[babopeddy]

Re #9, nice post Element, thanks.

Buddha Nature is present within all. All sentient life possesses it

Hiyah Kris,

Hmm, well I'm not convinced of the 'Buddha nature' of a slug - nor that it has the possibility of enlightenment in a future lifetime, because apart from it being too silly to comprehend anyway, such speculation would comes under what the Buddha called'unconjecturable'.

from a Vajrayana point of view again:

buddha nature = " The potential for enlightenment that is inherent in all sentient beings; the true nature of mind"

(Glossary of 'The Life of Gampopa' by Jampa Mckenzie Stewart - Snow Lion)

I tend to sort of equate (perhaps wrongly) Buddha Nature with the Dharmakaya.
To place 'Dharmakaya' into its complex Vajrayana context of the 'Four bodies of a Buddha' (from the same glossary)

" The four bodies or four kayas of the Buddha are:

1. the dharmakaya or ultimate truth body, corresponding to the mind aspect of the Buddha.

2. the sambhokaya or complete enjoyment body, corresponding to the speech and prana aspect of the Buddha.

3. the nirmanakaya, the emanation body, corresponding to the physical human body of the Buddha.

4. the svabhavikakaya, the essential or nature body, representing the inseperability of the first three bodies."


Phew! feels like its time for a lie down now,!

So to put it simply, what you are saying is that you equate Buddha Nature with the mind of a Buddha.

In which case a slug, being a sentient being with 'Buddha nature'......... ...


Anyway, moving on, there was the following interesting comment in the article #7:

"If you're primed to look for innate natures, you'll tend to see innate natures, especially when you reach the luminous, non-dual stages of concentration called themeless, emptiness, and undirected. You'll get stuck on whichever stage matches your assumptions about what your awakened nature is. But if you're primed to look for the process of fabrication, you'll see these stages as forms of fabrication, and this will enable you to deconstruct them, to pacify them, until you encounter the peace that's not fabricated at all."

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