Finding Our Buddha Nature

By Manny Mansbach
Register now to join Manny for a 5-week course, The One Who Knows, beginning Monday, October 7. 

Ajahn Chah’s term, The One Who Knows, refers to an innate knowing in us. Sometimes people use the term “Buddha Nature” to speak to this understanding that we’ve always had that knows about life. This quality of awareness can be a profound refuge, especially when we are able to clarify it and take that quality as the vantage point through which experience is known. One truly wonderful thing about it is this knowing is not something we have to acquire, but is an already an existing quality of our true nature!

Learning to rest in The One Who Knows is not a self-improvement project, but coming to know in accordance with the truth. As we come home to this knowing, our lives can settle and clarify. Ajahn Amaro speaks about it this way:​​

“Training the heart to rest in that quality of awareness, to be that very knowing, that space that receives and knows the world without confusion, that holds the whole world and all of its beauty and ugliness and ordinariness, and all its arising and ceasing. And the more that we are able to abide with this quality of knowing—be the one who knows—then we find a quality of integration, a quality of peacefulness.” ​

In this class we will keep bringing kind awareness over and over to what we are doing, encouraging a simplicity and clarity of heart and mind that facilitates a shift of identity from thought-structure identification into the spacious experience of the present moment.