A critical question has come up in looking over stuff for the book:
Does a dog have Buddha nature?
I mean, a dog has particle character, obviously. And quantum theory tells us that a dog has wave nature. But does a dog have Buddha nature?
Hard questions make Emmy sad. Or maybe she's just pondering the enlightenment and salvation of all beings. Sometimes it's hard to tell.
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Mu!
She's totally contemplating the Unfinished Cheese Block principle
What is the sound of one tail wagging?
Every being in the universe (sentient & non-sentient) has a Buddha nature. Since, acording to (Nichiren's) Buddhism, everything manifests Myoho-renge-kyo - the Universal Life Force, even a dog, a plant, etc. have Buddha natures.
GE
Woof! "Every being in the universe (sentient & non-sentient) has a Buddha nature." Is an electron a being, as Steiner said? A quark? A Gluon? Gluons are sticky. Like gravy on meat. I love meat!
Yip! What happens to beings below a Planck length or acting in less than a Planck time? Birds move fast. I like to chase birds.
Buddha lectured, beneath the Bo Tree, about quanta. He said that one can meditate to speed up one's subjective speed of consciousness, until one could be aware of an individual atom of air striking the inside of one nostril. He gave the right order of magnitude of this, too. Bo Tree. I like trees. Sniff, sniff. Just checking my pee-mail.
Buddhists in Tibet a thousand years ago said that, just as the Earth circles around the Sun, so also does the Sun circle around the Great Sun. And they gave the right length of that galactic rotation as 200,000,000 years. How did they know? Introspection, being told by extraterrestrials, or 20,000 years of naked eye astronomy to find galactic rotation? Legend has it that there were extraterrestrials listening to Buddha, in those grad student seminars he gave. How did they get here? Surely not by rockets, as Allen Ginsberg remarked to me once in Amherst.
Wag, adjoint wag, Wag, adjoint wag. Woof!
If you knew for sure, the answer would always be "no".
Depends on the dog.
"Someone asked a Zen Master, "How do you practice Zen?"
The master said, "When you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep."
All dogs are zen masters. (Except maybe little yappy ones...)