What has Buddha-Nature?

Summary

This talk is a Dharma teaching delivered in the Still Water Meditation Hall during the Winter Retreat 2013-2014, beginning with a chant invoking the Bodhisattva of deep listening, Avalokiteshvara, and the practice of collective mindfulness within the sangha. The opening emphasizes compassion, healing, and the wish to be embraced by a great compassionate presence that removes suffering and obstacles. The speaker then moves into a sustained philosophical explanation of Mahayana Buddhism, focusing on nonduality, interbeing, and the insight that Buddha and sentient beings are not separate entities. A central theme is that Buddha and sentient beings mutually depend on one another, just as lotus and mud cannot exist apart. The speaker uses this image repeatedly to explain dependent co-arising: a lotus is made of non-lotus elements, and a Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements. In the same way, a human being contains non-human elements such as minerals, vegetation, animals, water, air, and earth. The teaching insists that enlightenment does not erase the conditions that made it possible; rather, affliction, ignorance, and suffering are transformed into insight, happiness, and compassion. The speaker stresses that enlightenment is impermanent and must be cultivated continuously, just like a lotus must remain connected to mud and water. The talk also challenges common assumptions about the Buddha as a fixed human form. Drawing on the Diamond Sutra, the speaker warns against becoming attached to signs, forms, or images, including the idea that the Buddha must appear as a human being. The Buddha can be recognized in many forms: the earth, a rose, a cypress tree, a pebble, or any manifestation of peace, freedom, and mindful presence. The speaker extends this to the Earth itself, describing it as a female Buddha and a mother of all Buddhas. This broadens the notion of Buddhahood beyond anthropomorphic or gendered limitations and aligns with the teaching of signlessness. A practical section of the talk explains a guided meditation exercise: inviting the Buddha to breathe and sit. The speaker describes four progressive contemplations. First, one invites the Buddha to breathe and sit. Second, one recognizes that the Buddha is the gentle breathing and still sitting. Third, one sees the Buddha right here in the act of breathing and sitting. Fourth, one transcends the sense of a separate subject altogether, realizing that there is only breathing and only sitting, with no independent self doing them. This is presented as a direct practice of non-self and a way to erase the boundary between practitioner and Buddha. Peace, freedom, and stillness are identified as the living presence of the Buddha. The latter part of the talk shifts into a detailed explanation of the alaya-vijnana, or store consciousness, drawing on Buddhist psychology and the Thirty Verses tradition. The speaker explains that alaya receives and preserves seeds, bodily life, sensory capacities, names, images, and habit energies. It also manifests as body and environment, or locality, in ways that cannot be fully known intellectually. The talk distinguishes between individual and collective manifestations, using Plum Village as an example of a shared karmic environment shaped by collective seeds and affinities. The speaker notes that people gather according to karmic tendencies, whether in monastic life, music, or other communities, and that both body and environment arise together through karma and retribution. Throughout, the speaker returns to the practical purpose of the teaching: to help practitioners stop discriminating between opposites such as Buddha and sentient being, nirvana and samsara, self and non-self, animate and inanimate, or individual and collective. The conclusion is that one should not run away from suffering, but learn to use it as the mud from which lotus flowers grow. The talk ends by acknowledging the complexity of the topic and suggesting that enough has been said for one day, after a long exploration of Buddhist doctrine, meditation practice, and the lived reality of the sangha.