What is the Eternal Buddha

The Groundless Ground of Interbeing

Adapted from the chapter “Understanding Dharmakaya – The Buddhist Vision of Ultimate Reality” in Dharmakaya and God (2025)

“The buddha body extends throughout all the great assemblies: it fills the cosmos, without end. Quiescent, without essence, it cannot be grasped; it appears to save all beings... His state is boundless and inexhaustible... The Buddha is inconceivable, beyond discrimination... no sentient being can fathom it.”¹— Flower Garland Sūtra

What Is the Dharmakaya?

When the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree and awakened, what exactly awakened? Was it a man named Siddhartha Gautama? Or was it something far more metaphysical?

What Siddhartha Gautama awoke to was that all phenomena-sentient and insentient-are relational and interdependent, arising from the unconditioned nature of reality, what Mahayana calls Dharmakaya:

"Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the ultimate reality of all things. That is to say, among all things, each has such an appearance, such a nature, such an embodiment, such a potential, such a function, such a cause, such a condition, such an effect, such a reward, and from the first to the last, such an ultimate identity.”²

Dharmakaya is not alive, nor a cosmic force behind the scenes. It has no beginning and no ending, no birth and no death. It is not a person, place, or thing.

For many, Dharmakaya can sound remote or abstract. Yet, Dharmakaya is not an abstraction. It pervades everything. It is always already present. It is the condition of possibility that makes awakening possible here and now.

There may not be a more important – or more misunderstood – teaching in Mahayana Buddhism.

The Trouble with Translating Dharmakaya

Dharmakaya is an extraordinarily difficult concept to grasp. Its very nature resists definition. The Lotus Sutra echoes the Flower Garland Sutra, saying this “is difficult to perceive and understand.”³

Much of the confusion around Dharmakaya results from translation. Words matter not only in what they say but in what they imply or conceal. There are four potential points of distortion in translation: language to language, language drift, cultural context, and translator bias.

Translation is always contextual, never final.

Donald S. Lopez Jr. writes, “In many ways, the history of Buddhism is the history of translation… [Buddha exhorted] his disciples to teach in the vernacular. In other words, he required his monks to translate.”⁴

Paul L. Swanson notes, “There is never only one correct translation. A variety of translations are possible for all texts, without having to conclude that one of them must be ‘correct’ and all others ‘wrong.’… Both may be right within their respective contexts.”⁵

Dharmakaya – literally “Dharma Body” – doesn’t bend easily into English. Scholars have rendered it as “Truth Body,” “Body of Reality,” and even “Cosmic Body.” While each captures a quality of Dharmakaya, they also risk creating misunderstanding, especially the temptation to hear Dharmakaya as something analogous to God. Other translations such as “Buddha-nature,” “Eternal Buddha,” and “Primordial Buddha” likewise import theistic or personal connotations. “Buddha-nature” implies a fundamental essence of existence; “eternal” suggests temporal permanence; and “primordial” emphasizes priority. Each term illuminates something - while simultaneously misleading.

Perhaps the closest English approximation is Suchness: a deceptively simple word pointing to reality “just as it is.” Suchness refers to the true nature of things beyond conceptualization and dualistic thought. Dharmakaya is indescribable; the most we can say is, “It is such - it is the way it is.” Suchness has been described as unchanging, pure, and “prior to differentiation.” Yet Suchness too succumbs to the conditioned, conceptual realm of language. No amount of linguistic mastery can describe what is ineffable. Dharmakaya cannot be captured by such conceptual frameworks without either diluting it or turning it into a disguised God-term.

Confusion about Dharmakaya also arises when we try to fit it into familiar categories – to make it resemble what we already know - a creator god. However, Dharmakaya is not a god in the theistic sense. There’s no divine personality making decisions or responding to petitions. Yet it’s also not a blank void or mere nothingness. Think of Dharmakaya like water: formless in its essence, taking the shape of whatever contains it, yet always remaining water.

Translating Dharmakaya may very well be an impossible task, one best not attempted as a single fixed equivalent. keeping the Sanskrit preserves its multilayered meaning: Dharmakaya simultaneously indicates the ultimate nature of reality, the buddhas’ awakened consciousness, and the principle from which all phenomena arise.

No single English word can hold all of this.

From Doctrine to Revelation

A key to unlocking this mystery is the Buddhist doctrine of the Trikaya, the Three Bodies of the Buddha. The Trikaya are not three stacked “layers” of a divine being but a functional and relational description of Dharmakaya as awakened activity. Dharmakaya is activity – a continuous, formless functioning of reality. It is the generative principle of being that is not bound by space or time: pure potential, dynamic presence, the ever-unfolding suchness.

Dharmakaya is reality-as-activity, not reality as a fixed object.

Dharmakaya is felt through the relational experience called Sambhogakaya (“Reward Body”). Sambhogakaya is not a separate heavenly realm, nor a person, place, or thing. It is the relational engagement between Dharmakaya and the practitioner’s receptivity. This engagement is rewarding in the sense of being fulfilling and fruitful. It is the feeling of joy that arises through participation in relationship with Dharmakaya – in other words, awakening.

The third aspect of the Trikaya is Nirmanakaya (“Accommodating Body”). Nirmanakaya is Dharmakaya manifesting through causes and conditions within time and space. It is not merely the physical body of the historical Buddha – or of any particular buddha. It is any and all forms – sentient or insentient – that host or accommodate Dharmakaya: a teacher, a text, a chant, a mountain path, or an ordinary human body. These forms are functions rather than static things – acts of hosting the sacred within the everyday. Nirmanakaya does not exist apart from Dharmakaya; it is the expression of Dharmakaya that becomes knowable and livable, felt through Sambhogakaya.

Taken together, these three bodies are not separate aspects but facets of a single trilateral relationship: formless truth (Dharmakaya), relational fulfillment (Sambhogakaya), and embodied presence (Nirmanakaya). They are mutually functioning modes of the same awakened activity – a trinity of function enacted here and now.

Problems arise when the Trikaya is divided or made concrete. To imagine the Dharma-body acting separately from the other two is to fall into dualism, splitting what is essentially a unity. To imagine the Nirmanakaya as a permanent self is to drift into eternalism. To insist that “everything is empty” risks nihilism. The subtlety of the teaching lies in holding these three together without collapsing into any extreme.

Tiantai’s Threefold Truth and the Meaning of Emptiness

A second key to unlocking the mystery of Dharmakaya – and freeing it from potential misunderstandings – is Chinese master Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth:

• Truth of Emptiness (Ku / Sunyata) – all things are empty of fixed essence.

• Truth of Provisional Existence (Ke / Samvrti) – things appear and function provisionally.

• Truth of the Middle (Chu / Madhyama) – emptiness and provisional existence are a single unified reality: two but not two, nondual.

This brilliant philosophical model describes our direct experience right now in this single moment. The words you’re reading are empty of permanent essence (the page will yellow, the screen will break), yet they function meaningfully in this moment, and this very interplay of emptiness and form is itself the activity of Dharmakaya.

The Lotus Sutra’s Revelation

The Lotus Sutra’s great revelation comes in Chapter Sixteen, “The Life Span of the Thus Come One,” when Shakyamuni declares, “I am not extinguished… I always abide here teaching the Dharma… I am always dwelling in this world.”⁶

This is not Shakyamuni claiming that he is physically immortal. Rather, he is describing that what he awakened to under the Bodhi tree was the timeless capacity for awakening itself – always present, always available, constantly manifesting in new forms to guide beings toward realization, in this moment and every moment, in this place and every place:

• Timeless – beyond linear time

• Omnipresent – constantly active in the world

• Nondual – not separate from phenomena but expressed through them

• Compassionate – naturally manifesting for the sake of all beings

• Accessible – able to be experienced through practice, contemplation, and daily life

Nichiren practitioners, as part of their daily meditation practice, begin each session with a short recitation from the Lotus Sutra’s Chapter Two, Skillful Means. This passage honors Shakyamuni’s great vow to enable all beings to realize this awakening for themselves - affirming that all beings and all things are equal expressions of Dharmakaya.

The Nirvana Sutra and other Buddha-nature texts complement the Lotus Sutra. While the Lotus reveals the universal potential for buddhahood, the Nirvana Sutra articulates this potential in terms of purity, bliss, eternity, and authentic self.⁷ At first glance, these terms appear to contradict the classic marks of existence (impermanence, suffering, impurity, non-self). However, these sutras deepen and enrich earlier truths rather than cancel them.

This teaching approach uses paradox and apparent opposites to reveal truth: light and dark, up and down, joy and suffering. Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth shows that such pairs are not separate territories but relational poles within one reality. Impermanence implies the meaningfulness of continuity; non-self clears the ground for a different kind of “self” as awakened awareness and interdependence; suffering points toward unshakable peace.

If Dharmakaya is non-self, why does the Lotus and Nirvana sutras speak of it as “authentic self?” This language can easily mislead if taken literally. In this context, “self” expresses genuineness. Dharmakaya is unaltered by anything external, irreducible, simply “such.” In this functional sense, we may speak metaphorically of Dharmakaya as a self having a kind of “agency” or “capability.”

Thus, the Four Marks of conditioned phenomena – impermanence, suffering, non-self, impurity – can be seen as one pole. The Nirvana Sutra’s description of Dharmakaya – unconditioned, stable, joyful, “authentic self” – is the other pole. This self is not an eternal soul but a way of describing the irreducible suchness of awakening. It is not personal or possessive; it is the genuineness of Dharmakaya itself.

Thich Nhat Hạnh expressed this dynamic beautifully: “Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world with a lot of tenderness.”⁸

Nichiren taught: “Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, and continue chanting Namu Myoho-Renge-Kyo, no matter what happens. How could this be anything other than the boundless joy of the Law? Strengthen your power of faith more than ever.”⁹

This isn’t stoic resignation but recognition that joy and sorrow both arise from the same source, both expressions of the one reality we call Dharmakaya.

Dharmakaya as Groundless Ground

Dharmakaya is the miracle of life. The miracle is not a break in mechanical causality by a willful deity, but the fact that a thoroughly contingent, interdependent world is miraculous, complete, meaningful, and capable of awakening. There is no outside cause – and yet what appears evokes awe, responsibility, and reverence.

The Threefold Truth lets us reinterpret emptiness not as a sterile void but as “boundless fullness,” the generative groundless ground of being that is not a being. Dharmakaya expressing itself through Sambhogakaya and manifesting as Nirmanakaya. Reward and accommodation are functions of this groundless ground, not additions to it.

Dharmakaya is the Suchness of all things: unborn, undying, without inside or outside. To speak of it at all is already to fall short – and yet, we can begin to sense and respond to it through image, practice, and paradox.

Living Expressions – Dharmakaya in Practice

How does this understanding come alive in practice?

Nichiren wrote, “If you wish to free yourself from the sufferings of birth and death and to attain unsurpassed enlightenment in this lifetime, you must perceive the mystic truth that is originally inherent in all living beings. This truth is Myoho-renge-kyo. Chanting [Namu] Myoho-renge-kyo will therefore enable you to grasp the mystic truth innate in all life.”¹⁰

Here Nichiren doesn’t mean your personal thoughts and feelings, but the vast awareness within which thoughts and feelings arise and pass away.

When you sit in meditation and notice thoughts coming and going like clouds in an empty sky, that sky-like awareness is a glimpse of Dharmakaya. When you perform a simple act of kindness and feel the boundaries between self and other soften, that’s Sambhogakaya, the relational expression of Dharmakaya. When you chant, speak truth, or simply breathe with full presence, that’s Nirmanakaya, the manifestation body making the sacred tangible.

Nichiren writes, “Even the clouds of ignorance that spread over us would be dispersed by the winds of Mt. Sacred Eagle filled with the sound of the Sacred Dharma.”¹¹ Here “sound of the Sacred Dharma” evokes the active voice of the Dharmakaya carried on the wind of faith from Buddha’s mountain seat. Nichiren poetically describes the ‘Sacred Dharma’ as the activity of Dharmakaya itself, with the Daimoku as a manifestation of Dharmakaya’s sound-form.

Japanese Zen master Dogen wrote that "The valley sounds are his long broad tongue, The mountain shapes are [Dharmakaya]"¹² the awakened body of all reality. For Dogen, every element of the phenomenal world – when seen with awakened eyes – reveals this ultimate nature. The mountain doesn’t represent Dharmakaya; in its very mountain-ness it expresses the Suchness of reality.

Chan master Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin traced his own awakening through three stages: “Before I practiced Zen, mountains were mountains and waters were waters. When I gained some insight, mountains were no longer mountains. But now that I have penetrated to the essence, mountains are once again mountains.”¹³

This isn’t circular – it’s fractal. Each return to the ordinary world reveals the same pattern of awakening in a new way. The mountain is still a mountain, yet now we see it as an expression of Dharmakaya, not separate from our own nature.

Understanding Dharmakaya as groundless ground rather than cosmic deity or blank void fundamentally shifts how we engage with suffering and loss. When we grasp that nothing exists outside this unconditioned reality, grief softens - not because pain disappears, but because even loss unfolds within Dharmakaya's embrace. The death of loved ones, failure of dreams, the world's cruelties - these remain real and deserving of our full feeling, yet they no longer represent breaks or tears in reality's fabric. They are reality's fabric, as much as joy and birth.

As Nichiren wrote, "Neither the pure land nor hell exists outside oneself; both lie only within one’s own heart. Awakened to this, one is called a Buddha; deluded about it, one is called an ordinary person. The Lotus Sutra reveals this truth, and one who embraces the Lotus Sutra will realize that hell is itself the Land of Tranquil Light.”¹⁴

This is why Nichiren could write from exile, why Dogen could teach through his own illness, why countless practitioners have found unshakeable peace amidst impermanence. Not through bypassing human experience but through recognizing that experience itself—all of it—is Dharmakaya's self-expression. There is nowhere to fall out of this groundless ground.

Awakening as Participation

In the end, the question “What is Dharmakaya?” dissolves. It is like asking what a dance is apart from the dancing. Dharmakaya is not a person, place, or thing to know. Dharmakaya is the unconditioned reality – the groundless ground – within which awakening arises. To practice, to serve, to chant, to breathe – these are all ways this groundless ground appears as activity.

Every sound, every breath, every moment of awareness already occurs within this field of Suchness. The bird singing outside your window, the ache in your knee as you rise from the cushion, the taste of morning tea – all of it expresses the same reality that the Buddha awakened to under the Bodhi tree.

To awaken is not to meet a hidden being but to realize that there was never anything outside this unconditioned reality to begin with. What Siddhartha Gautama awakened to under the Bodhi tree was the timeless and boundless possibility present in every moment – the same possibility that reads these words right now. The Dharmakaya is measureless, luminous, and without beginning and end.

The fog lifts from the valley. The mountain stands revealed. It was always there, waiting to be seen.

Notes

1. Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Flower Garland Sūtra), trans. Thomas Cleary, The Flower Ornament Scripture (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 65.

2. Lotus Sutra, Chapter 2, trans. Shinozaki, Ziporyn, and Earhart, The Threefold Lotus Sutra: A Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers (p. 58)

3. Lotus Sutra, Chapter 2, trans. Shinozaki, Ziporyn, and Earhart, The Threefold Lotus Sutra: A Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers (p. 58)

4. Don S. Lopez, A New Buddhist Canon - Translation doesn’t merely preserve traditions; it creates them. Tricycle Magazine, https://tricycle.org/magazine/donald-lopez-on-translation/

5. Paul L. Swanson, Clear Serenity, Quiet Insight: T’ien-t’ai Chih-i’s Mo-ho Chih-kuan, vol. 1 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017), 55.

6. The Lotus Sutra, chap. 16, “The Life Span of the Thus Come One,” 281.

7. Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, trans. Kosho Yamamoto, rev. Tony Page, The Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, Chapter XI "On the Four Inversions” (London: Nirvana Publications, 2007).

8. Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2014).

9. Nichiren, "Happiness in this World," in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 1999), 681.

10. Nichiren, “On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime,” in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 1999), 3.

11. Nichiren. “Mt. Minobu Letter.” In The Writings of Nichiren Shōnin, vol. 5, translated and edited by Kyōtsū Hori. Tokyo: Nichiren Shū Overseas Propagation Promotion Association, 2012, 131.

12. Dogen, Shōbōgenzō: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, "The Sounds of Valley Streams, The Forms of Mountains" (Keisei-sanshoku), trans. Kazuaki Tanahashi (Boston: Shambhala, 2010).

13. Adapted from Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin, in Jingde Chuandeng Lu (The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp).

14. Nichiren, “Hell is the Land of Tranquil Light,” in The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 1999), 456.