “womb”; so tathagatagarbha means the “womb or essence of one who has gone beyond,” or “buddha nature.” Just as milk has the possibility of producing butter, as human beings we have the possibility of producing enlightenment in ourselves. That basic fact or possibility was discovered by the Buddha, and it has been actualized and promulgated throughout the twenty-six hundred years of his reign. So at this point we know that all sentient beings possess buddha nature.
Bodhichitta is a natural state of being awake, tender, and genuine. You feel that you are capable of opening yourself up to others, and you can express tenderness and affection to others and to yourself. Traditionally, it is said that even the most vicious animals are capable of expressing affection to their young. So tenderness is not a foreign thing; it is definitely inherent. You might say that the whole world hates you, but that is not true. You might say that you are not capable of falling in love or being tender, but that is also not true. If you were not capable of such a thing, you would soon perish.
Tenderness is what keeps you functioning throughout your whole life. Tenderness makes you a genuine and lovable person. Tenderness is magnetic; it causes the softening up of your environment altogether. Tenderness brings about wakefulness in yourself and others. It is what inspires you to comb your hair and wear clothes. We often forget such simple logic, but because of tenderness, you are capable of talking to others and working with them. You are capable of opening and closing a door, or taking a walk in the fresh air. You are capable of smiling. Those are all aspects of tenderness or bodhichitta.
Bodhichitta means the “heart of awakened mind,” but buddha nature is more than the heart. It means that your whole makeup, your whole nature, is based on buddhahood. The idea of buddha nature has been condemned by some as a distortion of Buddhist philosophy because it could be regarded as a form of ego, but I don’t think that particular charge makes sense. We could say very simply that bodhichitta is like a heart transplant: it is as if a new heart is being transplanted into you, something better than you had before. But you already have buddha nature, which is more important. It is your essence, which goes beyond your heart alone.
In another analogy, the difference between bodhichitta and buddha nature is described as approaching a cloud from the city’s point of view, or from the sun’s point of view. People in the city would say that the sun is behind the cloud, and the sun would say that the city is behind the cloud. That difference of perspective is an interesting and important point. When city people see the sun disappear behind a cloud, they need reassurance that the sun is not going to go away forever. They need to know that it is not going to go from being more and more clouded over to finally becoming completely nonexistent. That is the basic point of transplanting bodhichitta: it reassures people that the sun is always there, even if it is behind a cloud. The concept of buddha nature is the sun’s point of view, as the sun unveils itself to the city one cloud after another. So bodhichitta and buddha nature work together.
The mahayana symbol of indestructibility is a tablet, and in the vajrayana, the symbol of indestructibility is a vajra, or scepter. That tablet is buddha nature, which consists of both prajna and karuna. It is like the monolith in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. That symbol of the monolith was somebody’s brilliant coincidence. Very mysteriously, in that film somebody clicked into possibilities of human nature that cannot be captured, but are manifested even from the ape level. That monolith is precisely the notion of bodhichitta or tathagatagarbha. It is the soft spot, whose meaning is monolithic. So a basic monumental experience occurs, which is yours, which is inside you. But when you try to lay your hand on that experience or to touch it, it does not happen. You cannot grasp it. Such an experience is unreachable; it goes and comes at the same time.
Bodhichitta, or buddha nature, is monumental and always there, like the tablet. It is indestructible wakefulness. Buddha nature is based on tenderness toward others. We all have some kind of tenderness toward others, otherwise this planet earth would have dried up a long time ago. People would be killing each other, or simply not caring for one other. However, this planet earth has been able to continue for many billions of years. The reason for that is quite magical: it is a result of buddha nature. Without any doubt, there is buddha nature everywhere.
On the whole, in spite of our nastiness and aggression, we still always project warmth and compassion toward others. You can argue otherwise and try to refute this fact. Nonetheless, if the world were all that aggressive and terrifying, if no one related with sympathy and love, we would not have anything at all. People do not create businesses or go to work just to survive or to make money alone. Let us give everybody a little bit more credit. It is time to respect the world. We cannot say that people do not have gentleness and sympathy in them. They might be quite shocked if we told them so, but it is the case that there is always a certain amount of individual warmth and tenderness taking place. That is why the teaching of the Buddha, or buddhadharma, is seeping into the world. It is because of its integrity and its egolessness.
The possibility of realizing buddha nature comes from mindfulness training. When you are eating, for instance, it comes from knowing how to hold your bowl, how to pick up your chopsticks, how to eat properly with good posture. By developing mindfulness of eating, you are actually doing yourself a favor. You no longer need to eat aggressively or just gobble everything up.1
Sometimes you might flop, but even then you do not lose your buddha nature. It is always there. If you were a dog, would you lose your claws when you went to sleep? When you flop you don’t lose your buddha nature, but you do lose your bodhichitta awareness. You lose your rays, but you do not lose your sun. Bodhichitta is in your heart always, but when you are sloppy you do not communicate with it. You find something else to entertain yourself with. But you can always step back and reconnect with your bodhichitta. You could take an upright posture and expand yourself, then you could conduct your business. Working with bodhichitta has to be a natural process; you cannot strategize it on the spot. It is a question of how much at home you feel in your world. If you make your world homey, then you have no problem. You find that everything is hospitable. Even if you went to a hectic place like the New York Stock Exchange, with all the frantic people running around, you could sit down and make a decision about your investment.
When you develop full mindfulness-awareness like the Buddha, you automatically become a king or queen. In fact, one epithet for the Buddha is vijaya, meaning the “Victorious One.” The image of a king or queen with a scepter signifies that you are always going to work, from the beginning to the end, for the sake of sentient beings. Following the example of the Buddha, you are going to be a leader of the six realms.2 On one hand, the Buddhist nontheistic approach is based on the notion of not having a ruler or a god to worship. On the other hand, the medieval symbolism of a monarch continues in the Buddhist tradition. That notion of becoming a king or queen might raise the problem of egotism, but holding on to your ego is the complete opposite of the Buddhist nontheistic tradition.
Basically speaking, the starting point of the mahayana is being capable of extending love and affection to yourself. You begin by being gentle to yourself and not punishing yourself. In the process of becoming gentle to yourself, you first need to have a good understanding of shamatha. Next you need to have good vipashyana and proper postmeditation experience. Finally you look at yourself and find that you are not as bad as you thought. In fact, you find that you are a quite delightful and worthwhile person. That is the three-step, how-to-like-yourself technique.
THE FORMING OF THE SAMSARIC WORLD
The beginning of the nightmare we call “samsara” is stupidity and the willingness to dwell in ignorance. From that, we start to spin samsara. We spin out the twelve nidanas and all the rest of it.3 The original split took place already, and we continue to pile things up, one after another. Our stupidity and bewilderment become very comfortable and easy for us, so we keep piling up passion and aggression, this and that, all sorts of things. Then all these things begin to bounce around, and we begin to evolve in this world. We try to fight others or to seduce them. We dedicate our lives to warfare, hoping to perpetuate our existence by destroying others. That process is what is called samsara.
But the original split can be recovered. By tracing things back to the original split and beyond, you can actually experience who you are and what you are, right at the beginning—or who you are not. There is a quality of wakefulness that has no fixation and no sense of entity. It is egoless. We could call this genes of wakefulness, or genes of emptiness. Wakefulness is not a game or a technique. It is clear and spacious, very basic and ordinary, with no self-consciousness.
The Buddha grew up in the samsaric world, just like ourselves. He realized the nature of confusion and made his journey back, undoing his samsaric world until finally he reached square one. The Buddha followed the path all the way to the final achievement of enlightenment. The term enlightened genes could seem to imply that you merely have potential buddhahood, rather than already having within you a fully realized buddha. But the teachers of our lineage say that buddha nature is like having a statue of Buddha in your heart, fully developed in all its faculties and possessing all the enlightened marks. Although, like the Buddha, you are treading on the path, you possess buddha nature even before you become a student.
STAINED AND UNSTAINED BUDDHA NATURE
There are two types of enlightened genes or buddha nature: stained or conditional buddha nature, and unstained or unconditional buddha nature.
Stained or Conditional Buddha Nature
In the first type, stained buddha nature, you are yearning toward wakefulness, so it is similar to relative bodhichitta. You yearn to develop gentleness, softness, and virtuousness. At this level, you simply are guessing that you will be good one day. You don’t actually acknowledge that your existence is all that good—you just guess that you are good, guess that you are beautiful, guess that you have possibilities.
Stained tathagatagarbha is deliberately manufactured, like relative bodhichitta. If your grandmother told you that you should enter the mahayana and become a bodhisattva, you might become religious about bodhisattva-ism. But that would just be conceptualization or religiosity, not quite the true thing.
Stained or conditional buddha nature is called “conditional” because although even dogs, cats, and worms possess intrinsic buddha nature, that potentiality is covered over by samsaric veils. Conditional buddha nature is not discovered directly; it is discovered indirectly by uncovering these veils.
There are said to be five types of students, depending upon the thickness of their fog, veil, or blanket. These could be referred to as the five veils, or five types of genes: immediate, pratyekabuddha, distant, dubious, and very distant.4 The first type of gene, immediate, refers to people who aspire to the mahayana, and who have a sense of compassion, openness, and celebration. The second type, pratyekabuddha, refers to people who strive for personal salvation and have been able to cut through their own egotism and attain the first level of egolessness.
The third type, distant, refers to shravakas. For shravakas, as for pratyekabuddhas, personal salvation is important, but the veil is much thicker.5
The fourth type, dubious, refers to people who are sometimes able to cut through their resistance and sometimes not. There is a quality of uncertainty and gullibility. You are questioning life, trying to find the meaning of life, to find truth, but it is uncertain whether you will be pulled off course or whether your understanding will be provoked. The fifth type is known as cutoff, or very distant. For such people, the possibility of realizing their buddha nature is cut off, but they are not completely cut off, just very distant. You may be preoccupied with your lifestyle or livelihood, or you may have never heard of the dharma. You have a long way to go to cut through the thick fog that exists between you and your realization.
In discussing the five veils, we are not evaluating buddha nature itself. Enlightened genes are pure, and capable of expressing their intrinsic nature. They are only considered to be conditional, to be good or bad, because of their covering, their particular neurosis or fog. So nobody is fundamentally condemned as completely bad. The point is that the thickness of the veil depends upon how much we try to trick the world and cover up our deception.
Unstained or Unconditional Buddha Nature
The second type of tathagatagarbha is unstained or spotless tathagatagarbha. It is like ultimate bodhichitta. At this level, your notion of awakened essence is not just as a potential, but as the fully grown existence of tathagatagarbha that is already in you. The difference between spotless and stained tathagatagarbha is that in the spotless approach, having seen that you have the potential of wakefulness, you do a double take. You think, “I have possibilities of being spotless. But wait a minute! Maybe it is not just a possibility. Maybe I am already utterly spotless.” With spotless tathagatagarbha, you recognize the very powerful and vivid possibility of tathagatagarbha in you already, free from case histories and habitual patterns as to what a good person should be. Independent of all that, such a thing as tathagatagarbha could exist in you really, utterly, and fully. You begin to realize that cultivating tathagatagarbha is not the point—acknowledging fully the existence of tathagatagarbha is more like it.
Tathagatagarbha is based on gentleness and the absence of twofold ego, the ego of self or individuality, and the ego of dharmas or phenomena. It is based on compassion, but not the kind we might expect from the reference point of ego. Tathagatagarbha is pure because it does not refer back to memories or to a conceptual case history of the past. With pure tathagatagarbha, there is no reference point to the past or the would-be future. It is very open. Since it is without fear, you do not need to defend anything at all.
What pushes you from just feeling that tathagatagarbha is a possibility to realizing that tathagatagarbha is an actuality, is trust in your own intuition and trust in your teacher, your spiritual friend. When that begins to happen, a lot of unfolding takes place. So you jump first to the possibility of tathagatagarbha, and then you begin to realize the actuality of tathagatagarbha. In Buddhism, nobody is expected to do a perfect job. People begin as amateurs, and then build up. There is no problem with that; nobody is expected to be absolutely good at the beginning. In fact, trying to do so is a form of theism. According to our philosophy of nontheism, human conditions are taken into consideration.6 We include people’s inadequacies.
Unconditional buddha nature is spontaneous. It is not regarded as anybody’s product. Such a mind cannot be produced by parents or by two other minds—mind is simply mind. Unconditional buddha nature is beginningless. It has already occurred nowhere; therefore, it has occurred everywhere. According to the vajrayana, at the beginning there was a split into two categories: confusion and wakefulness. But at the same time, there was no split. The beginning occurred because there was self-existing energy where things happen very straightforwardly. According to both the mahayana and vajrayana, samsaric confusion and chaos are just a gust of wind that swirls over our wakefulness. That wakefulness is going on all the time, right from the beginning. From where does it come?
From nowhere. It is just wakefulness, simple and straightforward.
Fundamental enlightened mind or essence exists in us all the time. It is there right at the beginning, although there is no beginning. Before any kind of perception occurs, wakefulness is already there—beyond concept, beyond limitation, beyond anything measurable. We can all awaken: that is the hope and the potential. That self-existing potential has the capability of proclaiming and propagating the enlightened dharma because it has no beginning, and no time when it actually took place.
Unconditional buddha nature is beyond our conceptualized mind’s measure. In that way, it is similar to the notion of dharmata. Dharmata means “dharma-ness,” or the “isness of dharma.” Mahayana is a vast space, a vast experience, but when we realize the vastness of it, we begin to feel that we are being squished. We ask, “How am I going to survive? How am I going to breathe my air?” That experience, which is both vast and claustrophobic, is dharmata.
1. Trungpa Rinpoche placed great emphasis on mindful eating. In the 1980 Vajradhatu Seminary, Trungpa Rinpoche introduced his students to the practice of oryoki, a formal meal ritual he adapted from the Zen tradition. Since that time, oryoki has continued to be a component of seminaries and of group meditation retreats such as dathüns (one-month-long practice intensives). For more on oryoki and mindful eating, see appendix 2, “The Practice of Oryoki.”
2. The samsaric world is said to comprise six realms of existence: the god realm, the jealous god realm, the human realm, the animal realm, the hungry ghost realm, and the hell realm. For more on the realms, see volume 1 of the Profound Treasury, chapter 9, “The Painful Reality of Samsara.”
3. The twelve nidanas refers to the chain of interdependent origination that fuels the karmic patterning of samsaric existence. For more on the twelve nidanas and karmic conditioning, see volume 1 of the Profound Treasury, chapter 9, “The Painful Reality of Samsara.”
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 5