[Buddha-l] the existence of God in Buddhism

[jkirk]

 as it is so important to be defined as a
> religion or else everything Buddhist will collapse!!! *NOT!*
>
> Nah... what's in a label... call it what you will - "God", "gods",
> "religion", "pooh"...
>
> W.F. Wong
=====================
Precisely. The term" religion" is so multi-faceted and imprecise that it 
needs to be dumped unless applied with some definitional rigor.

Here the relative notion of insider view and outsider view comes in handy. 
People who "worship" in Buddhist temples in India, let's say, might say that 
they are observing their religion-----or dharma, the term most commonly 
translated into English as "religion." But this term is far more polyvocal 
than we think.

Yet, if we observe people practicing their path in Buddhist temples, we see 
behavior that seems to indicate that they consider the Buddha a god. There 
is a good deal of data that support this idea....people in Thailand or Sri 
Lanka often pray to the Buddha for help, even if technically he is gone. 
They are expressing insider views. Western Buddhists usually express 
outsider views to the effect that Buddhism is not a religion, and that we 
don't pray to the Buddha who is not a god.
If some of us prefer to pray to deities, that expresses views that are 
widely shared in some Buddhist cultures, and not in others.

Isn't the whole thing relative to the cultures of practicers of 
Buddhism?---there is no one explanation that covers all cases.
Joanna