Sounds like “special pleading” here* - do they back this up with some argument?
*Everything is empty of intrinsic existence except this special thing
This might be so mainly in Rinzai zen.
Dogen constantly refers to any old zazen as illumination itself.
And the sudden illumination that Huineng and Huangpo speak of, may be more akin to the idea of there being only one step to take on the “path” - rather than some weird “kensho” experience
Pretty much, yep.
There are lots of tools available: intuition, experience, logic, inference, word of mouth. But none of them enables The Truth to be established beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Clarity gained, mystery lost?
It’s a rather complicated and controversial area, but I will attempt to give a very concise overview (as far as I have understood it).
Contextually, Yogacarin and tathagatagarbha literature was in part a response to the way that some monks had understood the mahayana prajnaparamita literature. Some of this literature can be read as articulating a kind of illusionism in which the world is simply and straightforwardly empty like an illusion is empty, and nothing else. There is literally nothing at all behind the illusory appearance of a world. The problem with this view, as the Chan philosopher Tsung-mi writes, is that
If the mind and its objects are both non-existent, then who is it that knows they do not exist? Again, if there are no real things whatsoever, then on the basis of what are the illusions made to appear?… there has never been a case of the illusory things in the world before us being able to arise without being based on something real.
Indeed, one of the central texts articulating the ‘buddha-nature’ perspective (the Ratnagotravibhaga) presents itself as a “corrective” to those who have been waylaid by this negative or nihilistic understanding of emptiness.
In terms of arguments for the ‘buddha-nature’ view, much of it is based on scriptural authority (taken from canonical sources).
For Yogacarins there is an early Buddhist text called the Culasunnata-sutta, which speaks of an emptiness in which there is something left-over or that “remains” (a mysteriously affirmative form of emptiness that follows after the experience of negative emptiness).
Another textual precedent for the ‘buddha-nature’ (tathagatagarbha) schools is taken from the Anguttara Nikaya, where it says: “Luminous, monks, is the mind. And it is freed from incoming defilements” - the implication being that the mind is fundamentally free (luminous), but is covered over by the defilements of conceptual thought.
A general scriptural precedent for their view comes from the Samyutta Nikaya, which teaches that ‘reality’ (or nirvana as articulated in positive language) is “unborn, unproduced, uncreated, unformed”; without which there could be no release from the “born, the produced, the created, the formed” (Udana 8.1. and 8.3.). For the ‘buddha-nature’ school, this unborn, uncreated reality (variously called dharmakaya, dharmata, tathagatagarbha, tathata or suchness) can only be revealed to a mind that has cleansed itself of all conceptual defilements, and so is ‘empty’ in that sense. But it is an emptiness that makes the luminosity of the uncreated dharmakaya possible, and so is ultimately non-empty (or beyond emptiness and non-emptiness: i.e. ineffable).
This is just like Christians using the Bible to prove that God exists - “Look it says so right here in Chapter II Verse12” - In this case “look I think I’m right as far as I can tell, so there you go”
Knowledge gained, freedom lost?
Obviously when I mentioned Chan/Zen and its identification with sudden insight this was a tremendous oversimplification. I was merely pointing to a distinctive trait of certain expressions of Chan/Zen that are markedly different from traditional Nikaya and Theravada Buddhism.
For example, even as early as the 4th century, there was a Chinese monk called Daosheng, who became controversial (and for a time completely shunned) for being of the view that enlightenment or illumination is sudden and not gradual (as was the prevailing view of meditation at the time). Daosheng himself is said to have drawn inspiration from the Vimalakirti Sutra.
And in some sense the origin story (or myth) of Chan came from the 7th/8th century monk Shenhui who taught a subitist (sudden) strain of Buddhism, and enlisted Huineng as its legendary founder. Shenhui downplayed the value of traditional systematic (graduated) meditation practice, arguing instead for a meditation that involved instantaneous insight, the perception of one’s “fundamental nature”.
You say tomatoes … 
Thanks for all that - complex scholarly stuff.
As far as I can make out some are using “Buddha nature” as a teaching tool, others to describe freedom from or absence of concepts.
But does anything in the texts lead us to believe that Buddha nature is somehow free from the rules of dependant origination, non-self and emptiness? (Unborn thus not dependant nor arising from the rest? - instrinsic existence?)
Or rather, simple sense perception is the closest that ordinary human experience can reveal of the present. The images that thought makes always lag after this. If we say that perception lags after the true ‘now’ (and is the time it takes for neurons to fire and electrical signals to propagate through the body), then the abstractions made by thought make an added time-differential or a secondary lag that shadows the first.
There may be another aspect of the mind that does not take time to perceive (aka, what Krishnamurti calls insight outside of time, insight without a perceiver, the true ‘now’), but unless we have had such insight, the most immediate experience available to us is sense-perception (not thought).
Automatic, reflexive. Such as when there is an after-image on the retina following exposure to bright light. Similarly thought makes an image of an event (perceptual or otherwise), and records it automatically like the negative on a photographic plate.
Well, that’s the question. If all thought and experience are tinctured by the past, then there is nothing truly new in our perception: everything is coloured by the past. What Krishnamurti is proposing is that it is possible for the new - as insight, as direct-perception - to occur, to happen. But for this the mind must first be empty of the past (as thought).
I don’t think the content of thought can be free. The content is always an abstraction of experience, and so is a memory, something mechanical.
I agree - I don’t believe there is such a thing as a thought without content. I was attempting to tease out your own view by first dealing with what cannot be anyone’s view.
This you will have to explain. Thinking - as far as I understand it - is definitionally limited (otherwise it would be a synonym for reality itself). Thinking is always an abstraction drawn ultimately from some sense-perception. It is an echo, a shadow, and no matter how creative and imaginative it can be, it will never be more than that. A thought does not = the reality it attempts to represent.
Emptiness sure is full (of thought/interpretation). Reminds me of Hinduism’s brahman, The Ultimate Ineffable about which millions upon millions of words have been written/spoken.
If you take a journey into yourself, empty all the content that you have collected and go very, very deeply, then there is that vast space, that so-called emptiness, that is full of energy. And in that state alone there is that which is most sacred, most holy.
BOOM! I’ve visited, but I wouldn’t want to live there (yet).
Yes - in India they have been debating and discussing these topics for literally centuries on centuries, so every conceivable view has been articulated by someone or other!
It depends which texts you look at. According to buddha-nature texts (e.g., the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra, the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, the Ratnagotravibhāga, The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna - and, intriguingly, a hymn attributed to Nagarjuna himself, the Dharmadhātustotra), the answer is yes.
According to the Ratnagotravibhāga (which is both a collation - and an exposition - of earlier ‘buddha-nature’ sutras), the emptiness of dependently-originated phenomena (pratītya-samutpāda) refers to constructed or “conditioned factors” alone, but not to the unconstructed or “unconditioned” dharmakaya (ultimate reality). Making a clear distinction between nirvana and dependent-origination, the Ratnagotravibhāga insists that the unconditioned (nirvana) transcends dependent-origination altogether:
Since it is free from being born, it is permanent. Since it is without cessation, it is steadfast. Since these two are not present, it is peaceful. It is immutable, for the dharmatā ever remains.
The dharmakaya is
not born, and it does not die. It suffers no harm and does not age since it is permanent and steadfast.
Therefore,
The final truth is in every respect devoid of anything compounded
(Whilst what is dependently originated is implicitly compounded, and so is not final truth). The central analogy the text makes is to space:
Space is never burnt by fires. Likewise this [dharmadhātu] is not burnt by the fires of death, sickness, and aging…. The nature of mind as the element of space does not [depend upon] causes or conditions…. This clear and luminous nature of mind is as changeless as space
Perhaps the greatest exponent of Dzogchen, the 14th century Tibetan teacher Longchenpa, who was influenced by the Ratnagotravibhāga (which in Tibet is called the Uttaratantra), wrote that
The buddha-potential is the primordial, pure expanse of ultimate reality… it is not mere nothingness, a nihilistic void… It is totally free or empty of samsaric phenomena… [It is] the luminous nature of the mind; the dharmadhātu, the most fundamental mode of being… naturally pure suchness… the perfection of wisdom
Have you been in a nasty trap that you speak against, can you describe it, I have never seen anybody getting in the trap of awareness.
Every time I get emotionally attached to a teacher/teachings I fall into the trap. It happened with Krishnamurti, with Advaita, with Buddhism. Maybe even early on with Catholicism. Sometimes I fall hard, sometimes more gently. It’s the trap of spiritual/philosophical authoritarianism. I invest the teacher with authority, fall into believing that they are right and I am wrong. Then at some point I rebel and work to ‘free myself’ from the prison of attachment I’ve built. The process is more subtle now than it used to be, I catch myself getting attached quicker. But it still happens.
Well it’s definitely possible to fall into the trap of being attached to an awareness-based worldview. But I doubt it is possible to fall into the trap of awareness itself, since awareness (the choiceless kind) is not an object you can become attached to. You can get attached to the idea of awareness, but not awareness itself.
What do you think?
This comment wasn’t directed towards me, but I think this is right. One can be aware of one’s attachment to a philosophy of awareness, or attached to (the memory of) experiences arising out of awareness, but one can’t be attached to awareness itself. Awareness is just awareness (of the false or the true).
Please explain the “of the false or the true” part.
It merely refers to whatever arises in experience.
The false might be illusions that we take to be real, even though they are illusions (like the feeling of devotion to god, or to a national leader or a celebrity); or the feeling of envy that we take to be justified, or anger, irritation, hurt, etc.
The true might be an insight into what is false, the seeing of illusion as illusion. Or it might be the objective perception of something in nature, or in relationship, or an insight into the nature of freedom, space, emptiness, etc.
The false and the true covers all aspects of our experience, whatever arises for us in daily life - the (choiceless) awareness of that.
Thanks for the explanation.
We could haggle about the validity of false/true … but it’s Saturday, haggling is so M-F. 
In the cases of anger, irritation etc, they are unjustifiable because they stem from the false assumption that what happened should, could have been different than what happened. As in, what is happening now, could be different than what is happening now…the illusion of a ‘controller’.
And the illusion of a ‘time’ other than now.
How you can get attached to krishnamurti beats me. Most people try to avoid k because he tells the truth .
When you say that K “tells the the truth”, the implication is that you know the truth when you hear it or read it.