What is Buddha Nature

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 Stillwater Meditation Hall, Upper Hamlet, Plum Village · 1 December 2013 · talk 5 of 24

Illuminates: Buddha and sentient beings as non-dual (mud and lotus) · the Buddha is not limited to human form (the Diamond Sutra) · Mother Earth as Buddha · the “Invite the Buddha to breathe, to sit” practice (four stages → non-self) · Verse 3 of the Thirty Verses — the functions of ālaya: appropriation (seeds + body) and location (environment), individual and collective retribution (Verse 9), “beyond knowing.”

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[Opening chant / invocation.]

Dear Sangha, today is the 1st of December, 2013. We are in the Stillwater Meditation Hall, in the winter retreat 2013–2014.

Buddha and sentient beings are not two

In Christianity there is a long-debated question: is God a person or not? If God is not a person, how can we pray to God? At the end of the twentieth century there were theologians who said that although God is not a person, God is not less than a person. This is a complicated statement — “not a person, but not less than a person” — and it is a step of progress: God is not just a person.

In Buddhism we have the idea of sentient beings and Buddhas. Sentient beings are those who suffer, who are deluded; Buddhas are those who are enlightened and no longer suffer. Usually we discriminate between them, imagining that when we become a Buddha we are no longer a sentient being. But according to Mahayana Buddhism this is not right, because if there are no sentient beings, there are no Buddhas. Buddha and sentient beings are not two separate entities; one cannot exist without the other — just like the lotus and the mud: without the mud, there is no lotus.

This is easy to understand through interdependent co-arising. Look at a human being: we see elements that are non-human — minerals, water, air, vegetation, animals. Over time these gave rise to vegetation, then to animals, then to humans. If we take the minerals, vegetation, and animals out of a human, there is no human. So a human is also mineral, vegetation, and animal — because without these elements there is no human. To say that once we are human we are no longer mineral, vegetation, or animal is not true: these non-human elements are still in us.

It is the same with the Buddha. Although the Buddha is enlightened, the non-Buddha elements are still in the Buddha. What elements? Looking deeply, we see sentient beings in the Buddha — suffering that has been transformed, afflictions and delusions that have been transformed. Just as a lotus, though already a flower, is made of non-lotus elements like mud, and if it wants to continue being a lotus it must keep the mud in it — so the Buddha, to continue being a Buddha, keeps these elements. The ecosystem and the human being are not two separate things. When there are no longer sentient beings, there are no longer Buddhas. So we should not imagine that becoming a Buddha means saying goodbye forever to sentient beings. “Buddha-and-sentient-being” is a non-dualistic insight — like the left and the right: as long as the left is there, the right is there.

Even enlightenment is impermanent

In the Buddha there is happiness, there are the elements of enlightenment (bodhi). Enlightenment is the opposite of affliction; insight the opposite of ignorance; happiness the opposite of suffering. But the insight that comes from our practice is that everything is impermanent — not only suffering, but happiness too; not only affliction, but enlightenment too. If we do not cultivate our enlightenment, it can fade and become affliction again. So do not think that once enlightened we always stay enlightened. Sometimes we have an insight very clearly but don’t make use of it, and we act as if we had no insight at all. So the Buddha is impermanent and non-self; to continue being a Buddha, one has to keep making use of the elements of suffering, affliction, and ignorance to cultivate happiness, enlightenment, and insight.

This raises a simple but important question: once we become a Buddha, do we still need to practice? Ninety-nine percent of us enter Buddhism thinking that once we become a Buddha, there is no more need. But the truth is that the Buddha continues to practice — walking meditation, sitting meditation — because happiness, enlightenment, and insight are impermanent. Just as a lotus, having become a lotus, cannot push away the mud and the water but must live with them, so enlightenment must live with ignorance.

The Buddha is not only a human form

The Buddha Shakyamuni was a human, and humans appeared on this planet very late — among all the species, humans arose much later. Does that mean there was no enlightenment, no insight, no happiness before the Buddha? There was — but in a different form. So can the Buddha be recognized in a form other than a human? In the Diamond Sutra it is very clear: if you try to see me through form, or seek me through sound, you are on a wrong path and will never see the Tathāgata. If we get caught in the sign or form of a human, we will not find the Buddha, because the Buddha is not only in human form.

So the earth can be a Buddha, because in the earth there is happiness, enlightenment, and insight — and this Buddha is a mother. The Buddha is not only a man. In Christianity God is thought of as a man; but in Buddhism we also have a female Buddha. The earth is a female Buddha, our mother — the mother of all Buddhas in human form, and of Buddhas in other forms too. A cypress or a rose is also a Buddha, and gives a dharma talk — teaching impermanence, non-self, the noble truths. So we can see the Buddha in many forms: in a rose, in a cypress tree, in Mother Earth, in the sun [Vairocana Buddha]. If we are not caught in form or sign, it is easy to recognize the Buddhas.

We tend to discriminate — we like the lotus and dislike the mud — but without the mud there is no lotus. There is Buddha-nature in the lotus flower, and also in the mud. As the Heart Sutra says, there is no defilement and no immaculateness, no increasing and no decreasing. So we have to look with the eyes of signlessness, and then we recognize the Buddha in many forms — in a lotus, a rose, a pepper. In the sutra the Buddha says all sentient beings have Buddha-nature.

Before we Touch the Earth before the Buddha, we are taught to look deeply and see the Buddha’s interdependent arising. We say: “Dear Buddha, your nature is emptiness; you are made of non-Buddha elements, just as a lotus is made of non-lotus elements; thanks to the afflictions, enlightenment is possible.” We see the nature of emptiness in the Buddha, and that the Buddha contains everything — not only insight, enlightenment, compassion, and happiness. And though we are sentient beings, we have the Buddha in us, and we are in the Buddha. With this insight we can truly touch the Buddha, and there is real communication between the Buddha and us. But if we see ourselves as separate from the Buddha — us here, the Buddha there — then Touching the Earth is not very beneficial, and we can never become a Buddha. To see ourselves as separate is the dualistic, discriminative view.

The Diamond Sutra is very clear that there are four notions we must transcend: the notion of self, of person (the human being), of sentient being, and of lifespan. Looking at the self, we must see the elements of non-self; looking at the human, the non-human; looking at sentient beings, the non-sentient. If we let go of the idea of lifespan, we see that we are not confined to these hundred years. And there is a boundary to dissolve between the animate and the inanimate — between, say, wind and air on one side and animals and humans on the other. A French poet [Lamartine] asked: “Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?” How do we know the rocks and stones do not suffer, that they do not need one another? If we study anthropology, we know that at first there were only earth, rocks, and minerals; and from that “primal soup” came the single-celled organism, and from it more complex organisms. So it is from the minerals and water that life arose. The things we call inanimate — the photon, the neutron — have a kind of knowledge, a kind of insight. A corn seed: we cannot really call it inanimate, because it has knowledge in it. Put it in the soil, and within seven days it becomes a seedling, then produces leaves, flowers, and corn. So the corn is also animate — and we ourselves are made of “inanimate” things. There is no boundary between animate and inanimate; inanimate objects also have Buddha-nature. In Zen they ask whether a dog has Buddha-nature — and we also know that a rock has Buddha-nature.

“Invite the Buddha to breathe, to sit”

So we have to find a way to transcend the idea that a Buddha is only a human. There is a guided meditation that invites the Buddha to breathe, to sit. Thay practices this a great deal. Because the Buddha is not a self, we invite the Buddha to breathe and to sit: when we breathe peacefully, there is the Buddha; when we have freedom, there is the Buddha.

• First: Invite the Buddha to breathe; invite the Buddha to sit. We give our spine to the Buddha to sit, our lungs to the Buddha to breathe. I myself don’t have to make the effort. The Buddha sits very upright and still, and breathes very gently and mindfully. We pause for a few minutes so that the Buddha can become one with us.
• Second: The Buddha is breathing; the Buddha is sitting. The Buddha is able to breathe gently and sit stably. This practice is very beneficial; if it suits us, we continue with it.
• Third: The Buddha is the gentle breathing; the Buddha is the still sitting — I am the gentle breathing; I am the still sitting. If we look for the Buddha outside this gentle breathing and still sitting, we cannot find the Buddha. The boundary between us and the Buddha is erased.
• Fourth: There is only the gentle breathing; there is only the still sitting. There is no one breathing, and no one sitting. This is the practice of non-self. We don’t need a subject to breathe or to sit. The wind blows — it doesn’t need someone to blow it; if it weren’t blowing, it wouldn’t be wind. The rain falls — if it weren’t falling, it wouldn’t be rain. There is no blower, no “rainer”; there is only the wind, only the rain. So there is only the breathing, only the sitting; no one who breathes, no one who sits — no self.

When we look at the earth, we see it is breathing gently and sitting still — so the earth is the Buddha. We don’t need to imagine the Buddha in human form. Where there is peace, there is the Buddha; the Buddha is not a subject. Peace is the breathing; peace is the sitting — for when we breathe gently and sit still, there is peace, and we need no separate subject to “have” peace.

So if we want to find a Buddha, we don’t need to go back to India twenty-six centuries ago, or to a temple to see a Buddha of concrete or copper. If we get caught in signs — that the Buddha must have the eighty marks — we are caught in signs of a Buddha. But if we sit still, breathe, calm ourselves gently, and generate joy, peace, and freedom, then the Buddha is there — a real Buddha, not one of copper or stone. And it is thanks to the afflictions, the dispersion, the suffering, the grief, that we generate the energy of peace and joy — as it is thanks to the mud that we can make the lotus flower. So we should not run away from afflictions and suffering: if we know how to make use of them, they become happiness, enlightenment, and insight.

So, after becoming a Buddha, do we still practice? Yes — because if we have happiness, enlightenment, and insight and don’t keep cultivating them, they slowly wither and die; we make use of suffering, affliction, and ignorance to cultivate them. In Mahayana Buddhism it is very clear that affliction is enlightenment, and nirvana is birth-and-death — nirvana and samsara cannot be separated, like the left and the right. If we think that once in nirvana we are no longer in samsara, we are caught in a dualistic view. When a Zen student asked his teacher, “Where can I look for nirvana?” the teacher said, “Look for nirvana in birth and death.” So our daily practice has to be realistic — with our steps, our breath, our mind, our speech — generating peace, joy, and happiness, using the elements of non-happiness and non-peace to cultivate them. We always use the mud to grow the lotus. We don’t run away from our suffering; where we fall down, there we stand up.

Verse 3 — the functions of store consciousness

Today we will learn how the ālaya functions. If you have the Thirty Verses, take them out — the third verse. Its translation reads: “Its appropriations and locality cannot be known intellectually.”

The key word is manifestation (vijñapti), which [the master] translated from the Sanskrit. Vijñapti means to manifest — to arise so that it can be recognized, manifested so that it can be seen. For example, a sister can draw, but looking at her we don’t see that talent; when she sits and draws a picture, the talent is manifested and we can see it. The Sanskrit prefix vi- carries the sense of to be seen, to be recognized, to be cognized. And the verse says that, in the case of store consciousness, this cannot be known. What is it that cannot be known? Three things, named together: the grasping/appropriation (upādāna) of, first, the seeds, and second, the body; and the location (sthāna), the environment. The third verse tells us that the manifestation of this appropriation and this location cannot be known intellectually.

So the eighth consciousness manifests, but its appropriation and its location are beyond our knowing.

What store consciousness appropriates: the seeds

First, store consciousness receives and maintains the seeds. “Store” means it receives the seeds, keeps them, and preserves them so they are not lost — as when we learn English or music, the seed goes in and is preserved. What are these seeds? They are of three kinds:

1. Seeds of signs / images. A young brother comes from Thailand whom we have never seen; now we see his form, his face — and this image falls into our store consciousness as a seed. The signs of everything — a cypress tree, a pigeon — fall into the store as images, and store consciousness holds them; at night, in our dreams, these images come back out.
2. Seeds of names. We see a cake — its form, its sign — but may not know what it is called. Names are also seeds, and usually an image goes together with its name. Seeing the face, we know the name. If a thing is encountered only once, the seed is weak and hard to remember; only after seeing the image and hearing the name many times does it become natural — then, seeing the face, we know the name without effort.
3. Seeds of discrimination (the habit-energy of distinguishing). This is the habit-energy (vāsanā) that makes us discriminate — this from that: the father is not the son, death is not birth, sentient beings are not Buddhas, Buddhas are not sentient beings. But in reality things are in one another and cannot be taken apart; out of habit we see them as separate — we don’t see that the right and the left contain each other. This habitual way of discriminating is itself a kind of seed we receive daily and maintain in store consciousness.

What store consciousness appropriates: the body

Second, store consciousness receives and maintains our body — the five sense organs — according to our karma and its retribution. This too is a manifestation of ālaya: without ālaya, the body is no longer a living body; without ālaya there are no functioning five organs, only a corpse with eyes, nose, and ears that no longer see, smell, or hear. The energy that maintains our life is the ālaya. So when there is contact, it is on the basis of ālaya’s manifestation that organ, object, and consciousness can come together [and give rise to feeling, joy, peace]. This appropriating-and-maintaining of the seeds and the body is called appropriation (upādāna).

The location: our environment, individual and collective

Third, ālaya manifests as location / place (sthāna) — the environment. If we have a body of five organs, we have an environment for it. According to our karma in the past, we have a connection with a particular place. For example, this is Plum Village, in the countryside of France. We have a collective karma, and certain seeds have brought us together here — this too is a manifestation of ālaya. We are not out in a big city or lost in the world; we have come together here to sit and breathe together. If we are happy practitioners, we continue to stay, because the place nourishes our joy, our brotherhood and sisterhood. But if someone among us dreams of another life, or wants to go out and have a family, the habit-energies, the seeds, can make that person give up this place and leave. So whether we continue to live in Plum Village or leave it is the work of karma — and this location, this space, has both a collective manifestation and an individual one. For us practitioners, our connection with and image of Plum Village is more lived and realistic; for friends who come only a week, the image is different; and there are people living in the surrounding village who have never come, with a different image again. So the place is collective — it belongs to everyone — and at the same time each of us has an individual experience of it.

The place we live in is created by our karma: the cause of karma brings about the fruit of retribution (vipāka). One fruit is called the proper retribution (janma / the “direct” fruit) — our body, our five organs; the other is the environmental retribution (bhājana / the “dependent” fruit) — the location, this place. Our body is in that environment, and the environment comes from the seeds planted in us. A young person not yet ordained has the seed of a monastic in them; if they meet the monks and nuns in our centres, conditions are right — the seed is watered, and they become a monastic. So we have this connection by which we seek out this place. Just as people on drugs find others who take drugs — “collective retribution,” collective karma — and people who love music come together, and those who feel discriminated against gather where they feel comfortable, so this location, this space, is really a collective manifestation of many people. In Plum Village we walk every day and eat vegan food, and that is also the location; people who love this continue in it all their lives. Perhaps in the past we planted the seeds and the conditions were there, and that is why we are here today. So the location is the environment, and it is a manifestation of ālaya — and it is not just my ālaya or your ālaya.

Does everyone, then, have a separate ālaya? According to the insight of interbeing in Mahayana Buddhism, individual and collective are a pair of opposites: looking at the individual we see the collective, and looking at the collective we see the individual. There is really nothing completely individual and nothing completely collective — we can only say there is more collective than individual, or more individual than collective. So we cannot say this ālaya is purely individual, separate, private. Even in a pepper or a leaf we can see the whole cosmos; though individual, it is collective.

Beyond knowing

So we have to render it: the manifestation of store consciousness — its appropriation (the seeds and the body) and its location (the environment) — cannot be seen, cannot be conceived, cannot be known, because it is beyond our knowing. It comes in a way that is miraculous; we don’t notice when it enters. A man sees a woman for the first time, her image enters him just once, and back home he cannot sleep — he didn’t want it to happen. This is Kim, who saw [Kiều] and immediately fell in love. So these seeds grow, and this receiving of seeds is beyond our knowing. Children in France from the age of zero to three or four don’t go to school, yet they speak French well, because they hear the grown-ups speak it — the language goes in in a way beyond our knowing. The hard disk of a computer we can understand, because we put the information in ourselves and search for it; but ālaya is beyond our knowing — both its receiving-and-maintaining and its environment are beyond our knowing.

So we make this correction to the English: its manifestation as appropriation and locality cannot be known intellectually. It goes into our store consciousness in a way we cannot grasp, and when it manifests, that too is beyond our knowing and beyond our speaking.

That is enough for today — otherwise you’ll have a headache.