Plants in Early Buddhism and the Far Eastern Idea of the Buddha-Nature of Grasses and Trees

The present study has grown out of a lecture held in the winter term 2003-04, in which my aim was to present my view on the problem of the sentience of plants in early Buddhism to the participants of a series of lectures or various aspects of Buddhism, past and present, which were arranged by the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies of the University of Hamburg over about a decade.