07.12.2024 Awaken to Your True Self   A few years ago, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the home of a larger-than-life sculpture of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. The statue, carved from paulownia wood and dating back to twelfth-century China, came to the museum in 1920. It was moved to a storage room in 1999, where it sat deteriorating for fifteen years until a donor offered to sponsor its conservation.  It took conservators eighteen months to restore the statue. Layer by layer, they carefully removed paint that had been added over centuries, uncovering beautiful gold, green, and red adornments. They employed UV imaging and x-radiography to uncover the statue’s history. A plastic jewel on her forehead, placed between her glass eyes in 1950 for a television segment, was removed. Finally, nearly seventeen years after her last public appearance, Guanyin was reinstated in the museum in 2016. Like removing the plastic jewel from the forehead of an ancient statue, Buddhist practice can help us shed the parts of ourselves that feel inauthentic. Like conservators peeling away layers of paint, we too can shed our attachments, ignorance, and anger to uncover our true, awakened selves. With careful attention and persistence, layer by layer, our innate buddhanature emerges. By looking within, we find our true selves — a self that was basically good all along.  When I encountered the statue of Guanyin myself, I was taken aback by its presence. This Guanyin sits in her classic posture of royal ease, measuring nearly six feet tall. From behind museum glass, she radiates a brilliant light, her gentle eyes gazing down at those standing before her. Standing before this 900-year-old statue, I thought of the countless people who have worked throughout history to continue the Buddha’s teachings and help others discover their own awakened mind.  Below, you’ll find three pieces on the concept of buddhanature. May they guide you in uncovering it within yourself. —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, Lion’s Roar Rest in Your Buddhanature   Your true nature is like the sky, says Mingyur Rinpoche, its love and wisdom unaffected by the clouds of life. You can access it with this awareness meditation. When you feel comfortable, allow your awareness to extend beyond any particular experience. Rest in the knowing quality of mind itself. No matter what comes or goes, this knowing quality remains. Although everything falls apart, our true nature—awareness itself—cannot fall apart. It cannot die. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be destroyed, because it is unborn. Awareness is always with us. Trust in this. This is your true nature and ultimate refuge. ADVERTISEMENT Uncover the Golden Buddha Within You   The gold of your true nature can get buried beneath fear and confusion, but it can never be tarnished. Tara Brach on how to trust your basic goodness. Adding layer after layer to protect ourselves, we become identified with our coverings, believing ourselves to be separate, threatened, and deficient. Yet even when we cannot see the gold, the light and love of our true nature cannot be dimmed, tarnished, or erased. It calls to us daily through our longing for connection, our urge to understand reality, our delight in beauty, our natural desire to help others. Our deepest intuition is that there is something beyond our habitual story of a separate and isolated self: something vast, mysterious, and sacred. Glimpses of Buddhanature   Buddhist teacher-practitioners from across traditions share personal moments that gave them insight into the true nature of mind. Kokyo Henkel: I have come to see more and more how trusting in buddhanature can relieve discouragement in my own practice. By trusting that buddhanature is always present, even if seemingly obscured, it is always possible to practice and verify it. Our usual dualistic thought is like clouds seeming to obscure the vast clear sky of buddhanature, but occasionally there’s a little hole in the clouds, a glimpse of a small spot of clear sky. From that glimpse we can infer that there’s a huge unobstructed clear sky behind the clouds—and from the point of view of the sky, the clouds don’t even obscure it in any way. The sky has no problem with clouds floating through it, since the clouds are actually made of sky.