Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Stephen Batchelor explores Buddha nature through radical reframing, arguing it is not a fixed essence but a question—a capacity to experience existence itself as profoundly mysterious. He traces this idea through Dōgen’s Zen inquiry “What is this thing? How did it get here?” and contrasts it with Tsongkhapa’s understanding of Buddha nature as the emptiness of the self. Batchelor then unpacks how insight meditation reveals the constructed, moment-to-moment flow of experience beneath the illusion of a static identity, and draws on Huineng’s paradox that awakening and delusion are not endpoints on a linear path but simultaneous potentials available in any moment. He challenges the inadequacy of simplistic religious narratives that reduce humans to bundles of greed and delusion, arguing instead for a more honest assessment of human complexity: we are capable of genuine insight, compassion, and selflessness, yet in the next breath contract into egocentric habit. The talk ends with an invitation to recognize that wisdom and care are not distant achievements but imminent capacities constantly available within the texture of ordinary experience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 BwB.mp3
UUID: 2741d70a-07e4-4fa4-bef6-8735b0570aa8
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,138
Allowing certain, qualities of mind to gestate, to re to become to to reach a certain maturity so that something new can be born. And again, the way we’ve looked at the path is likewise about letting go of what impedes our potential, reaching a point where we see not only intellectually but experientially the possibility of coming alive in an entirely new way. And that is the the Sotapanna, the entering the stream of the path itself. So garbha and gotra are pointing very much to some kind of process. Now, I’d like to look at I’ve got about four other examples here of how this particular idea has been understood traditionally.
The first is to look at how Dōgen understood the idea of Buddha nature in scare quotes. Dōgen was the founder of the Japanese Soto, a school of of Zen Buddhism. He lived in the thirteenth century in Kamakura, Japan. And he’s most famous for a work called the Shobogenzo, which is a collection of about a hundred short essays, most of them deeply enigmatic. There’s one essay though called Bussho, which is Buddha nature.
And when Dogen asks himself, what is Buddha nature? What is, he then answers himself, Buddha nature is, what is this thing and how did it get here? Not at first sight immediately comprehensible, but it does, of course, refer back to a very famous saying that occurs in an exchange between the the sixth patriarch, Huineng, and his disciple, Huairang. Those of you who have been on our Zen retreat will know all about it. Let me just sort of say that story so you’ll put it in context.
Huairang was a young monk who lived at the beginning of the eighth century. He was living in Northern China at the time. He heard of this great Chan or Zen teacher down in Southern China. And so he walked all the way down to Southern China, which is several hundred miles. And then he arrives at the monasteries, shown into the master’s quarters, and Huineng, Huineng, the teacher comes out and to greet him and says, and where have you come from?
And Huairang says, I’ve come from Mount Song. And then Huineng says, but what is this thing? How did it get here? To which the text continues, Huairang was speechless and then spent eight years in the monastery, presumably trying to figure out what was meant by this question. So what Dogan is citing is in fact Huineng’s answer to Huairang’s I’m sorry.
Yeah. It’s it’s Huineng’s second question to Huairang. What is this thing? How did it get here? Or as we boil it down to the koan, what is this?
In other words, a question. For Dogen, Buddha nature is essentially a question. It’s not an affirmation of anything. I mean, Dogen could have said, oh, Buddha nature, that is the Buddha within or your own potential for awakening or something stated in a a cataphatic manner. In other words, in an affirmative manner.
But no, he says something quite curious to our ears on first hearing. What is this thing? How did it get here? Now, this is not an intellectual question of any kind, but it is actually a putting into words of the very question that our life poses to us in each moment. What we might call the mystery of our existence or the mystery of existence, quite simply.
The question of life itself. What is this all about? What’s going on? That’s the Buddha nature. To be able to somehow experience your life as profoundly and utterly weird and questionable and odd and curious and bewildering and awesome, whichever word suits your own particular inner vocabulary.
That is your Buddha nature. In other words, your capacity to wake up, one might say, your capacity to live your life not dictated by habit and convention and so forth and so on starts when you first become a question for yourself. And in Zen meditation, this question, particularly Rinzai Zen meditation, although curiously, Dogen is actually of the other school. The Rinzai Zen practice is very much about sustaining this questioning, not slipping back into the comfort of affirmations or beliefs or doctrines. And this is the great power, I think, of Chan or Zen is that it gives priority not to a set of internally consistent answers or doctrines or beliefs, but gives priority to the questions from which those beliefs might, on some occasions have been the answers and perhaps the most appropriate answers.
And I think this is always a problem in religion and Buddhism is certainly not exempt from this, that we come to let’s say a retreat or we take an interest in going to our local Buddhist temple or whatever. We or we’re buying a Buddhist book, and we often come to that. We make that first step. I think often in a deeply truthful condition. We acknowledge that we’re confused.
There’s something not quite right, something missing, something askew, awry with our lives. We are questioning, and we’re not just necessarily intellectually curious here. There’s something much more serious going on. Our our existence has become bewildering for us. And that, as Chögyam Trungpa once said, is very good news.
Because we’ve we’ve although it may not be very comfortable, in fact, it can be really rather awful. Nonetheless, we are one thing we’re not in any doubt about is that there’s something real going on, something truthful. We find Buddhism or whatever it might be, Southern baptism or whatever it is. And we find, if we’re lucky, some kind of positive response to that confusion. And there’s an amazing sense of somehow having come home in some way, of having found a way of life in which that confusion is resolved.
And this is very often considered to be, you know, an act of faith, an act of belief. And that of course can be enormously important for us. But at the same time, like most things in this world, it’s a double edged sword. It also can begin become the beginnings of the formation of a kind of mental carapace or shell in which we just lock ourselves into another set of fixed ideas. They might be Buddhist fixed ideas, but fixed ideas are fixed ideas.
In other words, rather than allowing us to grow and to evolve, it actually becomes something we then hold on to. Something we might become proficient in as in certain techniques of meditation. Something we might become very knowledgeable about in terms of our understanding of some philosophy or theology or whatever. And that gives us another sense of a feeling okay, feeling secure, feeling that we know what’s what. And for a while, that might work.
For a while, it might be the rest of your life. But I think very often, what we do is we substitute the truthfulness of confusion with a certain counterfeit, security of belief. And historically, when Chan or Zen appeared, it was very much as it were a reaction against the consolations and the securities of doctrinal belief. And it was saying, let’s get back to the beginning. Let’s try and recreate the situation of the Buddha sitting beneath the tree.
In other words, putting ourselves back into that pre awakening tension. And this then becomes articulated in practices such as asking yourself, what is this? Which is of course is what you introduced this morning. So it’s that ability to be sufficiently open and honest with oneself in which one acknowledges and affirms confusion, questioning, perplexity, bewilderment. That’s the the the the driving force behind the possibility of waking up, the possibility of seeing the world in another way, the possibility of responding to the world not just from our conventional habits, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere truer, somewhere more honest within ourselves.
So that’s Dōgen’s sense of Buddha nature. I’m now going to just look at what another Asian teacher Tsongkhapa, who is I’ve mentioned the founder of the Geluk School in Tibetan Buddhism. What his school came to understand as Buddha nature was simply the emptiness of the person. The emptiness of the person. The fact that the person in other words is devoid of any kind of intrinsic nature or essence.
That’s Buddha nature. So the very the the I mean, again, the very usage of the word nature here is in complete opposition to the idea that the reason we can wake up is because we are not fixed in any essential or substantial identity or nature. In other words, Buddha nature is not some kind of hidden property tucked away inside us somewhere, But it’s actually just a way of talking about the creative potential of the human organism. The problem is we tend to be fixated. And again, we’ve said this many times already, fixated on a kind of static notion of I or ego or self.
It’s when we begin to see through that, and again, that’s one of the whole points of Vipassana or insight meditation is to observe our experience in fine and close detail. To notice the breath in every moment, the sensations that run through the body, the feelings, thoughts, emotions. The more we plunge into and explore that experience, the the less we find anything that corresponds to such a fixed and static notion of me. And it’s a rather curious experience. And this is what the Buddha means by the selfless characteristic of experience.
That once we go into just paying attention to the momentary phenomena that are happening in each instance, we realize there is simply just the the pouring forth of process, be it physical, be it emotional, be it mental, be it whatever. And there’s nothing in it that is intrinsically reducible to me or mine. Conventionally, yes. This person is different from that person. But in terms of that deeper paying of attention, we somehow free ourselves from the need to be fixated around this ego with all of its desires and its attachments and its fears and its anxieties that are very limiting, that really somehow lock us into a stuck state.
So the idea of of experiencing the world in this way is actually an experience that in its very nature is beginning to free us up. In some of the Mahāyāna writings, Nāgārjuna has this idea, Śāntideva too, that the very nature of of phenomena themselves is nirvanic. That they talk about the natural nirvana. The the the the the nirvana itself, in other words, that sort of freedom, is already somehow implicit in the very structure of experience. And we begin to see that.
We begin to see that life is is freely flowing. It’s operating according to causal laws, of course, but there’s something open and unimpeded about its flow. And I think very often we catch this best in poetry, for example. But very often when we find this rising and this passing away, or this passing away and this arising continuously and constantly. And there’s something very liberating and something very freeing simply about somehow being in that space without this constant kind of urge to contract into, gosh, I must be enlightened or something now.
And then you freeze up into that little, again, self image that immediately sort of cuts off the immediacy and the vitality of the experience that was happening. Again, going back to Huineng, there’s another statement of his, I think, although it doesn’t explicitly refer to Buddha nature. Nonetheless, I think is useful in this regard. And that is his statement, when an ordinary person becomes awakened, we call them a Buddha. When a Buddha becomes deluded, we call them an ordinary person.
Now this is a very useful idea because it somehow undermines the notion of a strict linearity. And it’s true that just the metaphor of a path suggests a certain linearity. In other words, we start here and we end there. And that’s very characteristic of Indian Buddhist thought. It’s constructed The path is constructed along a series of stages in which you start out as a completely confused person, full of misery and suffering and greed and hatred and delusion, and it’s really bad.
And then you sort of, you know, step by step, you move along the path. At the end of the day, you end up as an arhant or a Buddha or something in which all those problems are gone. Now, as a kind of didactic framework, that’s probably helpful. But it doesn’t actually capture the rather more ambiguous condition that human beings experience. I don’t think it’s true to say that the unenlightened person is just a seething mass of attachments and fears and hatreds and delusions.
That seems to be a rather inadequate way of describing any person. We’re not like that, in fact, at any given time during even a day of our lives. There are moments in which we find ourselves responding to a situation with great insight, with great warmth, with great compassion, with great love. In fact, that might be in many ways what’s dominant in our lives. So to simply define the ordinary person as someone who is just, you know, incessantly caught up in greed, hatred and delusion is an inadequate way of understanding the human condition.
It’s not saying that it isn’t pointing to something that’s actually worth paying attention to in the human condition. It might, in fact, be precisely what prevents us from living out our capacity to be intelligent, wise, caring, loving people. And that’s where the practice occurs really, is working on that dysfunction, one might say, or that particular blockage that we’re caught up in. But that blockage is not adequate to convey a sense of who, in fact, we are. We’re far more complicated than that.
And again, I think the images that I was rather critical of at the beginning can be seen to have some use too, that there is within us often at rather surprising moments. Unexpectedly, we find that we say things and we do things that are genuinely selfless and caring and loving. We’re prepared to sacrifice ourselves for others. We’re prepared to go out of our way. And that seems in a way to be truer to what we are than constantly calculating everything in terms of my own self interest.
The human being is far more complicated than these simple religious descriptions that we sometimes have in Buddhism. And yet we also know that in the next moment, after we’ve just done this wonderfully caring thing, we respond to a situation in an utterly kind of selfish way. And that although we construct in retrospect these narratives of ourselves as basically being these rather together intelligent, nice people going through day to day, We also, when we start paying attention, say, and again, I think meditation and awareness practices are very good at showing us this, we also see that there’s an awful lot of muddle, of rather pointless fantasy and daydreaming, all of which is incredibly egocentric. I mean, our our fantasies in meditation are very revealing. They expose to us what inveterate egoists we are.
Our fantasies are generally not about, you know, doing good in the world. Or may maybe it’s just me, but but they tend to if you look at your fantasies, you usually find that they’re they’re usually the the reiteration in a kind of loop tape fashion of some little fantasy or story about about me and how I can get what I want. And then I get what I want again and again and again and again. And I get a kind of a thrill out of that. Now again, there’s probably perfectly good biological reasons why we do that.
We, you know, we are survived we have survived to this point, and these are mechanisms that have enabled us to thrive on this planet. But once we become, as the Buddha says, content with our material situation and we begin to ask questions about how we can cultivate and create a life that’s more rich and meaningful and valuable, then these kinds of habits of mind become extremely counterproductive. They they’re no longer of any use. In fact, they become hindrances and obstacles. So what Huineng is pointing to is that a Buddhahood or awakening or enlightenment or whatever word you choose to use there is not something that will only happen to you at the end of some long trajectory, but is actually possible or at least aspects of it are possible in any given situation.
And so Buddha nature, if we have to use that word, is in fact a way of recognizing that this capacity for insight, intelligence, compassion, whatever, is constantly imminent. It can burst out. It can express itself. And yet, in the next moment, we contract, and those possibilities seem almost inaccessible to us. We must have had those experiences when somebody comes to us in a state of great grief or or or or some personal crisis.
And we want to help. We want to be as caring as we can. But there’s something within us that blocks that. It’s like you were saying yesterday about, you know, we want to meditate, but we don’t. We want to be loving, but we can’t.
We find ourselves repeating, you know, religious or spiritual platitudes or trotting out some bit of received psychotherapeutic wisdom. But we’re not we know deep down we’re not actually engaging with that person. There’s some there’s a kind of a wall between us. At other moments, that wall isn’t there. What makes it come and go like that seems very difficult to understand.
It’s not within our willpower to love or to be wise any more than it’s sometimes in our willpower to sit on a cushion. There’s something very curious going on. And that’s why I find Huineng’s comment so useful because he points to the ambiguity of experience, which I think is much more realistic than thinking of us as either deluded or enlightened. We’re both. It’s not either or, it’s both and.
And, again, the Zen tradition, vajrayana tradition too are very, very good about pointing to the imminence of these qualities, that they’re actually potential in each moment. We don’t have to wait till we’re, you know, a Buddha before we can start doing some good in the world. And I think I’ll stop there. And again, we can explore this further this afternoon in the question and answer session. So thank you.
We’ll now do walking for forty five minutes.