Enlightenment of plants
Enlightenment of plants
草木成仏 ( Jpn somoku-jobutsu )
Also, Enlightenment of insentient beings. the enlightenment of grass, trees, rocks, the land itself, or anything else that has neither emotion nor Consciousness. The Doctrine that insentient beings can attain Buddhahood derives from
T'ient'ai's Doctrine of three thousand realms in a single moment of Life. One of the component principles of this Doctrine is the realm of the environment, or the insentient objective World. The Doctrine teaches the
mutually inclusive relationship of living beings and their environments, or that of sentient and insentient beings, thereby revealing that both manifest the same state of Life. Therefore, when living beings manifest the state of
Buddhahood, their environment simultaneously manifests the state of Buddhahood as well. In The Diamond Scalpel, Miaolo (711-782) refuted the arguments of Ch'eng-kuan, the fourth Patriarch of the Chinese Flower Garland (Hua-yen) school, who asserted that insentient beings do not possess the Buddha nature. Miao-lo wrote, "A plant, a tree, a
pebble, a speck of dust, each has the Buddha nature, and each is endowed with cause and effect and with the function to manifest and the Wisdom to realize its Buddha nature.
