The Angel in the Marble: Unveiling Our True Nature

David by Michelangelo. Photo by Marco Crupi, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

~ Apocryphal quote commonly attributed to Michelangelo

When young Michelangelo Buonarroti stood before an eighteen-foot block of Carrara marble in 1501, he did not see lifeless stone. He saw David, already alive and breathtaking in his perfection, hidden within the excess rock. “The sculptor arrives at his end,” Michelangelo later wrote, “by taking away what is superfluous.” This was the vision of a creator who trusted that perfection already existed and only needed to be revealed.

In a similar spirit, Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions teach that our essential nature, known as Buddha nature or tathāgatagarbha, is already pure, complete, and luminous. It lacks nothing. There is nothing to add and nothing to transform. Awakening, then, is not an achievement gained through effort or accumulation but a revealing of our true nature, obscured by habits of the conditioned mind.

Most of us initially approach spiritual practice with an unexamined belief that something is wrong with us. We assume we must become better, more evolved, or more virtuous to be liberated or enlightened. From this perspective, the spiritual path appears to require filling ourselves with something. More knowledge, more experiences, more virtues, and more elevated states of consciousness.

Meditation becomes a construction project, an attempt to build a new and improved self on top of the old one. Yet both Michelangelo’s marble and the Buddha’s teaching point in the opposite direction. Enlightenment is a process of subtraction, not addition. Luminous awareness is not brought in from elsewhere. It is revealed when everything that is not it falls away.

This is why meditation, at its deepest level, is an act of letting go.

We do not sit on the cushion to acquire peace.

We sit to release the agitation that prevents us from noticing the peace that is already here.

We do not meditate to become loving.

We meditate to dissolve the fear, resentment, and self-clinging that obscure the boundless compassion native to the mind.

Each moment of mindfulness becomes a chisel stroke, removing a little more of the unnecessary stone of distraction, fantasy, and grasping. Thoughts are allowed to arise and pass without being fed. Emotions are felt fully and then released rather than dramatized. Even the subtle sense of a meditator who is “doing meditation” is eventually recognized as just another portion of marble to be hewed away and set aside.

As this understanding deepens, we stop waiting for a dramatic breakthrough that will finally make us enlightened. We see that there is no future moment in which a new self will arrive. There is only this moment and the ongoing invitation to let go of anything that solidifies a false sense of a separate self.

The Advaita Vedanta tradition expresses this insight with equal clarity through the practice of nēti nēti, meaning “not this, not this.” The seeker removes every false identification and every mistaken perception until only the Self remains. Adi Shankaracharya illustrated this with the rope and snake analogy. In the dark, we mistake a rope for a snake. The rope was always just a rope. We do not become our true nature. We simply stop believing we are anything else.

This understanding resonates across contemplative traditions. In Christianity, 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart taught that God is found 'not by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.' Islamic teaching speaks of fitra, the pure nature we're born with, which becomes obscured by worldly concerns. Kabbalistic Judaism describes spiritual work as removing the barriers of ego to reveal the divine spark already present. Across traditions, the pattern repeats:

We are not fundamentally broken.

We are fundamentally whole, just temporarily obscured.

In the presence of my Guru, Nitya Chaitanya Yati, I always felt deeply seen and unconditionally loved, not for who I was striving to become, but for who I already was. Others spoke of experiencing the same affirming recognition in his presence. He seemed to perceive our innate perfection, and in doing so, dissolved any self-imposed sense of deficiency or otherness. Having recognized his own Buddha nature, he was able to see the same truth in others.

In a world fractured by divisions of race, nationality, religion, and political identity, my hope is that we can commit ourselves to this same work of inner subtraction. If by stripping away our own delusions we can also see beyond the tarnished patinas of others, we open to the possibility of living in a world with greater understanding, deeper tolerance, and a more enduring peace. The angel in the marble is not only a metaphor for awakening but an ethical invitation to recognize one another as already whole.

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