Buddha-nature in all beings

The Tathagatagarbha sutras, appearing in India from around the third century, teach that all sentient beings contain the womb or embryo of a Buddha. Their characteristic mode is imagery rather than argument: gold buried in filth, a lamp inside a covered jar, a treasure under a poor man's house, honey guarded by bees, a royal embryo carried by a destitute woman. In each the valuable thing is already fully present and merely obscured, and awakening is uncovering rather than construction.

The doctrine answered a real question. If beings are empty and driven by conditions, what accounts for the possibility of awakening at all, and why should anyone believe it is available to them? Buddha-nature supplies a positive answer where emptiness gives a negative one, and it did so in a register accessible to ordinary practitioners.

In East Asia it became foundational rather than supplementary. The Chinese reception, mediated by the influential treatise known as the Awakening of Faith, made Buddha-nature the ground of Chan, Tiantai, Huayan and Pure Land alike. Chan's conviction that awakening can be sudden follows directly: if the nature is already present, no gradual accumulation is strictly required to produce it. Pure Land's assurance that the incapable are not excluded rests on the same base. Nichiren's teaching that Buddhahood is attainable in this very body draws on the Lotus Sutra's related claim of universal potential. Chinese and Japanese thinkers extended the doctrine further than Indian sources had, to grass, trees and the land itself.

Zen's best-known koan turns on it: asked whether a dog has Buddha-nature, Zhaozhou answers wu, no, in flat contradiction of the doctrine every questioner knew, and the contradiction is the point.

Buddhism denies atman, a permanent unchanging self. Some Buddha-nature texts describe what is within as permanent, blissful, self and pure, using precisely the four terms the earlier tradition had rejected. The Mahaparinirvana Sutra does this deliberately. The tension is not an outsider's invention; it is internal, and Buddhist thinkers have worked on it for most of two millennia.

The main lines of resolution are three. Buddha-nature is potential rather than an existing entity, so nothing permanent is asserted. Buddha-nature is emptiness stated positively, the mind's lack of inherent defilement described in affirmative language for the encouragement of practitioners; this is the standard Tibetan Gelug reading, and it treats the affirmative texts as provisional in meaning rather than definitive. Or Buddha-nature is the mind's luminous nature, a claim about the character of awareness rather than about a possessed thing, which some trace to an early canonical passage describing the mind as luminous and defiled only by adventitious stains.

Tibetan Buddhism divides sharply here. The shentong or emptiness-of-other view, associated with the Jonang school and influential in parts of Kagyu and Nyingma, holds that the awakened nature is empty of everything extrinsic but not empty of its own qualities. The rangtong view holds that it is empty in the same way as everything else. The Jonang position was suppressed politically in seventeenth-century Tibet, which indicates the stakes.

The comparative temptation is to read Buddha-nature as a soul, or as the divine spark of Christian and Platonic mysticism, or as atman in Advaita. Buddhist commentators from Indian scholiasts to modern teachers have resisted all three, and a reader who wants to understand the doctrine on its own terms should note that the resistance is itself a large part of the tradition's literature on the subject.