Buddha Nature quote

“…many questions a modern Westerner asks as a matter of course about human being are not directly addressed in the Buddhist texts. Of course there are important reasons for this. Our concept of and assumptions about human individuality are profoundly different from Buddhist views of the same. Our two worlds of discourse about the value and meaning of incarnate, finite existence, the course of history, the meaning of suffering, and the nature of possible human greatness are set up on entirely different foundations. Thus for a contemporary Westerner to ask the question, What is a person? What is human being? of a Buddhist text is to set oneself up to receive an answer that does not satisfy the intent of the question. Yet, although Buddhist views and assumptions differ so markedly from our own, Buddhist texts reveal in their own way a preoccupation with the human condition as intent as that of our own hyperindividualistic, anthropocentric culture.” (Pp. 137-8)