The Groundless Ground

“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.”
—The Avatamsaka Sutra, trans. Thomas Cleary

I grew up the son of a Protestant minister, immersed in Christianity from birth yet always sensing a gap between the faith I was taught and the spiritual truths I intuited. When Buddhism entered my life at 18, the resonance was immediate. In my fifty years of practice since, dharmakaya has remained the teaching I find most resonant for my practice yet the most difficult to explain. And, simultaneously, because it sits at the center of Nichiren and Tendai practice, it is impossible to set aside.

Neither dharmakaya nor God is conceivable from a purely intellectual standpoint. They are ineffable. One can only experience and feel them. Yet for decades I found it nearly impossible to approach dharmakaya without inadvertently reaching for theistic language, as if I were moving toward a horizon that kept receding.

Awareness of dharmakaya changes practice. It is the ground every practice stands on. For Nichiren practitioners, every recitation of the daimoku rests in dharmakaya. For Tendai contemplatives, every gaze through the threefold truth observes it. For Zen practitioners, the mountains, valleys, and rivers express it. For Theravada meditators, the breath observed with mindful awareness participates with it. Dharmakaya unites all these practices. Every chant, every breath, every moment of full attention enters into the same reality the Buddha awakened to under the Bodhi tree.

Living Expressions—Dharmakaya in Practice

In his essay “On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime,” Nichiren Daishonin 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.” By “mystic truth,” Nichiren is not pointing to your personal thoughts and feelings but to 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, walk, or simply breathe with full presence, that’s nirmanakaya, the manifestation body making dharmakaya tangible.

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, the failure of dreams to manifest, and 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.

In the essay “Hell is the Land of Tranquil Light,” 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.”

There is nowhere to fall out of this groundless ground.

Coming to this realization 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 by bypassing human experience but by recognizing that experience itself, all of it, is dharmakaya’s self-expression. There is nowhere to fall out of this groundless ground.

What Is the Dharmakaya?

When the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree and awakened, what exactly awakened? Was it an event in the life of 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, 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.”
—The Threefold Lotus Sutra: A Modern Translation for Contemporary Readers

Dharmakaya is not alive, nor a cosmic force behind the scenes. It has no beginning and no end, 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 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 in saying it “is difficult to perceive and understand.” Translators caution that translations are never final and are always context-dependent. Words matter not only in what they say but in what they imply or conceal. Translators have rendered dharmakaya as “truth body,” “body of reality,” “cosmic body,” “buddha-nature,” “eternal Buddha,” and “primordial Buddha.” Each illuminates a quality. Each smuggles in theistic or personal connotations the original Sanskrit does not carry: “Buddha-nature” implies a fundamental essence, “eternal” suggests temporal permanence, “primordial” emphasizes priority.

Perhaps the closest English approximation is suchness: a deceptively simple word pointing to reality “just as it is.” Dharmakaya is indescribable; the most we can say is, “It is such, it is the way it is.” Yet even suchness succumbs to the conditioned realm of language.

Confusion deepens when we try to fit dharmakaya into familiar categories, especially that of a creator god. But dharmakaya is not a divine personality making decisions or responding to petitions. Yet it is not a blank void either.

Think of dharmakaya like water: formless in its essence, taking the shape of whatever contains it, yet always remaining water.

Translating dharmakaya may be an impossible task because no single English word can hold all of this. Keeping the Sanskrit preserves its multilayered meaning: the ultimate nature of reality, the buddhas’ awakened consciousness, and the principle from which all phenomena arise. 

From Doctrine to Revelation

How can meditation, an act of kindness, a chant, and the encounter with loss all be expressions of the same reality? A key to unlocking this mystery is the Buddhist doctrine of the trikaya, the three bodies of the Buddha. The trikaya is 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 dharmakaya 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 tripartite relationship: formless truth (dharmakaya), relational fulfillment (sambhogakaya), and embodied presence (nirmanakaya). They are interdependent 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 dharmakaya 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:

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.”

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:

Nichiren practitioners begin each session with a short recitation from chapter two of the Lotus Sutra, entitled “Skillful Means.” Nichiren considered this chapter the eye of the Lotus Sutra, and Zhiyi drew on it for his seminal doctrine of 3,000 realms in a single thought-moment. The chapter offers insight into the true reality of all things: the relational nature of interdependence, and the truth that all beings—sentient and insentient—are expressions of dharmakaya.

The Nirvana Sutra and other buddha-nature texts complement the Lotus Sutra. While the Lotus Sutra reveals the universal potential for buddhahood, the Nirvana Sutra describes dharmakaya in terms of purity, bliss, eternity, and authentic self. At first glance, these terms appear to contradict the classic marks of existence (impermanence, suffering, impurity, nonself). However, these sutras deepen and enrich these earlier truths rather than cancel them, by using 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 things but relational poles within one reality. Using the dialectical unity of opposites, we learn that joy is possible through our suffering. Each pole contains the other in complete unity.

Impermanence means change is possible. Suffering means joy is possible. Impurity clears the ground for liberation. Nonself means we are never alone.

Why do the Lotus and Nirvana sutras speak of dharmakaya as authentic self? This language can easily mislead if taken literally. In this context, authentic self means that dharmakaya is genuine, unaltered by anything external, irreducible, and simply such. It is what it is. 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, nonself, impurity—can be seen as one pole. The Nirvana Sutra’s description of dharmakaya—unconditioned, stable, joyful, authentic self—is the other pole. This authentic 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.

In his teaching “Happiness in this World,” Nichiren offered this wonderful pastoral guidance to a grieving follower: “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 [dharma]?”

In No Mud, No Lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh 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.”

Nichiren and Thay’s statements shouldn’t be seen as stoic resignations but as a 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 expresses itself through sambhogakaya and manifests 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.

The World as Suchness

In “Mt. Minobu Letter,” Nichiren wrote, “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.” Here the “sound of the sacred dharma” evokes the active voice of dharmakaya carried on the wind of practice from Buddha’s mountain seat. Nichiren poetically describes the sacred dharma as the activity of dharmakaya itself, with the sound of Namu Myoho Renge Kyo as a manifestation of dharmakaya’s sound-form.

In his landmark collection Shobogenzo: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Japanese Zen master and Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen wrote that “The valley sounds are [the Buddha’s] long broad tongue, the mountain shapes are dharmakaya,” 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-yuan Wei-hsin described his experience of 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.”

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.

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 intellectually comprehend. Dharmakaya is the unconditioned reality of life itself—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, and we can experience it directly in our everyday lives.

Every sound, every breath, every moment of always-already awareness 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. Dharmakaya is measureless, luminous, and without beginning or end.

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

♦

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