If everybody has the Buddha-nature, then what makes any individual spiritually unique?

Tagged:

Leaving aside Buddha-nature, which isn’t really necessary to answer the question, though I’ll return to it later, spiritual uniqueness is guaranteed by the fact that people’s lived experiences are all extremely extremely different from each others. These experiences lead to different beliefs about the world, different ego patterns, different resolutions for those patterns, different abilities created from the surrender of those patterns.

Buddhism is the religion built around a particular kind of truth, the truth that everything is illusory. The same truth is given weight in other religions like Judaism and Christianity, the difference is in what weight is given to the concept and what should be done about it and why.

Buddhism as a religion evolved in a particular way because history went a certain way. Early Christianity resembled early Buddhism in so many ways it would make your head spin to think about them all. The process of theology, of deciding what is true, the actual way that humans come to those decisions about these incredibly weighty topics, there’s no substantial difference.

In short, the essence of things like theology and religion remains static, similar across all the things, while the particulars, the parts that stem from the illusion, are as many and as varied as the people that see, witness, believe in, and work with them.

It is the same with people and their spiritual uniqueness. We all share the same essence, Buddha-nature, but differ greatly in our response to the maya, the illusion.

It should be noted that there’s nothing wrong with the world, with maya, with the illusion. The feeling that the world is bad and horrible and whatnot is just more personal reaction to maya, otherwise known as ego. Once seen as illusory, once the ego holding on to the illusion is surrendered, then the illusion stops being so weird and scary. It’s just that, illusory.

Buddha-nature is the inborn ability of all of us to see through the illusion, should we decide to take the effort and do the work. Again, there’s nothing special about this, you don’t have to believe in Buddhism in order to recognize or use this. The essence of this idea is taught in Christianity, indeed in all religions. Just given different priority.