Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor examines the Western idea of Buddha nature and traces why it emerged in English Buddhism despite having no direct equivalent in Pāli or Sanskrit texts. He argues that Buddha nature became a popular concept in the West largely through DT Suzuki’s translations from Chinese sources, where the term had been inaccurately rendered over a thousand years earlier. Batchelor then explores the original Pāli and Sanskrit terms—Gotra (lineage or family) and Tathāgatagarbha (womb of the Tathāgata)—showing how these processual, relational metaphors differ fundamentally from the static, essentialist “nature” language now used. He contends that understanding Buddha nature as lineage and womb reveals it as about belonging to a spiritual community and gestating inner change, not possessing a fixed transcendent essence. This grounds Buddhist practice in creative emergence and material contentment rather than the dualistic split between pure inner essence and corrupted outer world.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 BwB.mp3
UUID: 953b5463-2bb4-4b3b-98d4-3ec80e826b76
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,820
This morning, I’m going this morning, I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent. Though, as you’ll see, we’ll come back to where we left off yesterday at many points. Yesterday, we, in a way, followed through the implications of the Buddha’s central idea of of contingency or dependent origination and saw how that was then extrapolated into the idea of the four truths. And we looked at the four truths as describing a process of actions that knowing or fully knowing, dukkha, leads organically to the dropping away of certain graspings and cravings. And that dropping away culminates in a stopping.
And it’s that stopping, that opening, that’s technically what’s called Nibbana, that opens up the possibility of being in the world from another perspective altogether, namely one not dictated by the imperatives of greed, of hatred, of delusion around self. And that leads us into the Eightfold Path. And so I’m giving priority here not to the experience of Nibbana, but actually to what the experience of Nibbana opens up as a possibility of being in the world, as a perceiving, thinking, speaking, acting, working person. And how that process too then leads us back through mindfulness, through concentration, to another consideration, a deeper consideration of our situation in life, dukkha, and craving, and so forth and so on. And this capacity that human beings have for such a way of life is captured in this much used phrase or expression, Buddha nature.
It’s become so widely used, even in this book I was mentioning yesterday by Lewis Wolpert on the evolutionary origins of belief, when he does his little summary of Buddhism because it, you know, he deals with religion in one chapter, so Buddhism gets a mention in the paragraph. Lo and behold, the idea of Buddha nature pops up. And that, I think, is indicative because Wolpert’s clearly not a Buddhist scholar or even interested in Buddhism. But nonetheless, that idea has filtered through to him. The idea of Buddha nature.
And I think it’s become a very attractive idea in the West. As with many such ideas, they become prevalent because they seem to click with us in a certain way. They seem to have a natural there’s a natural kind of an attractor built in. Ah, Buddha nature. Yes.
I like that. I’m not so sure about this dukkha business, but Buddha nature. Buddha nature. Yeah. Can go for that one.
And but I think what happens as soon as we take a term like this, we tend to privilege it, and we tend to restore it to a kind of normative religious language. And I think in many cases, the idea of Buddha nature has become for many, many Westerners, but Buddhists throughout the world as a kind of surrogate soul. We’ve got rid of the Ātman, this notion that there is a kind of permanent fixed, isolate soul tucked away deep inside of somewhere. But now fortunately we’ve got Buddha nature and that will do more or less just as well. And in some of the dominant metaphors that we find around this word, that very idea is very clearly stated.
And I’m thinking particularly of a text called the Ratnagotra Vibhaga, which was a fourth to fifth century AD commentary by Asaṇga. But it’s very widespread in both the Chinese traditions and the Tibetan traditions. And you’ve probably heard these metaphors. The Buddha nature is like the seam of gold that runs through rock. The Buddha nature is like the honey inside the honeycomb in the beehive.
The Buddha nature is like a golden Buddha image which has been wrapped in soiled cloth. Now all of these notions suggest again a splitting of the world, which as I’ve mentioned already is somehow characteristic of normative religious thinking. There is a pure uncontaminated transcendent, real world and there is the deluded, confused, corrupted reality in which we find ourselves most of the time. And whether we call that God or whether we call it nirvana or whether we call it the unborn or whatever, the split is there. And Buddha nature in this term clearly fits that model.
The gold inside the rock. In other words, there’s something at the heart of our experience that is qualitatively of a different kind of stuff. It can be extracted from the rock. It’s not contaminated essentially by the rock or the honey in the hive or the Buddha image wrapped in the soiled cloth. There’s a dualism in this idea, very strongly.
And that’s very attractive. We like to think that there is a bit of us that is somehow exempt from the messiness of our physical, social and other more palpable aspects of existence, something transcendent, something apart. And Buddha nature certainly has come to fulfill that role for many Buddhists. Not to be entirely negative, I do think nonetheless that these kinds of images can be inspirational. I think if we’re feeling kind of lost and confused and depressed, then to affirm that there is something within us like the gold inside the rock can be very liberating.
It can be a very positive image to somehow motivate ourselves to rise above these things. Another classic image, of course, is the image of the lotus flower that arises out of the mud and yet is unsullied by the mud. In fact, this is an image that goes back into Indian tradition as a whole. And again, it’s inspirational. It has its value certainly, but philosophically, it’s problematic because it once again is based upon a split, a dualism, the lotus as opposed to the mud, and so on.
Now, someone left me a note and said, doesn’t the idea of Buddha nature go against some of the things I’ve been saying? And yes, it does. And one of the things I find very problematic about it is the very notion of the word nature. Now, remember, nature is not being used in this sense as the birds and the bees and all the lovely things that are going on around us, mother nature. But nature in the sense of an essence or substance.
In other words, the nature of something, the true nature of something. And the Buddha nature idea is that our true nature is that of the Buddha, that somewhere inside our body mind complex, there’s a Buddha trying to get out. That our essential identity, what we really are, is this seed of Buddhahood or this immanent awareness that’s already there. And again, I think there is some value to that idea. But the danger, once again, is this slippage back into the very sense of things that the Buddha was deeply critical of, namely that there does reside somehow within us a kind of uncorrupted, a true nature, something separate and different from everything else.
And it’s curious also because if we consider the work of Nāgārjuna, who I’ve mentioned a number of times, who is very much the great philosopher of the idea of emptiness, then for Nāgārjuna, what emptiness means is the emptiness or the absence of Svabhava. In other words, own nature. Nature. The the determining Sanskrit is Svabhava. And so nature in Indian tradition, in Buddhism, has always been a term of great suspicion.
The notion that there are essences and natures and so on makes Buddhism very much a non essentialist approach. It doesn’t acknowledge or accept the reality of intrinsic natures to things. This is seen as actually a blockage. It locks us into a fixed idea as to what we really are and actually prevents the kind of liberative creative movement the path and the movement into the path suggests. So it’s kind of anti Buddhist in a way, I feel, this very notion of nature, the nature of things.
And we have to ask, therefore, you know, why has this term become so prevalent? And the reason is not because it’s a term that we can actually find an equivalent for in the Pāli or in the Sanskrit literature. There is nowhere to be found in all of the research that’s been done any term that equates the English word Buddha nature. It’s just not It doesn’t exist. So how come in English we have this word, Buddha nature, if there’s no equivalent for it in the original text?
The reason is a rather curious one that is the result, of translation from Sanskrit into Chinese. The word Buddha nature first finds its way into English probably through the writings of DT Suzuki and his contemporaries back in the last century. And Suzuki was working from Chinese and Japanese materials primarily and would have quite correctly translated the Chinese word as Buddha nature. That’s exactly what it means. Means essence or nature.
Means Buddha. Or in Japanese. Suzuki and his colleagues didn’t make a mistake in the translation. They were quite literally correct. The problem, however, lay in the fact that the Chinese translated the Sanskrit terms inaccurately as, where in fact there is no Sanskrit equivalent.
And this is curious. So the reason the word has become prevalent in the West is because partly of a translation choice made about over one thousand years ago in China. Again, that might just seem a curious little anecdote, but the implications of it, I think, have been considerable. So what are the terms that we find in Pāli and Sanskrit that have been subsequently translated as Buddha nature? And that’s what I want to look at.
And as we consider these terms, we realize we’re in a whole different field of metaphor. Now, there are two terms that are most commonly used in the early Indian languages for which we translate as Buddha nature. And they are Gotra or Gota in Pāli. That’s G O T R A in Sanskrit and G O T T A in Pāli. And Garbha, G A R B H A, primarily only in Sanskrit.
But the earliest indications of a notion that we would translate as Buddha nature are found in the Pāli texts. And in fact, in the text that Martin one of the texts that Martin referred to last night. The first this is in the Anguttara Nikāya. And the term Gotra or Gotta that I’ve just mentioned literally means something like lineage or family or type almost. In Pāli.
And this term is not used very much in the Pāli tradition. In fact, I’m only aware of this one passage, the one that Martin referred to, as actually where the Buddha actually specifies what it means to be somehow part of this lineage. Remember, the word lineage family has very much to do with the metaphor of reproduction, of being born, of being part of a community, part of a family. That is really where the root of the idea lies. That those who are participant in the Buddha’s project, are part of the Sangha, are part of the community, are metaphorically born into a kind of lineage, into a kind of family.
The word that is used in Tibetan for Buddha nature is almost in is is almost exclusively the word rik. And rik means, again, family or lineage. And it again is a translation to Sanskrit or Gotra. Now that’s a very different notion to the nature of something, which almost invariably suggests something static, something fixed, our true nature. Our true nature is something that, by definition, isn’t going to budge.
Whereas the notion of of lineage, of family suggests immediately the idea of growth, of development, of birth, of belonging. That’s very much the idea. In fact, the Buddha is also historically in the Pāli often described as belonging to the Adicca Gotta, the the the lineage of the sun, s u n. The Sakyans, as a tribe or confederacy in North India, regarded themselves as descendants of the sun god, Okkaka. And perhaps there’s even a background suggestion of the Buddha belonging to this solar lineage, something that burns, something that radiates, something that generates light and warmth.
Arguably, the notions of enlightenment and so on are deep down in him calling back to this image of the sun, this image of radiance, this image of giving life in that sense. But the way he picks it up is in this notion of the Ariyagotta, the lineage of the Aryans. Now I mentioned already yesterday that the Aryans, of course, are a northern for a European tribe. We don’t quite know where they came from. That are believed to have come into northern India about a thousand or so years before the Buddha to have displaced the local indigenous population and have established the, Brahmanic, civilization, primarily in the Gangetic plains.
But the Buddha takes this word aria and he twists it around. He gives it a radically new meaning. For him, it doesn’t mean belonging to a particular racial lineage, but it means belonging to a spiritual lineage, a lineage of human possibility that is intimately tied to his notion of these four truths, which are the truths that ennoble one. So he describes the the lineage that he he puts forth into the world as the Ariyagotta, the lineage of the noble ones. And, he then describes what, in fact, it means to belong to such a noble lineage.
And there are four features of this, identity. It says, first, a monk is content with any kind of robe. Secondly, a monk is content with any kind of food. Thirdly, a monk is content with any kind of lodging. And fourthly, a monk finds delight in Bhavana, which I’ll explain.
So in other words, he sees the the root of belonging to this community or this lineage in having achieved a state of material contentment, to be satisfied with what you eat, to in other words, to have sufficient food, to have sufficient clothing, to have sufficient shelter. Those are the primary requisites that enable a person to then be able to say, okay. I’m more or less comfortable, but what is this life all about? In other words, this does seem to be a kind of, a foundation for a Buddhist social theory, that a Buddhist society would be one that would provide the members of that society with the fundamental requisites of material survival. The example of the monk or the nun is basically the example of a person who is content to live with the minimal material requirements such that they can then dedicate their lives to what might be called their spiritual development.
In other words, the pursuit of meaning, the pursuit, of the question as to what life is actually about. And this then leads to the fourth of these criteria of membership, if you wish. A monk finds delight in Bhavana. Now the translator here, Bhikkhu Bodhi, has said, a monk finds delight in the development, open brackets, of meditation, close brackets. This is entirely wrong.
This is you can you could read it that way. In fact, Buddhist tradition has tended to, but it totally obscures the centrality of this term, Bhavana. The word he’s translated is development. Sounds like a housing development. The word, literally means to bring into being, and it is the injunction the Buddha gave regarding the fourth of the four noble truths.
Remember, this is the emphasis I’ve been giving it. Suffering is to be fully known. Craving is to be let go of. Cessation is to be experienced. And the path that then opens up is to be which we might translate as to be cultivated, to be brought into being, to be created is what it essentially means.
The word has its root in the Sanskrit word, which is actually a cognate of the English word be. Be, existence, verb form, to bring into existence, to cultivate something as you would a plant. A plant is initially just a seed that you put in the ground, you take care of it, and then you bring into being something that did not previously exist, a gladiola, whatever it might be. And likewise, the Buddha’s injunction regarding the path is not follow the path as though the path were already laid out for you somewhere, and you just had to sort of meekly go step by step along it. He doesn’t say that at all.
He says you need to create the path. You need to bring it into being. Here it would be develop it. But curiously, this word in all Buddhist societies has tended now to become almost exclusively identified with meditation. And again, when the Tibetans translate it, they translate it as gom, which has come to mean, you know, basically what we understand as meditation, sitting cross legged somewhere and doing some kind of internal spiritual exercise.
That’s certainly part of it, arguably even a central part of it. But nonetheless, it reduces a much more a much richer idea to a much poorer idea. It it singles out only certain elements of the path, namely mindfulness and concentration, forgetting therein that what is to be bhāvanā’d is the way we see the world, think about it, the way we communicate, the way we act, the way we earn our living. All of these are equally practices. They are thing they are qualities of life that need to be brought into being.
And, of course, the word in English that I mean, brought into being is very clumsy. What we would say is to create. To create something means to bring it into being. To create, you know, work of art or whatever whatever it is is to bring into being something that previously wasn’t there. And I think this points very much to the centrality of this practice as being rooted in a creative process.
We’re not just dumbly following instructions. We may do that, and again, hopefully not dumbly, but there is a need, I think, for commitment and training and discipline and so forth as we’re in fact doing on this retreat. But that’s not the end point of the exercise at all. The end point of the exercise is to discover a freedom within ourselves, a stopping of these habitual, drives to possess and to acquire and to get rid of and to just dwell in one’s own ego. When that falls away, then we open up the possibility of creating our lives anew, that we ourselves become, as it were, the the raw material for the emergence of what metaphorically we call a path.
So that is, so so for the Buddha, therefore, the the the the the the and again, I hesitate even to use this word now, but we’re stuck with it. Buddha nature starts with this idea of, achieving a degree of contentment, being content with what one has that provides the basics of one’s survival, and on that basis, then delighting in, as he says here, the cultivation of a path, the creating of a path. That is your Buddha nature, if you wish. Though the Buddha would not use a word quite like that. But the other word that is perhaps the one most commonly found in the Sanskrit literature, and we don’t find it in the Pāli, it’s an idea that emerged after the Buddha’s life time, is the term Tathagatagarbha.
Tathagatagarbha is usually considered to be the Sanskrit equivalent of the English word Buddha nature. But if we look at the term closely, that’s not what it means at all. Tathāgata means the Buddha. And, we don’t need to get into that. Why?
It’s a weird word. The Tathagatas actually, I just came never mind. The Tathāgata means the Buddha. And garba, this is the key word. Garba means womb.
And in other words, the idea of Buddha nature is rooted in this notion of the womb of the Tathāgata, the womb. Now this is a language, a metaphor that is so at odds with the notion of an essential nature that one wonders why the Chinese would have used that term to translate it. I wonder if, in fact, they were not slightly squeamish. I don’t know. That’s a guess.
But likewise in Tibetan when they translated Tathāgatagarbha, they also didn’t use the word womb. It’s not as though the word womb doesn’t exist in Tibetan or Chinese. Of course it does. But the Tibetans used the word nyingpo, which means more like the the heart essence. In other words, they chose another organ, but not the womb.
It’s quite curious in a way that a bunch of celibate monks locked away in monasteries would would would come up with this very fleshly and very female metaphor. And yet, that’s the one they chose, a garbha. Garbha, if we think about it in terms of of metaphor, garbha is of course an empty space. A womb is an empty space, but it’s an empty space that can be be fertilized. An empty space that can be impregnated by metaphorically here, an idea, a possibility, some other way of living.
And it’s the kind of space that then is able to, to nurture and to, allow, something to gestate to the point where it is ready to be born. And again, here we see very clearly the the linkage between the idea of of womb and of birth and of family, and of lineage. It’s all very much within the same metaphorical ballpark. We’re talking here of a living process. In fact, the idea they couldn’t have chosen a metaphor more suggestive of life process.
So Buddha nature, I think, fails to capture that idea at all. It doesn’t suggest so much a process, but rather some kind of state, some kind of, essential thing. Whereas the metaphor at root is a processual metaphor. And this is something that I’ve been trying to emphasize throughout this retreat. The idea of how what the Buddha’s teaching is not about trying to somehow transcend our lives and disappear into nirvana, which is certainly a way Buddhism even represents itself at times, but rather about freeing what blocks us, what impedes us from living fully.
The whole metaphor of Mara and the Buddha is very much a metaphor of of releasing or or or freeing ourselves from those forces within us that are a kind of inner death. Attachment, grasping, hatred, fear, these are metaphorically elements of death. Mara meaning the killer. Buddha therefore, as the counter image to Mara being an image of living fully and living totally. The idea of creating a path.
The idea of each of our beings being like a womb that can gestate an idea or a practice like mindfulness or awareness or, clarity of mind. That this is