Aitken Roshi. From an essay titled, The Body of the Buddha.

The body of the Buddha is my body and yours. "Yours" includes human and nonhuman, sentient and non-sentient-individually and collectively. "All beings by nature are Buddha," Hakuin Ekaku says in his "Song of Zazen," "... This very body is the Buddha."

There is nothing that is not the Buddha body. In the Mahayana tradition, it is said that the historical Buddha, Shākyamuni, resolved his questions about suffering in the world and exclaimed, "Wonderful, wonderful! Now I see that all beings have the wisdom and virtue of Buddha. They cannot testify to that fact because of their delusions and preoccupations."

With this statement we have definition. All beings are the Buddha, but they cannot say so. It is not that people would rather say that they are Christian or atheist or whatever—they cannot acknowledge what is called Buddhahood: the emptiness, oneness, and uniqueness of their perceptions and all they perceive. They cannot acknowledge that delusions and preoccupations create suffering, yet have no substance.

The two elements of Shākyamuni's statement, the nature of beings and their inability to formulate that nature, are the foundation of Buddhist experience, practice and philosophy. Experience is the realization, by each according to individual capacity, of the truth Shākyamuni expressed. Practice is the way of realization, and philosophy is its post hoc formulation. I begin with the philosophy:

The three elements of Buddhahood: emptiness, oneness, and uniqueness, are the so-called "Three Bodies of the Buddha," the Dharmakāya, the Sambhogakāya, and the Nirmānakāya. All beings have these three qualities, as do all communities of beings, even the largest community, the universe itself.

The Dharmakāya is the "Pure and Clear Law Body." "Law," the etymological meaning of "Dharma" in Sanskrit, refers to the nature of things, animate and inanimate.

In this context, the term refers to the infinite, fathomless void, charged with possibilities, that produces, infuses, and indeed is the "material" of all bodies. According to some Buddhists, one's body is only momentarily substantial. In the Zen view, and of the Mahayana School generally, it has no substance, even for a moment

Complementary to this emptiness, the Sambhogakāya is the body of fullness, or oneness, exemplified by the "Net of Indra" in Hua-yen philosophy. The whole universe is a vast, multi- dimensional net, with each point of the net a jewel that perfectly reflects and contains all other jewels. "Your body is not your body, but is a constituent of all bodies." The Sambhogakāya is known as the "Body of Bliss," a name that expresses the delight of freedom from the "small self" and oneness with all beings.

Finally, there is the aspect of uniqueness. The Nirmānakāya is exemplified by Shākyamuni Buddha in the archetypal pantheon of the Three Bodies (the other two Bodies have their Buddhas too). Shākyamuni is surely a prime example of uniqueness, but so am I. So is each "I." The earthworm and the nettle are individual; no other being will ever appear like this particular earthworm, this particular nettle.

Each of the Three Bodies is qualified and made possible by the other two. The potent void is the source and essence of being in its fullness and oneness. Uniqueness gives interpenetration its dynamism—without it, there would be no Chinese, distinguished from Norwegian, to be one with the Norwegian. And if in essence all things were not empty, then skins would be barriers, and unity would not be possible.

The Three Bodies of the Buddha are implicit in Shākyamuni's teaching, but it was his successors who formulated them, sometimes without being clear that work is necessary to realize them, and work is necessary to maintain and deepen that realization. Without practice philosophy is superstition. When he was very young, Dōgen Kigen looked at just one side of Shākyamuni's statement about all beings, and asked why he should train at all, since he was already intrinsically Buddha. This is like suggesting that one can harvest without first preparing the ground, and then planting and cultivating.