The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana

The Awakening of Faith is a concise and enormously influential treatise that systematised Mahayana Buddhist thought for East Asia. Its central teaching is the "One Mind" in two aspects: mind as suchness, pure and unchanging, and mind as arising-and-ceasing, the flux of ordinary experience.

All beings, it holds, already possess the enlightened nature; ignorance is only the temporary clouding of a mind that is intrinsically awake. Practice — faith, meditation, and moral discipline — does not manufacture enlightenment but removes what obscures it.

A cornerstone for the Hua-yen, Tiantai, Pure Land, and Zen schools, it shaped the whole East Asian conviction that awakening is the recovery of an original purity never truly lost.