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In the Zen tradition, the dog was deemed a low creature. A dog was also used as a metaphor for a new student—one who would ingest anything without discrimination—just like a dog! We have a different view of dogs. The Buddha-nature is said to be like a seam of gold running through a piece of rock; or like the honey inside a honeycomb; or like a golden Buddha image wrapped inside a soiled cloth. Now, such images can be very inspiring.
But the difficulty with these images is that they are profoundly dualistic: the gold can be removed from the rock, the honey from the comb, the statue from the cloth: they are two different things. That is the whole point of the image. This brings us back very close to the kind of view of the person that the Buddha denied.
This is a return to the atman, to the divine, eternal essence of the person that is neither the body nor the mind, but an entity separate from them. This idea is attractive because deep down we all would like that to be true. But even the word Buddha-nature is problematic. Yet Buddhist philosophy is non-essentialist. It says that there is no nature, there is no essence of things.
Why then did the Chinese choose to use this word fo-shing : Buddha-nature? More commonly, though, one finds the term Tathagatagarbha. Now, neither gotra nor garbha mean "nature". One of the critiques of any notion of nature or essence is that it implies something fixed, something permanent, something eternal. The idea of a womb, on the other hand, is of something profoundly life giving, fleshly, earthly, feminine. A womb is also an empty space. But not just any empty space: it is an empty space that can be fertilized, in which something can germinate. And once that fertilization has happened, then it becomes the environment for life to grow, and then at a certain point, when the gestation is complete, a new being is born.
This is a metaphor of life, of a living person, something organic, something living. As a metaphor it suggests that the human organism is like a womb, it can be impregnated with new ideas and values. Once we are impregnated with such ideas, once we engage in certain practices, we begin to experience and understand the world from a new perspective. Something within us begins to grow, the deluded human person is transformable into an awake being.
The other word you find in Sanskrit is Buddhagotra. G otra means family or lineage. We can without much imagination see the connection between wombs and families and lineages. Buddhagotra suggests that when you embrace and practice the Dharma, you become a member of a family or lineage. What I find strange is that there is a perfectly good word both in Tibetan and in Chinese for womb, but in both cases they chose to translate it with a non-womb word. I don't know why.
Possibly the monks who did the translations felt a bit squeamish about those things. In any case, with gotra we find a link back to the early Pali tradition.
Often Buddha-nature is thought to be a uniquely Mahayana concept, but in fact its origins are found within the Pali texts. There is a passage in the Anguttara Nikaya where the Buddha speaks of the ariya gotta Skt: aryagotra , which means the lineage of the noble ones. This term is a direct progenitor of the idea of Buddhagotra , the lineage of the Buddha.
Clearly, the Buddha doesn't use ariya as a racial or ethnic idea, but he uses it nonetheless and transforms it into the idea of a kind of spiritual nobility. To be an ariya for the Buddha meant to have internalized the four ennobling truths, the catuh ariya sacca. Unfortunately, this is always translated as the four noble truths, which gives the impression that the truths themselves are noble.
But what is noble about suffering or craving? What it means is that the person who wholly knows suffering, lets go of craving, experiences cessation and creates a path, becomes dignified and noble. That is why I prefer to translate them as the four ennobling truths.
The Buddha is saying that all beings have the capacity to become noble, dignified in a spiritual-existential sense. The Buddha describes four conditions: the first is contentment with food, the second, contentment with clothing, the third, contentment with lodging, and the fourth, delight in bhavana. Moreover, bhavana is the injunction the Buddha gives to the fourth ennobling truth, i.
The text says that he then spent eight years in the monastery. Share via. Event Saved. There are two aspects of the daimoku in Nichiren Buddhism: the daimoku of faith and the daimoku of practice. This, I think, is what the Buddha discovered.
The eightfold path is something to be brought into being, to be cultivated, nurtured, created. What is striking about this notion of an ariya gotta is that it acknowledges the necessity of certain material conditions being realized before a spiritual practice can take place. It implies a contentment with simplicity, the willingness to be able to do with what is sufficient to feed you, sufficient to clothe you, sufficient to house you. It thus suggests the beginnings of a kind of social theory or social awareness.
Because if people have to spend their lives struggling to provide themselves with food, clothing and housing, they're not going to have the time, energy or contentment to then be able to reflect, to ask more deeply questions about what life is for. It is likely that when many of us hear about the four aspects of the ariya gotta for the first time, we probably find it a little odd.
To give a sense of how this idea of ariya gotta has evolved through Buddhist history, I'd like to give a couple examples, one from the Zen tradition and one from the Tibetan tradition. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done.
Tathagata-garbha because it contains the very seed, the potential of Buddhahood. It resides in each and every being and because of this essential nature, this heart nature, there is the possibility of reaching Buddhahood. It is as if the doors of perception have been opened wider and subtly obscuring curtains have been drawn back from the windows of the mind. Although this exhilarating vision of a world filled with infinite possibilities may fade, it provides a great incentive for pursuing the higher practices and a conviction that full enlightenment, though still a distant goal, is actually attainable.
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