I received a few questions from my readers in relation to my
last articles, “Some Buddhist explanations on the origin and existence of the universe” and “There is no supreme creator god in the Buddha Dharma”. Here are
two of them (reformulated) and my short answer:
Question 1: “Where
the Buddha nature within us originally came from?”
My answer:
First of all, no matter how much a Buddha would explain to
us the nature of the universe, Buddha-nature, Nirvana, etc., as long as we are
unenlightened beings with limited mental/spiritual capacities, we cannot truly
understand it. So, the Buddha only offered us some hints or clues (like those I
presented in my last article), but He could not possibly offer to us everything we
want to know, and not because He did not know, but because we do not have the right
organ or spiritual maturity for knowing more. Just imagine how can you explain a
physical theory to a newborn baby :) – it is not because you do not know it,
but because the baby cannot really understand you at the level he is now. Our
brain or what we call “mind” cannot really process the wisdom of a Buddha who
naturally knows everything. Thus, only when we ourselves attain Buddhahood we
can understand everything about Buddha nature and Samsara, and all our questions will be answered or
better said, we’ll have no question to ask because then we will naturally know
everything, and where there is no ignorance, there are no questions :)
This is why the Buddha insisted that here and now we should
be concentrated on following the Path and reach Nirvana, as a person wounded by
a poisoned arrow will first pull the arrow out instead of dealing with theories
like, “to which bird did the feathers of the arrow belonged to”, or “what type
of wood was used when making that arrow”, and so on :)
The unenlightened human mind is limited and dualist, so
it has the tendency to think in terms of begining and end. But this, „begining
and end” are just „mind categories”, nothing more. Sometimes they are useful
tools, especially in dealing with everyday life, but when we wish to use them
to understand Nirvana or Buddha nature, they are not so useful anymore, rather
they can become obstacles. Thus, because we cannot overcome duality, it is
impossible for us to conceive that which is beyond begining and end. The truth
is that the mind wishes very much to be a begining, because this gives her a
sense of security, stability, and some kind of false understanding which is in
fact, an intelectual concept, not true knowing. Because our mind functions in
terms of „begining and end”, it might appear safe for it to accept the idea of
a creator-god. Indeed, the human mind feels safer if it wraps up the world in
concepts wich seem familiar to it. So, for many people, the matter is not if „there
is or there is not a creator god”, but rather, „it must be a creator”, and so
they will actually do everything to cling to the idea of a creator-god.
Coming back to the Buddha-nature or Nirvana, sometimes
the Buddha used positive and negative
descriptions of it, so as to make us yearn for freedom, or wish to become Buddhas ourselves, or to give us a starting point, but He also pointed out that: „Nirvana is beyond concepts”. This is to show us that we cannot apply any
mind category to it. So, without entering into details which are impossible to
comprehend with our limited minds, Nirvana or Buddha nature is the state of true
freedom, while Samsara is the state
of bondage or slavery. You are free or you are not free, or in other words,
you are either a Buddha or an unenlightened being. No god created the state of
samsaric slavery and its myriad of realms (as I explained in my article), just
as no god created the state of true freedom. Being uncreated, the state of Nirvana or Buddha nature has no beginning
and no end, so we cannot say about it that it came from here or there. Only
about the karmic existences we can say they are created over and
over again by unenlightened beings who are self-illusioned. But as to “when
this process of self-delusion or suffering started in the first place and why”
- this is a question asked in the dream by a sleeping (unenlightened) person
using dreaming categories, with a mind which does not know freedom and
awakening, and which will be answered after Awakening (Buddhahood) or better, the
questions will naturally disappear after Awakening.
Once we attain true freedom or Awakening from the Samsaric dream (Buddha means the “Awakened One”), there is no more Samsara for us. This
is similar with the every morning situation when we awake from a dream and we
realize that the dream was not real, while the
state of awakening, or Buddha-nature, was always there. This means that the
dream was created by us and our own emotions, while the state of awakening (Buddhahood/Nirvana) is uncreated. That which is always there, uncreated and unchanged is this
Reality-when-awake or the Buddha-nature. As Bodhisattva Nagarjuna, the
first Patriarch of Jodo Shinshu, said (as I quoted in my article):
“There is no reality
in a dream but nevertheless we believe in the reality of the things seen in a
dream. After waking up, we recognize the falsity of the dream and we smile at
ourselves. In the same way, the person deep in the sleep of the fetters (samyojananidra)
clings (abhiniviśate) to the things that do not exist; but when he has found
the Path, at the moment of Enlightenment (Nirvana/Buddhahood), he understands
that there is no reality [of Samsara] and laughs at himself”.
please also read my article
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