Our Shared Purity

Dudjom Rinpoche, a revered Tibetan lama of the Nyingma tradition, taught that "All beings possess the tathagatagarbha, the seed of Buddhahood". This means the mind of a fully awakened Buddha is essentially no different from your own. This inherent capacity for enlightenment resides within each of us. 

If this is true, what distinguishes most of us from awakened Buddhas? Rinpoche explains that this potential for enlightenment is "obscured and veiled," causing us to "wander in samsara," or the world of anguish, ecstasy, and everything in between—non-enlightenment.

Imagine a raw diamond. To the inexperienced eye, it may seem like an ordinary stone. However, a jeweler sees its true potential: a brilliant jewel hidden beneath a rough surface. Similarly, our enlightened essence is obscured by impurities such as anger, attachment, and ignorance, much like clouds block the sun. Buddhists strive to transform these poisons and the suffering they cause through various practices. The goal is to uncover your Buddha-nature, your essential purity, the gem waiting to be polished beneath the turbulence of your emotional life. This awakened essence can reveal itself at times.

As a meditation teacher since 2020, I've observed this "essential purity" in hundreds of my students—writers, artists, queer youth, senior citizens, and recovery clients. These diverse New Yorkers have unconsciously revealed this enlightened essence during my workshops, which integrate mindfulness and creative self-expression.

Glimpses of Awakening

One of the most telling signs of this awakened presence is the varying degrees of "awareness" my students exhibit. Awareness is the expansive canvas of your consciousness, offering a wide-angle lens on the present moment. You can be aware of your thoughts, emotions, surroundings, or bodily sensations; it's simply the knowing that something is happening. This awareness is the essence of your fundamental nature: an empty, cognizant luminosity that’s pure, clear, and inherently alert within you.

While this "clear light mind" can be obscured by greed, hatred, and ignorance, its pure, unblemished radiance is always present, even when concealed by the clouds of defiled emotions. It pierces through darkness when least expected.

For example, many of the queer young people I've taught were clear about the challenges they faced, such as unemployment and homelessness. They recognized their anxiety, despair, and depression, but also their joy, gratitude, and curiosity to discover hidden talents through art and spoken word poetry. My recovery clients were cognizant of their addictions and the karmic repercussions these created. The senior citizens I teach, many in their eighties, are well aware of the dwindling days of their lives.

This might seem trivial or obvious, but too many people drift through life with little awareness of what's happening. Many choose to live in a self-created fantasy that causes them more pain in the end, a web of delusions such as addiction or denial. Accepting whatever is happening in your life, however unpleasant or unwelcome, is the gateway to awakening. This requires awareness.

Coming into Clearer Focus

The second quality that reveals our obscured purity is mindfulness. While awareness provides a broader perspective, mindfulness is the intentional, non-judgmental attentiveness you cultivate for the present moment. This focused attention, developed through mindfulness or calm abiding-insight meditation, is a more concentrated form of awareness that allows for a fuller life experience. Mindfulness is the active application of awareness that directly leads to present-moment wakefulness.

Through mindfulness practice, you can uproot the causes of much of your suffering by recognizing their impermanent, thought-based origins, such as anxiety or suspicion. It allows you to unravel delusion at its base by observing these thoughts as they come and go, by witnessing the moment-to-moment changes in life without reacting to them. This leads to the realization of—and familiarity with—your inherent wakefulness.

I teach all my students to express these moment-to-moment fluctuations through writing and visual art. They become hyper-focused while documenting these ever-changing “contents” of consciousness, such as memories and emotions. By exercising their mindfulness “muscles” this way, they interpret this impermanence creatively while concentrating on each word or brushstroke they commit to the page.

My senior students have expressed profound mindfulness of bodily transformation that occurs as vitality fades, including their shaking hands and failing eyesight. Even so, they focus as best they can to keep their minds and brains as nimble as possible. My recovery students express frustration with the thoughts that distract them from the movements of the breath in mindfulness meditation, which is part of the discipline.

We can be mindful of our joy, well-being, and lovingkindness as much as our shame, anger, and paranoia. While some of my students have struggled with revealing these observations to strangers, many have demonstrated an egoless courage in surprising ways, yet another sign of an enlightened purity operating “behind the scenes”.

The Wisdom of Interconnectedness

Compassion, the third quality I've witnessed, is more than a virtue. It's an awakened form of wisdom inextricably linked to a profound, non-dual understanding of reality. When you deeply realize that all beings are interlinked and interdependent, that there is no truly separate self, the delusion of a distinct, isolated "I" or "mine" dissolves.

For Buddhists, compassion acts as an antidote to self-cherishing, the ego's primary concern for its own well-being. As our concern expands to genuinely include all sentient beings, the narrow confines of self-interest begin to dissolve. This release from self-fixation is a profound act of transformation, aligning with the truth of non-self (anatta), which can lead to profound awakening. Witnessing another's suffering becomes akin to experiencing one’s own once we transcend the ego's self-obsession. The natural response for most of us is to alleviate another's pain, which is the essence of the Mahayana path.

Everyone possesses this potential for awakening, even those burdened by severe defilements such as chronic addiction and the crimes it can lead to. My opioid recovery students, many of them ex-convicts with violent histories, have expressed deep concern and sadness for the suffering of fellow addicts. This appears to stem from an existential familiarity with their addiction-related anguish, the recognition of their suffering in others.

My senior students more commonly demonstrate compassion for the trials of others, having lived long and experienced a great deal. They've learned from their mistakes and those of their spouses, children, and loved ones. The wealth of wisdom that old age brings is significant; time is an unparalleled teacher. Even the teens and young people I've taught have shown empathy for the hardships of others—an ageless ability to lead with the heart rather than the brain. This is another sign of an essential purity operating beneath the turbulence of the self-serving, egoic mind.

Recognizing Our True Nature 

Dudjom Rinpoche's message is optimistic: an enlightened essence exists within everyone. The Buddhist path to awakening isn't about creating something new, but recognizing what is primordially pure and present within you. Our awareness, mindfulness, and compassion shine through, whether we know it or not. These flashes of clarity, concentration, vulnerability, and lovingkindness reveal who we are behind the illusions of a false “self”.

I encourage you to see with your "eye of wisdom" and feel with your "heart of compassion" as you encounter people on your journey through life. By recognizing these awakened qualities in others, you'll catch reflections of them in yourself.