One of the fundamental teachings of Mahayana Buddhism is that every being has the potential for awakening—buddhanature. Yet out of the billions of people on this planet, the overwhelming majority are locked by necessity or by choice into a materialistic approach to life. In all probability, no more than a few million have even a possibility of spiritual practice, and of those, probably only a few thousand may actually touch the mystical experience we call buddhanature.
We are deeply conditioned to think and feel that those few thousand people are in some way special. Many of us want to be one of them. Most religious traditions would have us believe in some form of specialness, whether they view the specialness as due to the grace of God, the ripening of efforts made in previous lives, or the result of our own efforts here and now.
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