Someone cited a passage and told me it asserts universal consciousness.

I replied:

The Avatamsaka Sutra stated, “there is no difference among the individual mind, the Buddhas’ mind, and the sentient beings’ minds” — 心、佛、众生，三无差别

But it is not any sort of a universal mind that you are postulating. Just because all fires have the similar generic characteristic of heat, does not mean there is one singular, universal, transpersonal, overarching “heat” that all fires are sharing as some sort of singular pervasive and inherently existing substance.

This is consistent with Avatamsaka Sutra and all other Mahayana sutras. No Buddhist sutras assert the sort of ontic universal consciousness that for example, Shaivism or Vedanta teaches.

As Dzogchen Acarya Malcolm Smith wrote before, excerpts from https://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2014/02/clarifications-on-dharmakaya-and-basis_16.html —

“Each mind has its own basis [nature].

There is no such thing as a singular, transpersonal, universal basis in Dzogchen.

...

There is no universal basis, as such. There is however a generic basis, which has three characteristics: essence, nature and compassion. Just as all instances of water are generically limpid, clear and moist, likewise the basis for each and every sentient being is the trio of essence, nature and compassion. Put in the simplest terms, all sentient beings possess a consciousness which has the nature being empty and clear. When examined from the point of view of reducing this to the most essential point, the basis is just one's unfabricated mind, nothing more, nothing less.

The all-basis is of course the imputing ignorance.

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No, not multiple bases, no more than there are multiple heats.

The basis, as we saw above, is just the dharmatā of one's own mind, just as heat is the dharmatā of fire. We don't say of emptiness for example, that there multiple emptinesses for multiple entities, we don't need to say that of the basis either when we understand that the basis is a generic set of attributes for all minds, just as emptiness is a generic attribute of phenomena. We speak of emptiness often without distinguishing whether we mean one emptiness or many emptinesses, because it is understood at the outset that there is no entity "emptiness" that needs to spoken of in plural or singular terms. Likewise, we don't need to speak about the basis in plural or singular terms because we can understand at the outset the term "basis" refers to the dharmatā of the mind, and not some entity out of which minds arise, or in which they are somehow located. Likewise, we discuss fire in terms of heat, we don't say that fires have heats, we merely generically declare that all fires are hot.

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Malcolm wrote: Yes, I understand. All awarenesses are conditioned. There is no such thing as a universal undifferentiated ultimate awareness in Buddhadharma. Even the omniscience of a Buddha arises from a cause.

PadmaVonSamba wrote: isn't this cause, too, an object of awareness? Isn't there awareness of this cause? If awareness of this cause is awareness itself, then isn't this awareness of awareness? What causes awareness of awareness, if not awareness?

If awareness is the cause of awareness, isn't it its own cause?

Malcolm wrote: Omniscience is the content of a mind freed of afflictions. Even the continuum of a Buddha has a relative ground, i.e. a the rosary or string of moments of clarity is beginingless.

Origination from self is axiomatically negated in Buddhadharma,

Each moment in the continuum of a knowing clarity is neither the same as nor different than the previous moment. Hence the cause of a given instant of a knowing clarity cannot be construed to be itself nor can it be construed to be other than itself. This is the only version of causation which, in the final analysis, Buddhadharma can admit to on a relative level. It is the logical consequence of the Buddha's insight, "When this exists, that exists, with the arising of that, this arose."

PadmaVonSamba wrote: I am not referring to cognition, rather, the causes of that cognition.

Malcolm wrote: Cognitions arise based on previous cognitions. That's all.

If you suggest anything other than this, you wind up in Hindu La la land.

Malcolm wrote: There is no such thing as a universal undifferentiated ultimate awareness in Buddhadharma.”

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