All beings by nature are Buddha
A Talk by Madelon Bolling, May 10, 2026
In the Book of Serenity, Tozan Zenji teaches us:
Don’t try to seek yourself.
Don’t try to figure out who you are.
The “you” found in that way is far from the real you;
it is not you anymore.
But when I go on my way, wherever I turn, I meet myself. [#49]
The Huayan school says,
“Inner reality is complete, words are partial; when words are born, inner reality is lost.” [Book of Serenity, #49]
One of the first instructions I received from Korean Zen master Seung Sahn was to consider “What am I?” This seems to be directly contradicted by Tozan Zenji’s admonition: Don’t try to seek yourself. Don’t try to figure out who you are . . .
Then there’s Hakuin Zenji’s Song of Zazen, where it says:
All beings by nature are Buddha.
If this is true, how does it work? If we say by nature, the implication is that before anything is done, at birth we are already awakened, so already fully a manifestation of Buddha-mind. Does that mean we should return to infancy?
Hmmm. So let’s try again. “All beings by nature are Buddha.” That is, all beings without any further input, are awakened consciousness, through and through. Hakuin Zenji says:
. . . as ice by nature is water.
Apart from water, there is no ice,
Apart from beings, no Buddha. [Hakuin Zenji: Song of Zazen]
Tozan started his koan with “Don’t try to figure out who you are,” and then ends with “when I go on my way.” Seeking (figuring out who you are) requires an idea of something before the first step: To seek is to look for something, so we need an idea ahead of time. “Going on my way” points to having nothing in mind, just walking. Or just washing the dishes, just cleaning the cat pan—the sorts of things we may do without thinking.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said:
“When you become yourself, at that moment your practice includes everything. Whatever there is, it is a part of you.” (p. 17)
Actually, even before you become yourself: whatever there is, is already a part of you. Your practice includes everything, though you might not recognize it from here.
He continues:
When you accept yourself as a Buddha—or understand everything as an unfolding of the absolute teaching . . . then whatever you think or see is the actual teaching of Buddha. Before you attain enlightenment, enlightenment is there . . . Enlightenment is always there, and to realize this is enlightenment. (p. 20)
Furthermore, he continues:
“Buddhist teaching is the teaching that arises from emptiness of mind.” (p. 12)
He describes the Buddha’s enlightenment, saying, “We say, ‘he attained enlightenment,’ but it may be better to say, ‘He completely forgot everything!’ He had nothing in his mind at that moment.”
Nothing in his mind: no “thing” in his mind—that’s a critical detail. Have you ever had no thing in mind? How is that possible? Look out at the world, but don’t focus on (that is, don’t give a name to, don’t conceptualize) any one thing. Consider awareness –when looking out on what we call the world. Everything we see is just awareness—we say it’s awareness of objects, of the floor, the cushion, the grape vine, the sky, the other people here. But what if it were just awareness, different flavors of awareness? Floor-flavored awareness, cushion-flavored, car-flavored, jet-sound flavored, chill-flavored, sunlight-flavored. . . It may be that this practice will then encourage us to have nothing (literally “no thing”) in mind as the Buddha did.
This helps make sense of Suzuki’s statement:
“When you become yourself, at that moment your practice includes everything. Whatever there is, it is a part of you.” How is that possible?
When we sit, we may be looking for a sense of “me” in all of this—so we look for an object, a thing, whether it’s an idea or a chair, a grape leaf, a certain angle of the sun. All of these are in the visual field. But then there’s the auditory field, the tactile field, the olfactory, gustatory—all of these are what we call “physical experience.” But what are these in fact, when we consider them closely?
In visual experience, we focus on stimuli that come through the eyes. So there’s a class of experience that we expect when focusing on stimulation from the eyes: light, dark, movement. colors, shapes. Are these “us”? Or how about sounds, stimulation through the ears? Rumble of traffic, or the sounds of machinery, heaters, blowers, the sound of gravel being walked on, birds singing, a dog barking; sounds of fabric rustling, a bare foot meeting the wood floor, the sound of a phone’s ringtone.
Where is the sense of “me” in all this? We say, “I see,” “I hear,” “I smell,” “I touch or feel,” “I taste,” even “I think,” which labels and manipulates such experiences and considers their relationships with one another. But who or where am I? You can get how “I” appears and is extracted from sensory experience, but where is the sense of “me” in all of this?
Suzuki Roshi said:
“When you become yourself, at that moment your practice includes everything. Whatever there is, it is a part of you.” (p. 17)
Which matches Tozan Zenji’s declaration:
. . . when I go on my way, wherever I turn, I meet myself. [Suzuki, p.25]
These two pointers indicate a direction to consider. If you look at inner experience and expect to get a complete answer from there, it won’t work. The “I” sense is derived from all of the sensory input we have—and it is still an object—literally a thing “thrown out” in front of us. This “I sense” is derived from multiple “objective” experiences. But if you try to pin it down, there is no objective “I” where we’ve been looking. There are only these objective experiences that we then appropriate to form an “I,” a subject.
Well, that has a lot of implications.
The Huayan school says,
“Inner reality is complete, words are partial; when words are born, inner reality is lost.” [Book of Serenity #49]
What about enlightenment being emptiness of mind? This doesn’t mean blankness of mind but refers to the remarkable awareness that the experience is without boundaries, including the fundamental boundary of I and it which refers to a full picture without edges, a concept without object. This accounts for Tozan’s saying:
But when I go on my way, wherever I turn, I meet myself. [Suzuki, p. 25]
Suzuki continues:
“Tozan Zenji says that although the image you see there is not you, what you see in the water, as it is, is actually you yourself.” (p. 26)
This simple statement encompasses the difficulty of reaching understanding in our ordinary sense, since understanding Zen is literally impossible = not do-able. Tozan left the scene without saying anything more. Later, as he was crossing a river, he saw his reflection and then. . . was thoroughly enlightened. Then he composed a verse:
Just don’t seek from others, or you’ll be far estranged from Self
I now go on alone; everywhere I meet It:It is now me; I now am not It.
One must understand in this way to merge with thusness.
Is all of our endeavor then useless? No, of course not!
Tozan said “It is now me; I now am not It.” This tags an experience of no difference. His experience of the reflection in the stream differs from ours. If we say, “I saw my reflection,” it bears all the baggage of “me”—the image was my image and ends at its edge. But what Tozan saw was truth, with nothing superimposed, not even identity with the reflection in the water, not even stopping at the edge of the water. What he saw was everything in the visual field, and no doubt the auditory and tactile fields as well. “It is now me; I now am not It.”
One might say in fact he was aware of awareness itself, which has no edges.
Try for a moment to be aware of awareness itself.
This requires giving up the edges of things, so we no longer identify concretely with “this” vs. “that.” Not that we don’t perceive edges: water is still water, stone is still stone, but the perception that they are fundamentally distinct is gone. The same could be said of sound, as well as taste and smell. And the notion of “I” vs. “you.” The conviction that they are fundamentally distinct or even distinguishable is gone. Doesn’t mean you’re going to chew on a rock the same way you’d chew on a banana, but it opens the perception to new relationships.
One must understand in this way to merge with thusness.
Suzuki, Shunryu. Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life. Selected & edited by Jiryu Rutschman-Byler and Sojun Mel Weitsman. NY: Tarcher (Random House), 2025.
The Book of Serenity. Cleary, Thomas, trans. Lindisfarne Press, NY, 1990.