We fundamentally have the awakened or Buddha-nature. It’s other name is ātman or in Pali, attā.
"The ātman is the Tathagatagarbha. All beings possess a Buddha Nature: this is what the ātman is. This ātman, from the start, is always covered by innumerable passions: this is why beings are unable to see it" (Mahaparinirvana-sutra).
There is no need for us to create a Buddha nature or ātman. It is already present in the way the air we breathe is. We just don’t recognize it because it is hidden by karmic impressions including layers upon layers of programming which, as a consequence, take us upon various paths of deception so that we are always faraway from our true nature. This means that we are in servitude to a complex matrix of ignorance in which the likelihood of escape is not in our favor.
The Buddha had no magic wand that he could wave and liberate the people of his time. He was a teacher who instructed those who were his followers how they might come to recognize their Buddha-nature.
In today’s parlance the Buddha taught his followers how to self-deprogram themselves which in a nutshell is about abandoning all that is not the ātman such as the conditioned five skandhas consisting of shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness.
These five skandhas are constructs just like a clay pot is a construct of clay—they are empty of their own unique self-nature (e.g., shape-ness). We might even call each one something like an “experession of ātman” which is not ātman or the same, an-ātman. From this we could also say that these skandhas are not the Buddha-nature or Tathagata. On the other hand, the Buddha-nature is not far from the skandhas; they are only the Buddha-nature’s configurations, so to speak like a wave is a configuration of water.
It is important that we acknowledge that we are, intrinsically, the Buddha-nature but also, instead of recognizing it, we wrongly attach to what is not this nature. This grows into a dangerous habit that we have to learn how to counter. We have to learn to self-deprogram and abandon desire for what is not our Buddha-nature. The huge majority of people are not interested in doing this. But what is the alternative except another illusion supported by delusion?
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