Esoteric Dixie Dharma

It doesn’t mean all sentient beings are already Buddha’s, just waiting to come out. It means they all have a fundamental purity at the heart of their Samsaric mind, which gives them the potential to awaken. This empty and luminous nature of the continuum can be described as natural nirvāṇa. Directly realizing it brings release from conceptual fabrication, but it does not necessarily mean that every obscuration has been exhausted. There may still be much more work to accomplish along the path. Being “enlightened” / realizing emptiness/experiencing nirvana is not the same as becoming a Buddha. A Buddha is enlightened but not everyone who is enlightened is a Buddha. Examples would include Śrāvaka arhats (who are already liberated from the cycle of compulsive karmic rebirth, even if they have much more work to do to become a Buddha), or a zen boomer who has a satori moment, even if that is a genuinely insightful moment of clarity. A Buddha possesses complete, unsurpassed awakening, with the wisdoms, marks & perfections, bodies, and capacities of Buddhahood. A Buddha is what is born from that womb of emptiness. In Western Magic, we talk about the “Solar Body”. A Buddha in Buddhism is similar. Well, as a linear simplification of varied tantric systems, one first practices the Clear Light Mind. One first learns to manifest the clear-light mind and employ it in the direct, nonconceptual realization of emptiness. We can call this Wisdom. Then one practices the Illusory Body. Through work with the subtle winds, channels, and drops, the practitioner develops the illusory body, a purified, dreamlike form arising from the subtlest wind that serves as the vehicle of clear-light mind. We can call this skillful-means. Thus, the subtle body, embodied within the physical body - is fundamental to the Illusory Body’s construction, and fundamental to Skillful Means. Wisdom + Skillful Means (Clear Light Mind + Illusory Body) = Buddhahood. An active vehicle of the Buddha Mind to operate in the world. If taken alchemically, “Lead” represents our ordinary ignorant minds: the defiled ocean filled with samsaric karmic seeds and tendencies. Through the clear-light realization of emptiness, the obscurations of this continuum are purified. It then “returns as Gold”: Buddhahood, understood here as the perfected union of clear-light mind and illusory body. Thus we have taken our ordinary Samsaric “ocean” of mind as the basis, and transformed it / turned it into Buddhahood. This is, of course, just my flawed and imperfect understanding and you would be much better served speaking to reputable and accomplished Vajrayana Lama’s.