Buddha-nature

Buddha-nature translates the Sanskrit tathāgatagarbha, “the womb” or “embryo of the Tathāgata”, and the related buddhadhātu, “buddha-element”. A group of Mahāyāna sūtras, among them the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra and the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, teach that every being has within it the nature of a buddha, obscured by defilements as gold by dirt, and that awakening uncovers what was always present.

The teaching was immensely influential in East Asia, where it shaped Tiantai, Huayan and Chan. The Chan saying that one should “see one’s nature and become a buddha” rests on it. Dōgen famously read a line of the Nirvāṇa Sūtra not as “all beings have buddha-nature” but as “all beings are buddha-nature”.

The teaching also raised questions. Some passages describe buddha-nature as permanent, blissful, self and pure, language that sounds like the self the Buddha denied. Buddhist commentators answered that buddha-nature is emptiness, or the mind’s luminous nature, not a self; some modern Japanese scholars of the “critical Buddhism” movement argued that the teaching is not Buddhist at all. In Tibet, the Jonang school’s “other-emptiness” and the Gelug reading as the mind’s emptiness divided over the same question.