Our FBA Dharmabyte today, and#8220;Buddha Nature – Practice is Paramount,and#8221; features Dhammarati in the midst of an indispensable exploration of everyday practice of the Dharma in the beautiful light of the Tathagathagarbha Sutra. From the fantastic talk, and#8220;Breaking the Mouldand#8221; given at Triratna [FWBO] Day, London 2003
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Buddha Nature – Practice is Paramount
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio – the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. So the tradition accepts this notion of emptiness. And then it says, we want to have a go at expressing the positive nature of this. So it gives you this whole set of metaphors. The later tradition tries to spell out the relationship a little bit more. It says, "What are you saying that's positive that still includes the idea of emptiness?" So one last attempt to sort of square this circle. Sally King says that the Tafagata Galba tradition is not seeing that something simply is. On the contrary she says, the Tafagata Buddha nature is essentially constituted by action. It's not a thing, it's a kind of doing. And rather than it being a type of being, it's a series of actions. It's a practice. The nature is only to say that the relationship between Buddha nature and ignorance, the relation between the Tafagata Galba and the clashes, the defilements, is not the relationship between two substances. It's the relationship between two behaviors. She accepts that the tradition accepts that the fundamental nature of your mind is that it's moving. Her nature is transformation, she says. But the Tafagata Galba and the clashes are fundamentally the mind behaving in two different ways. And our task is to shift our mind from the behavior that expresses the crepe, the cliches, to the behavior that expresses an underlying potential nature, the food within the house. But a behavior that expresses that. And far from under-minding practice, Sally King argues, the whole point of the Tafagata Galba sutra is to underline the absolutely critical importance of practice. It's practice in the sense of behavior expressing skillful mental states that makes the Buddha nature to use that language manifest rather than just some abstract potential. So, I hope that's enough to address these two concerns of a substantial nature in under-minding practice. It's not a nature, it's a behavior, and it's not a calling into question, a necessity for practice. It's saying that if you have to act and you do have to act, the nature of your mind is that it moves, that it acts. You have a choice, and that choice is whether that action expresses confusion and craving, or whether that actually starts to express awareness and emotional openness. And it's an active choice that we make. Spiritual practice by me says somewhere is essentially a growth in consciousness. And because of that, it must be consciously directed. What would be in the Tafagata Galba sutra is a conscious choice between two behaviors, and it's saying it's critical that we choose, and the evidence will actually that we choose. If you don't choose one, you choose the other. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donnie. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]