The term Buddha-mind refers to something sentient beings are born with: a luminous, natural, and eternal state of the mind. Anyone who has ever practiced meditation will be familiar with its unruly cousin ‘monkey mind’ which habitually wanders from one topic to another, into the Past, Future, and Fantasy, all the while wishing for peace of mind.
The following exchange is from a book* about Bankei Yōtaku, an influential Zen teacher who lived in Japan 600 years ago.
Student: I don’t know why it is, but my mind often seems to be somewhere else. Could you help me to keep my mind from playing truant like that?
Bankei: The Buddha-mind … that all people receive from their parents when they’re born is wonderfully bright and illuminating. No one–and that includes all–is ever separated from it.
This absentminded of yours is the same. Your mind’s not somewhere else. It’s only that you haven’t learned about the Buddha-mind, so instead of just dwelling in it, you change it into various other things. Then even though you listen to things, you can’t really take them in—you don’t really hear them.
You’re not absentminded, what you’re doing is making the Buddha-mind into something else. If your mind were somewhere else, you would hardly be aware of it. You wouldn’t be asking questions about it. … You’ve never been apart from your mind in the past, you won’t be apart from it in the future, you are not apart from it right now...
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* The Unborn: The life and teachings of Zen master Bankei, 1622-1695. (Revised 2000). Translated with an introduction by Norman Waddell. North Point Press, p. 74. I made minor changes to make the text accessible to anyone who may be unfamiliar with Buddhist terminology.
I swear as I age I have more monkeys!!