[Buddha-l] "God" and Buddhism

[Curt Steinmetz]

Brad Warner recently stated the following:

"I don't think Buddhism is atheism. And if people ask me the question, 
'do you believe in God?' I'm always, like, 'Yes, I believe in God.' 
There are other Buddhists, or other people who will tell you that 
Buddhism is atheistic, and sometimes when I hear their explanations for 
why it's atheistic, I can go, 'OK, if you define God as that, then 
Buddhism doesn't have that kind of a God.' It doesn't have a creation 
myth, or a creator God, or a God you can thank for getting a touchdown 
in football, or this kind of thing. That isn't really part of Buddhism. 
But there is this sense that there's an underlying ground to the 
universe, and that ... that we all partake in it and we're all 
manifestations of that and that this underlying ground is not just dead 
matter, it's something alive. So in that sense I think it is not 
atheism. My teacher would always say, 'God is the Universe, and the 
Universe is God.'"

Warner also goes on to tell us that his approach to the whole "God" 
thang is obviously influenced by the fact that he was brought up in a 
family that only knew they were Protestant because they knew they 
weren't Jewish and they knew they weren't Catholic. The whole youtube 
clip is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwUOxNpv5GA

Personally I think Warner does a fairly good job of explaining this. I 
particularly like the way that he makes it clear that everything depends 
on what one actually means by "God".

Paul Williams, on the other hand, insists that Buddhism is inherently 
atheistic:

"Buddhists do not believe in the existence of God. There need be no 
debating about this. In practising Buddhism one never finds talk of God, 
there is no role for God, and it is not difficult to find in Buddhist 
texts attacks on the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, all-good 
Creator of the universe.

"But there are those who say that Buddhism does not deny the existence 
of God. It is not atheist. It is, rather, agnostic [all emphases are in 
the original]. Buddhism does not pronounce on whether God exists or not. 
Buddhists do not claim to know God. God is irrelevant to the Buddhist 
project of (broadly speaking) final freedom from all types of suffering 
through the attainment of nirvana, liberation of enlightenment. 
Enlightenmnent is attained through oneself following a set path of 
morality, meditation and wisdom. It does not require any help from 
divine intervention or any reference to God.

"To portray Buddhism as agnostic in this way seems to me a modern 
strategy. In ancient times Buddhists were quite clear that they denied 
the existence of a personal creator God as taught in the rival theistic 
systems. Buddhism does indeed hold to the existence of divine beings, 
rather like the gods of Greek and Roman mythology. But none of these is 
the one supreme creator God of the great theistic religions such as 
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Buddhists 'gods' (deva) tend to be 
happier and more powerful than we are. They live longer than we do. But 
they are part of the cycle of death and rebirth. In infinite past 
rebirths we ourselves have been born as gods many times.

"Any God as He is understood in a religion like Christianity could not 
be irrelevant to the path of final spiritual fulfilment. No God as 
understood by Christians could be irrelevant to final fulfilment. If 
Buddhism does not teach this God, it either does not teach the path to 
final fulfilment or it considers that it is not necessary to the path to 
teach such a God. But a God that is not necessary to final spiritual 
fulfilment is not God as taught by Christianity. Thus if Buddhism does 
not teach that sort of God, it must hold that such a God does not exist. 
Therefore if Buddhism claims to teach such a path, and yet God is not 
part of it, then the God referred to by Christians is indeed being 
denied. From a Christian point of view Buddhism is clearly a form of 
atheism." [pp. 25-26 of "The Unexpected Way"]

I could not disagree more with what Williams says in the above. This is 
an excellent example of the very worst kind of "Christianity or nothing" 
logic that dominates so much of modern discourse on religion. 
Christianity makes a lousy template for Religion in general - and the 
Christian "God" makes an especially lousy point of reference for other 
religions' views of the Divine.

Here's one more quote - one that I largely agree with, from Alan Wallace 
on the question of whether or not Buddhism is atheistic:

"In the framing itself, the question is already skewed. It’s not so 
obvious to a person who’s totally immersed in Western civilization and 
has almost no understanding of anything outside of Western civilization. 
Frankly, so much of this antireligious rhetoric from the likes of 
Richard Dawkins is just wildly unconsciously and uncritically 
ethnocentric. Do Buddhists themselves ask, ‘are we atheists?’ Well, I’ve 
never seen that question posed. In Buddhism that would be regarded as 
such a dumb and uninformed question that is not even worthy of a response."

This quote is taken from a long interview with Wallace here:
http://www.reason9.com/podcast/index.php?id=74

Curt

P.S. I further explore these different takes on "God" and Buddhism on my 
blog:
http://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/05/brad-warner-versus-dalai-lama.html
I also manage to drag in Miranda Shaw, Alan Watts, King Asoka, Anagarika 
Dharmapala, and others.....