[Buddha-l] "God" and Buddhism

[Bruce Burrill]

Brad W is a bit of a doofus; an interesting doofus, but a doofus 
nonetheless: "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.'" That is good Hinduism as far it goes, but 
really is not very meaningful. It is vaguely vacuous, but then that 
is about as good as it gets for god.


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...it is equally clear that theism in the sense in which I am using 
it -- as the assertion of  an omniscient, permanent, independent, 
unique cause of the cosmos -- is rejected throughout the length  and 
breadth of the Indian Buddhist tradition. Dharmakiirti's antitheistic 
arguments may have taken the Buddhist critique to a new level of 
sophistication, but he had behind him a millennium of refutations, 
with many of which he undoubtedly was familiar, and which ought to be 
borne in mind when we consider his discussion.

The Paali Nikaayas contain a number of explicit rejections of theism, 
and some important implicit ones, as well.

...

For the later Buddhist philosophical tradition, however, the most 
important early arguments are perhaps the implicit ones: those many 
passages in the Nikaayas where the concept of a permanent attaa or 
aatman is rejected, principally on the grounds that no permanent 
entity is or can be encountered in experience or justified by reason. 
It really is Buddhism's emphasis on universal impermanence that is at 
the root of its aversion to the concept of God, as became evident in 
the sorts of refutations offered in the post-nikaaya period (when the 
attributes of the creator, identified by the Buddhists as ii`svara, 
perhaps had become more clearly defined). --- Dharmakiirti's 
refutation of theism By Roger Jackson
Philosophy East and West 36:4 Oct. 1986.

http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/jackson.htm