Buddha-nature

The sun behind the clouds is a common metaphor for buddha-nature.

Buddha-nature is the basic nature of the buddhas, which is the same as the basic nature of all sentient beings (sattva). Because of this buddha-nature, all beings have the potential to attain buddhahood.

The difference between ordinary sentient beings and the buddhas is that a buddha has recognized his or her basic nature and ordinary beings have not. Hence, from this perspective, the goal of Buddhist practice is to peel away the veils that prevent us from seeing our true nature, and allow our buddha nature to shine forth.

A common metaphor for buddha-nature is that of the sun (or moon) hidden behind the clouds. The sun represents our basic nature, and the clouds represent veils that prevent us from recognizing our own nature. These veils are often described in terms of cognitive and emotional obscurations. Caught up in our conceptual thinking (prapañca) and afflictive emotions (kleshas), we are unable to recognize our true nature, which is a fundamental core of goodness, wisdom, and compassion.

Buddha-nature is a core concept in the Sanskrit Mahayana tradition, that has significantly influenced the view and practice of both East Asian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism.

The English term "Buddha-nature" is actually used to translate a group of related Sanskit terms, such as tathāgatagarbha, tathatā, buddhadhātu, etc. While these terms have different shades of meaning, they all share a core sense that all beings have a true nature, and the potential to recognize that true nature and thus attain buddhahood.

What is buddha-nature?

The capacity for enlightment

The Tsadra editors state:

Buddha-nature is the capacity for enlightenment and freedom present in every being, a fundamental core of goodness, wisdom, and compassion that is hidden by clouds of ignorance—so hidden in fact that we might never even suspect its presence. It is like the sun that continues to shine regardless of the clouds that may cover it. By clearing away those clouds of greed, anger, and selfishness we uncover a state of perfection that is, and always has been, our own true nature.

Although it may be difficult to completely overcome all our limitations and clear away those clouds, the fact that our nature is fundamentally the same as a buddha's is what makes the whole path to enlightenment possible. We already have everything we need to begin walking a path that leads to true happiness. We simply need to have confidence in the presence of our buddha-nature and the courage to begin the journey to uncover it.

Everyone has it

The Tsadra editors state:

Everyone has buddha-nature. The only difference between us and an enlightened being such as a Buddha is that a Buddha recognizes this nature and the rest of us do not. The goal of Buddhist practice is to allow our true nature to shine forth. We may not be perfect buddhas yet, but we have the capacity to develop wisdom and compassion and free ourselves from selfishness, greed, and hatred. Buddhist teachings and practices are dedicated to revealing our true nature by cultivating the proper outlook and behaviour, and by ceasing the negative habits that cause dissatisfaction and suffering.

Luminous nature of mind

The Tsadra editors state:

All Buddhist traditions claim that the nature of our mind is luminous - that is to say, the natural state of our mind is free, open, and pure awareness. Buddha-nature refers to this pure, natural, and luminous state of our consciousness which is free from any duality or defilement. All beings are said to possess buddha-nature, which is what makes enlightenment possible. The myriad Buddhist practices, from quiet sitting meditation to visualization of deities, chanting, and yogic endeavors are diverse methods to shake off the temporary obscurations which veil this nature and bring out the mind's natural perfection.

Although the teachings related to buddha-nature are vast and the ideas manifest throughout Tibetan Buddhist literature, there is a single core text for the Tibetan tradition, which is called The Treatise on the Ultimate Continuum or the Sublime Continuum in English... and often referred to as the Gyü Lama or the 'Uttaratantra. In Western scholarship it has become known as the Ratnagotravibhāga. This text was originally composed in Sanskrit and translated into Tibetan sometime in the eleventh century, and many commentaries followed from many traditions right up to present day.

[...]

Beyond the sun always shining behind the clouds, two other metaphors are traditionally used to describe buddha-nature: a golden statue encased in muck and the seed of a mango tree. The first suggests that our buddha-nature is already perfect and only needs to be revealed in order to manifest our enlightenment. The second presents buddha-nature as a potential that must be cultivated in order to attain enlightenment. A third, less common interpretation is that we somehow produce buddhahood and thus acquire buddha-nature at a certain stage of religious accomplishment. These three models—disclosure, transformation, and production—are used by different traditions to define buddha-nature and describe the methods to fully actualize enlightenment.

Not all Buddhist traditions are comfortable with language that describes buddha-nature as the mind's fundamental state, suspecting that such descriptions promote the idea that buddha-nature is some kind of abiding individual self (atman). The Buddha, of course, famously taught that such an idea of a self is wrong, a delusion we create but which causes us suffering. However, buddha-nature is not taught as an individual self but more like the natural characteristic of mind, akin to wet being the natural characteristic of water. Some Buddhist philosophers have rejected buddha-nature simply because it uses positive language. They maintain that ultimate reality cannot be described by language because language is limited by dualism (self and other, good and bad, and so forth), whereas the ultimate is nondual. Such philosophers will only say what the ultimate is not—not permanent, not individualistic, not ignorant, and so forth. The limitations of such a position for teaching about experience are obvious; how can one describe anything without language? Still others have argued that buddha-nature is misguided because it undermines the drive to improve ourselves, as though we must think of ourselves as bereft of good qualities in order to become better people...

In Indian and Tibetan traditions, philosophers have also debated whether buddha-nature is a teaching to take literally or if it was meant to promote and encourage the student to move in the right direction. Early scriptural evidence in fact points to the provisional interpretation: buddha-nature was offered to help those who were discouraged by the difficult philosophical teachings of emptiness or by the daunting project of attaining enlightenment. Most teachers, however, take the position that the mind's natural luminosity is self-evident and need not be explained as a rhetorical trick. They maintain that if the mind were not already enlightened by nature, then enlightenment would have to be produced. This would contradict the definition of ultimate reality—that is, nirvāṇa—as unproduced and unconditioned.

Further information:

• Buddha nature home, Buddha Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative

Nine similes for buddha nature

Further information: Nine similes for tathāgatagarbha

Nine similes for tathāgatagarbha are identified in the literature on tathāgatagarbha and buddha-nature. These are also commonly referred to as the "nine similes for buddha-nature." These similes were first presented in the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, and they were elaborated upon in the Ratnagotravibhāga and other commentaries.

In brief, these nine similes are:

1) a buddha in a decaying lotus, 2) honey amid bees, 3) kernels in their husks, 4) gold in filth, 5) a treasure in the earth, 6) a sprout and so on from a small fruit, 7) an image of the victor in a tattered garment, 8) royalty in the womb of a destitute woman, and 9) a precious statue in clay.

For detailed explanations of these similes, see:

• Nine Similes for Tathāgatagarbha, Buddha Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative (excerpt from Samsara, Nirvana and Buddha Nature by the Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron)
• The Nine Similes, Buddha Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative

History of buddha-nature theory

Alex Gardner states:

The theory of tathāgatagarbha—most commonly, if not perfectly, translated into English as "buddha-nature"—is generally thought by scholars to have first appeared around the third or fourth century CE and possibly as early as the second. Many Tibetan and Chinese scholiasts found justification for the ideas in various passages in the Pāli Canon, such as this from the Aṅguttaranikāya Sutta: "Luminous, monks, is this mind, but sometimes it is defiled by adventitious defilements. . . . sometimes it is free from adventitious defilements." The Vinaya contains a famous story in which the Buddha sends his gaze over all existence and perceives sentient beings as lotuses rooted in deep mud; the metaphor is taken as pertaining to the buddha-nature of all beings, destined as we are to attain perfectly pure enlightenment.

Traditional and modern scholars debate how much of a link can be found between early Pāli references to "luminosity" and buddha-nature. Mainstream Pāli Buddhism considered consciousness to be one of the five skandhas, the building blocks of conditioned existence. Early exegesis of luminosity passages in the scriptures seems to suggest that they were not, in fact, teaching that the mind is naturally pure or that it preexists the skandhas, but only that it has the potential to be made pure. A related concept is bhavaṅga mind, meaning the substratum of consciousness that represents mind in its inactive state. This does not appear originally to have been intended as a permanent subconscious; at the moment the mind becomes active, bhavaṅga is cut off and the active mind (vīthicitta) takes over. Still, some scholars have pointed to the concept as a forerunner to the notion of luminosity.

Although over the centuries Chinese and Tibetan scholiasts have categorized the concept of buddha-nature as either Yogācāra or Madhyamaka, there is sufficient reason to believe that the tathāgatagarbha theory developed independently: it is a cataphatic doctrine (that is, it uses positive language to describe the nature of reality), which distinguishes it from the apophatic approach of Madhyamaka; and it asserts that all sentient beings have an equal capacity to awaken, which contradicts the basic Yogācāra doctrine of different potentials for enlightenment. Instead, the rise of the doctrine was likely a result of Buddhist theorists grappling with long-standing core Buddhist conundrums such as the nature of mind; how to use language to describe what is by definition beyond the reach of language; how nirvāṇa, which is unconditioned and perfect, can arise out of saṃsāra; and how to make sense of various yogic experiences.

Further information:

• Gardner, Alex (2019), A History of Buddha-Nature Theory: The Literature and Traditions, Buddha Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative

Early appearances of the term tathāgatagarbha

Alex Gardner states:

Scholars currently debate the earliest (surviving) appearance of the term tathāgatagarbha. The term itself appears in a handful of early scriptures but without elaboration, suggesting that the term had been coined but its meaning had not yet been fleshed out. These are documented by Karl Brunnhölzl in When the Clouds Part:

Possibly the first appearance of the term tathāgatagarbha (though not in the sense in which it is used in the tathāgatagarbha sūtras) has been traced to the Mahāsāṃghika Ekottarikāgama (the Chinese recension of the Aṅguttara Nikāya):

If someone devotes himself to the Ekottarikāgama

Then he has the tathāgatagarbha.

Even if his body cannot exhaust defilements in this life

In his next life he will attain supreme wisdom.

The term is also used once in the Gaṇḍavyūhasūtra (which is dated prior to the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra) as an epithet of Sudhana, without further explanation. Furthermore, the Prajñāpāramitāsūtra in One Hundred Fifty Lines (Adhyardhaśatikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra) contains the sentence "all sentient beings possess the tathāgatagarbha because their entire being is that of the great bodhisattva Samantabhadra.”

In When the Clouds Part, Brunnhölzl also surveys the literature to which the earliest Indian treatise on tathāgatagarbha, the Ratnagotravibhāga, makes reference. These include the Dhāraṇīśvararājasūtra and the Ratnadārikāsūtra, among others. Although these scriptures do not use the term tathāgatagarbha, they provided the treatise's author with much of the doctrinal basis for the explication of the theory.

One such concept on which tathāgatagarbha theory relies is gotra, a Sanskrit term that refers to family unit by bloodline and is used metaphorically in Buddhism to refer to "class," "lineage," or "disposition." Buddhist teachings since the early days of the religion discussed the various predilections of followers, a way of separating the children of the "noble" class—those who are sincere in their renunciation and diligent in their austerities—from the rest of humanity. In the Mahāyāna, three basic classes of Buddhist practitioners were said to exist:

• śrāvakas, who will become arhats by following the Hīnayāna path;
• pratyekabuddhas, who will become arhats without being taught; and
• bodhisattvas, or those destined to become buddhas on the Mahāyāna path.

An additional gotra was posited in some sūtras: that of the icchantika, who does not possess tathāgatagarbha and therefore has no possibility of becoming enlightened. Whether or not such a class of beings truly existed was one of the earliest controversies in buddha-nature theory.

Tathāgatagarbha scripture

Alex Gardner states:

A handful of texts that are sometimes collectively labeled "tathāgatagarbha sūtras" are generally agreed upon as the initial group of literature that developed the concept of buddha-nature as we know it today. These stand distinct from the Yogācāra scriptures such as the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra, and from the prajñāpāramitā (perfection of wisdom) literature that provided the foundation for the Madhyamaka; so much so that some historians have posited the existence of a third Indian Mahāyāna school alongside them: the Tathāgatagarbha school. Among the most important of these texts are:

• the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra,
• the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra,
• the Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśaparivarta,
• the Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa,
• the Mahābherīsūtra, and
• the Aṅgulimālīyasūtra.

While later Mahāyāna scriptures such as the Laṅkāvatāra and the Lotus Sūtra also teach tathāgatagarbha, the above-named scriptures predate the popular Ratnagotravibhāga, a fourth- or early fifth-century Indian treatise that systematized tathāgatagarbha theory, and so are considered the first wave of the doctrine. The dates of their creation are unknown, and there is as yet little consensus concerning the sequence of their appearances.

Further reading:

• Gardner, Alex (2019), A History of Buddha-Nature Theory: The Literature and Traditions, Buddha Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative
  • "Tathāgatagarbha Scripture"
  • "Tathāgatagarbha Sūtras in China"
  • "Tathāgatagarbha Sūtras in Tibet"
  • "The Ratnagotravibhāga and the Later Spread of Buddha-Nature Theory in India"

See also:

• Tathāgatagarbha literature

Etymology

Alex Gardner states:

Buddha-nature is actually an English translation of a Chinese term, foxing 佛性. This term appears to have been invented in China to translate buddhadhātu, possibly also buddhatā, tathatā, prakṛtivyadadāna, and other terms. See King, Buddha Nature, 173–74n5. The most common Sanskrit term, tathāgatagarbha, means something like "womb/essence/seed (garbha) of the one who has gone/come (gata / āgata) to thusness (tathā; i.e., enlightenment)." The Chinese translation of tathāgatagarbha is rulaixing 如來性.

The Tibetan equivalents of buddha-nature include rang bzhin gnas rigs and sangs rgyas kyi snying po. Tathāgatagarbha is translated as de bzhin gshegs pa'i snying po: "the essence of those who have gone/come to thusness."

Sally King states:

Any discussion of the term Buddha nature must begin with consideration of the term tathāgatagarbha, to which it is closely linked. The Sanskrit word tathāgatagarbha is a compound of two terms, tathagata and garbha.

• Tathāgata is itself understood as a compound word that can be interpreted in two ways: as tatha + āgata, “thus come”; or tatha + gata, “thus gone." It is an epithet for a Buddha, who is “thus gone” in realization from saṃsāra to nirvāṇa, and “thus come” from nirvāṇa to saṃsāra to work for the salvation of all.
• The term garbha also has two meanings, embryo and womb.

Thus, the term tathāgatagarbha may mean either “embryonic Tathāgata" (i.e., the incipient Buddha) or “womb of the Tathāgata," understood as that which possesses the essential attributes of the Tathāgata in their fully developed form. The first meaning often is discussed as the “cause” of the Tathāgata, and the latter meaning as the “fruit” of Tathāgata. As “fruit,” it represents the fulfillment of the Buddha Path and is linked with such terms as dharmakāya, nirvāṇa, perfect wisdom, and realization.

The Chinese decided generally to translate the term tathāgatagarbha in the latter sense as womb of the Tathāgata. In Chinese, the term is rendered ru-lai-zang (Japanese nyoraizo). The term ru-lai exactly renders tathāgata as “thus come,” and a zang is a storehouse. Thus the Chinese translation shows a preference for conceiving the tathāgatagarbha as the container of the Tathāgata (i.e., the womb) rather than that which is contained (the embryo).

[...]

The term Buddha nature (Chinese fo xing, Japanese bussho) is closely related in meaning to tathāgatagarbha. However, it is not the Chinese translation of the latter; in fact, fo xing is a Chinese term for which the Sanskrit equivalent is not readily apparent. This missing Sanskrit equivalent has been the topic of considerable discussion among Buddhist scholars. Scholars now generally agree that the Sanskrit equivalent is buddhadhātu. Takasaki Jikido explains buddhadhatu as signifying: (1) the nature (dhātu = dharmatā) of the Buddha, thus equivalent to the term dharmakaya, and (2) the cause (dhātu — hetu) of the Buddha. Moreover, he says, “the link between the cause and the result is the nature (dhātu) common to both, which is nothing but the dharmadhātu. It should be noted that this understanding claims for the Sanskrit buddhadhātu the bivalence of the Chinese fo xing, embracing as it does the sense of buddhadhātu as cause of Buddhahood and as Buddhahood in fruition.

According to King, the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (written 2nd century CE) linked the concept of tathāgatagarbha with the buddhadhātu. The term buddhadhātu originally referred to relics. In the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, it came to be used in place of the concept of tathāgatagārbha, reshaping the worship of the physical relics of the Buddha into worship of the inner Buddha as a principle of salvation.

Sources

• Brunnholzl, Karl (2014). When the Clouds Part, The Uttaratantra and Its Meditative Tradition as a Bridge between Sutra and Tantra. Boston & London: Snow Lion. 
• Jikido, Takasaki (2000), "The Tathagatagarbha Theory Reconsidered. Reflections on Some Recent Issues in Japanese Buddhist Studies", Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 27 (1–2) 
• King, Sallie B. (1991), Buddha Nature, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 
• Tsadra editors (2023), Buddha nature home, Buddha Nature: A Tsadra Foundation Initiative

Further reading

• Hurley, Scott (2004). "The Doctrinal Transformation of Twentieth-Century Chinese Buddhism: Master Yinshun's Interpretation of the Tathāgatagarbha Doctrine." Contemporary Buddhism 5, no. 1: 29–46.
• Kano, Kazuo (2016). Buddha-Nature and Emptiness: rNgog Blo-ldan-shes-rab and A Transmission of the Ratnagotravibhāga from India to Tibet. Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 91. Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien.
• Kim, Seong-Uk (2007), Understanding Tsung-Mi's view on Buddha nature 
• Liu, Ming-Wood (1985). "The Yogācārā and Mādhyamika Interpretations of the Buddha-nature Concept in Chinese Buddhism." Philosophy East and West 35, no. 2: 171–93.
• Thich Hang Dat, The Interpretation of Buddha-nature in Chan Tradition
• Robert H. Sharf, On the Buddha-nature of Insentient Things
• Scott Tusa, Our Underlying Wholeness: A Reflection & Meditation On Buddha-Nature