Buddha's Nature

Inquiry Reflection: April 20, 2010

Flint Sparks

Words spoken in the Silence:

Buddha Nature... We hear these words and assume we know what they mean, or at least we have some vague sense of what they must point to. Buddha’s Nature... What is the nature of a buddha? What is Buddha’s nature? Joko Beck would often suggest that we substitute the phrase “life as it is” for the word “buddha.” What is the nature of “life as it is” - this life, just as it is? Can we actually see and feel, “life as it is,” in Nature all around us? And, can we remember that, as animals - as warm relational mammals - we are not separate from that nature, from Buddha’s nature, from all of nature. Buddha Nature.

Coming out of Silence:

I have been thinking about the ongoing volcanic eruption in Iceland, which is on my mind primarily because I am preparing to fly to the UK in about a week to teach. I am wondering if I will be able to make the journey. In these eruptions, Nature is expressing itself as a robust and completely appropriate response to all the powerful forces meeting and moving together in that frigid and fiery part of the world. It is also completely confounding our small human plans. Primitive forces trump our most highly refined forms of air transportation, day-after-day. This is life as it is. This is nature... Buddha’s Nature.

Reflecting on this situation reminds me of the first time I had an intimate engagement with a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. I learned some useful lessons as I confronted the power, as well as the seduction, of those primitive forces. [For a full description of that adventure and its teachings, go to http://www.flintsparks.com/fs/message.html and read “Buddha’s Nature”]. After that challenging and exhilarating experience, I began to consider the ways in which the forces we confront in the apparent “outside world” are really not so different from the ones we meet in our own troubled hearts and minds. When we sit on the cushion in the silence of the meditation hall, do we not confront deeply felt tremors, fiery eruptions, immense obscuring clouds, frigid contractions, and seemingly unending frustrations? But, of course, these are just our personal descriptions and particular names we give to the vibrant life flowing through our body-minds. These great streams are nothing more than completely appropriate responses to all the powerful forces of conditioning meeting and responding in us and as us. Our naming of them is secondary and our judgements are very small and personal. This is simply life as it is. This is Buddha Nature “unrolling widely” as Zen Master Dogen noted in his fascicle Self-Fulfilling Samadhi.

In more contemporary language, Stephen Mitchell offers some wise comments about the nature of our relationship to life and practice in his introduction to John Tarrant’s book, The Light Inside the Dark. Here, Mitchell is speaking about Tarrant’s invitation to the journey of awakening, one that we often mistake as acquisitive. I would suggest you check out Peg Syverson’s recent Appamada blog post about this very confusion. [posted on 4/21/2010].

Here are Stephen Mitchell’s words:

“On this journey, going means letting go. It’s not all that hard to get enlightened; what is difficult is to keep giving up our sense of the world so that the world can come to us on its own terms, with its vast, pitiless, loving intelligence. At the end of the journey, we return to the simplest things with an immense recognition and gratitude...”

What is difficult on this journey is the letting go. Awakening is not about getting or achieving anything. It may be more about offering up everything. Nothing changes, except how we fundamentally perceive the world, and that changes everything. Renunciation - this letting go - is a foundational key to practice and is usually the first in the list of the Paramitas, or Practices of Perfection of the Bodhisattva. It is key because what must be let go of is our personal sense of the world. We first learn what it means to let go of “my” sense - me, my self, ego. We then investigate, through ongoing practice, what this “sense of the world” is that both maintains the self and is created by the self. This is a tangled knot that is not easily released. This is Zen Master Dogen’s “body and mind dropped away.” [from Genjo Koan]

Our practice is to “keep giving up our sense of the world so that the world can come to us on its own terms, with its vast, pitiless, loving intelligence.” The volcanic eruption is not personal. It is doing what volcanos sometimes do, and it is doing so in precisely the way that the current geological and meteorological factors surrounding that volcano prescribe. It is a dramatic version of “the world coming to us on its own terms.” The problem is that we don’t always like the terms offered by nature. We reject nature. We turn away from life as it is. We relinquish Buddha and cling to our own, small sense of the world. We renounce the reality of Buddha Nature and wonder why we suffer. And we call this habit, “everyday life.”

The true offering of Nature, of Buddha, of life as it is, is a “vast, pitiless, loving intelligence.” The love of a Buddha is vast and it is pitiless. It is immense beyond conception and completely impersonal. Our personal sense of the world prefers that this vast love choose “me” in particular and respond to “my” individual needs and wants. This vast, pitiless, love is, instead, profoundly intelligent, an intelligence expressed as infinite wisdom and inconceivable compassion. It is simply not personal. Nature does not buy the illusion of a separate self. It is not caught in the self-centered dream. And, this vast, pitiless, loving intelligence is infinitely flexible and can take any form. It sometimes looks like an explosive eruption and sometimes like a snow-covered peak. Sometimes it is a warm hand extended in care and at other times a lowered, unfriendly gaze. It is the glistening black bamboo shoots finding their way toward the sun while its roots destroy the adjacent garden. It is the rain dripping sleepily off the eaves of the porch as I write these lines, while in Iceland the rains soak the ash-covered earth, spoiling the farmer’s fields.

Renunciation is just another word for charity. As we soften our attachment to our sense of the world and allow the world to come to us on its own terms, we are offering ourselves back to the world as a gift, full of gratitude to Nature, to Buddha, to life as it is. “At the end of the journey, we return to the simplest things with an immense recognition and gratitude.” This “recognition and gratitude” is the fruit of a life’s journey. We may say, “end of the journey,” but the end only truly arrives as our last breath. So, we are left with the question about how we are to live this life; just as it is; nature expressing itself as loving intelligence. Buddha’s nature. Buddha Nature. Do we truly see that we are of the nature of a Buddha? Can we actually be otherwise?

I will close with this short poem by the great Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. In reading it I ask, “What has been entrusted to me in this life, and what will I do with it?” This is what we investigate in Inquiry. Please come forward.

The Wind, One Brilliant Day

Antonio Machado

The wind, one brilliant day, called

to my soul with an odor of jasmine.

“In return for the odor of jasmine,

I’d like all the odor of your roses.”

“I have no roses; all the flowers

in my garden are dead.”

“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals

and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”

The wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:

“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”