Is human nature Buddha nature?

This essay was inspired by a sharing session at the Sangha. This question arose - Is human nature the same as Buddha nature? My gut reaction was that the two are the same. But this raised issues. 

What about the nasty stuff - exploitation, genocide, warfare, anger, lust, greed etc Are these built into human and Buddha nature or are they due to aberrations in post hunting and gathering  social systems where the essentially ‘good’ nature is buried?

I was inspired to approach the topic from several different directions. I have not yet figured how to tie all the loose ends but the process of writing has helped to clarify things.

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The mindbrain of a particular human being is conditioned in part by its nature, in part by its nurture and in part by serendipity. (for optional patterns see here )

The conditioning process ensures that the individual grows and develops in a way that fits him to behave appropriately in a particular physical and social environment.

‘Nature’ provides some hard wiring in the form of instincts and intuitions – eg the adrenalin based fight or flight syndrome. In many cases this allows a person to react quickly and to delay thinking about it till afterwords. He who hesitates is lost! 

More, and more sophisticated, instincts and intuitions are being identified daily (see the work of Kahneman et al). The date of evolutionary origin of particular examples is not always clear but, given neural plasticity, there is likely to be a lot of tweaking of old patterns to suit us for life in the globalised and fast changing computer age.

‘Nurture’ provides learning experiences. It puts environmentally appropriate flesh on the hard wired skeleton – eg it is in our nature to learn a language but it is our nurture that determines which language we learn. 

Other names for the nurturing process include enculturation, programming, indoctrination, brainwashing, education, training, and coaching. At issue is the creation of a pattern of belief and actions that ensures survival of the individual, her family and her hunting and gathering group. The group would have been made up of about 50 individuals that were ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’.

Evolution is a tinkerer for whom good enough is good enough. ‘Truth’ is not part of the early pattern of believing and acting. There are records of many myths and patterns of magic that are farcical by our modern standards - eg human sacrifice to the gods; virgin births etc - but they served particular cultural groups well enough to survive into the 21^st century.

The enculturation process can be viewed from two sides. On the positive side it allows for the preservation of useful cultural products - eg stone hand axes, young males organised in bands as warriors. On the negative side it tends to reify ‘tradition’ and thus to limit the conceptual horizons of its members. Humanity was very conservative for most of its history of hunting and gathering.

The limited horizons of ‘them and us’ thinking is alive and well in our present times. There are zealots who are parochial and xenophobic and who are fairly easily and quickly convinced of the demonic qualities of the enemy (ie ‘them’) and the need for genocide and thus a holocaust.

SO – what is human nature?

Human nature is demonstrated as patterns of beliefs and associated actions. Anthropologists have tried to isolate and classify these to determine which are common to all human cultures and are thus likely to be due to nature rather than nurture. The following table is based on Kluckhohn and Strodbeck (1961) (for later developments see (ref ‘culture and values’  ))

variations in value orientations

A useful metaphor is of a huge mass of unconsciousness modules topped by a small lump of consciousness modules and by an even smaller lump of self-consciousness modules. This image supports the notion that the ‘I’ concept is not all that it was once cracked up to be.

The concept of ‘Flow’ is now well accepted (ref Csikszentmihalyi). It links to the idea of the musician in the groove, the athlete in the zone, and the poet being a channel for his muse. Time, space and self consciousness fade away and the mindbrain is in a creative and non-egoic state. No self, no problem. Excellent work gets done. Something apparently comes from nothing.

But flow is not magic. It is just the conditioned unconscious involved with tasks that are deemed culturally important. But this need not always have desirable outcomes. The prison guards at Auschwitz and the warriors of Genghiz Khan  might well have been in flow. At best this might be viewed as a branch capability of the mindbrain.

A common Eastern theory is that there are 8 consciousnesses. The storehouse consciousness is the vast foundation upon which the lesser consciousnesses rest.

• Five sense-consciousnesses
•  Mind (perception)
•  Manas (self-consciousness) 
•  Storehouse-consciousness

Thich Nhat Hahn uses the image of store consciousness. This contains many seeds. Some good and some not so good. There is the option of watering the good ones so they expand and keeping the not so good ones relatively dry and wizened.

The word ‘mindbrain’ helps us to remember that there are always neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). These can be thought of as a range of special purpose modules linked by neural pathways. BUT - very little is set in stone. There is neural plasticity – it is never too late to change your mindbrain.

So we now have an image that could be referred to as ‘human nature’ as well as ‘Buddha nature’. The  human mindbrain has evolved with a set of thought/ feeling/ action seeds (its nature) whose flourishing depends on focusing attention on specific modules of the physical and social environment (its nurture).

Throughout human history there has been a minority of mindful meditators who for some reason came to realise that there were better ways to be human; better ways to inhabit the planet. But they were limited to using particular languages with distinctive vocabularies and their thought about patterns and agencies were in many cases linked closely to myths and magic. They served their immediate communities as shamans and witchdoctors who provided treatment and sometimes cures for physical and mental health problems.

However, around 600 BC, there was a global ‘awakening’ when several of the founders of key religions were active. Characters such as the Buddha and Mahavira began to sit quietly and notice what they were noticing and to think about what and how they were thinking. Their activities were precursors to what in our present times are the scientific disciplines of evolution, psychology, and neurology. 

The foundation of the practice is to look inward and thus to know that your cultural conditioning sets unnecessary limits on your manner of ‘being’ in the world. The practice of ‘mindfulness’ is becoming more popular in the West. And, given ICT, the potential for its expanding, even for going viral, is enormous.

SO – is human nature Buddha nature?

YES – warts and all!

And in both cases there is need to practice using your mindbrain in a sometimes counterintuitive way where the principle is to promote the positive and demote the negative so as to generate compassion,  wisdom and peace in your self and in others.