Buddhist traditions express our potential for awakening in diverse ways: natural luminous mind; suchness; nondual awareness; basic goodness; dharmakaya; the unity of emptiness, self-existing wakefulness; unconfined capacity; and so forth, all under the rubric of “buddhanature” (tathagatagarbha). Mahayana Buddhists understand this dimension of our mind to be an innate source of joy, compassion, courage, and wisdom. It is always operative and always available.
Buddhanature can be a difficult concept to understand. Any attempt to engage “awakening” through
