BUDDHISM AND GOD

Why is it... The Buddha never talked about the One God of the desert. Does this mean that all Buddhists are atheists and don’t believe in God? Did the Buddha believe in God?

The Buddha was born 500 years before Christ, in what is now Nepal. His dad was a king, his mom was a queen, and his dad wanted him to take over the family business (the kingdom) when he got older.

The kind of world the Buddha was born into was magical. Everything seemed to be alive. The trees, mountains, lakes, and sky were living and breathing with a variety of gods in charge. If you needed rain you asked one god, if you needed it to stop raining you asked another. The priests of India did all the religious work, and got paid for it.

In India at the time of the Buddha you became a priest if you were born into the right family, and not because of the school you went to, or the grades you got.

There were other kinds of religious people as well.

Mendicants were men who left their family, friends, and jobs to find the answers to life. They did not live in homes or apartments, but lived under trees and in caves, and would practice meditation all day long. They wanted to really be uncomfortable, so they could understand what suffering was all about.

Many kinds of meditation were practiced by these mendicants. In Tranquility Meditation for instance, you think about just one thing, like looking at a candle or saying a word over and over. When the mind becomes focused in oneness, you experience a great peacefulness.

Even if the mendicants were sitting in the rain on a cold day, they were still content. They found in their meditation practice the essence of happiness.

Renunciation is when you give up all the things that make your life pleasant. Sometimes the people with money and power in India would buy a lot of stuff to make themselves happy and their lives more comfortable, thinking that happiness and comfort depended on what they owned.

When the mendicants could see their own suffering clearly, after many years of renunciation, they understood that happiness was not dependent on the things they owned, but the kind of life they lived.

Even all the gods in India could not end the suffering of one human being.

At the age of 29, the Buddha stopped praying to the gods to end his suffering and the suffering of others. He left his family and friends, went to the edge of the forest, took off all his clothes and jewelry, covered his naked body with rags of cloth, cut off his hair and started to meditate.

He became a mendicant, and It took him six years of hard work and much suffering, but in the end he was able to stop his suffering forever (Nirvana) and help others stop their suffering as well.

Did the Buddha believe in God, the One God of the desert, the God of the Christians, Jews and Muslims?

Well... No... He didn't... Monotheism (only one God) was a foreign concept to the Buddha, his world was filled with many gods. The creator god Brahma being the most important one.

At the time of the Buddha, the only people practicing the religion of the One God of the desert, were the Jews. Remember, it was still 500 years before Christ came into the world.

The Buddha never left India. The Buddha walked from village to village... In his entire lifetime he never went any further than 200 miles from his birthplace.

The Buddha never met a Jew... And because of this, he never said anything about the One God of the desert.

There is also nothing in the teachings of the Buddha that suggest how to find God or worship the god's of India, although the Buddha himself was a theist (believed in gods), his teachings are non-theistic.

The Buddha was more concerned with the human condition: Birth, Sickness, Old age, and Death. The Buddhist path is about coming to a place of acceptance with these painful aspects of life, and not suffering through them.

Please be clear on this point... The Buddha is not thought of as a god in Buddhism and is not prayed to. He is looked up to and respected as a great teacher, in the same way we respect Abraham Lincoln as a great president.

He was a human being who found his perfection in Nirvana. Because of his Nirvana, the Buddha was perfectly moral, perfectly ethical, and ended his suffering forever.

Does that mean that every Buddhist in the world is an atheist?

No!!! I have met a lot of Buddhists who believe in God. I have met a lot of Buddhists who don’t believe in God... And a lot of Buddhists just don’t know.

All three points of view are OK if you’re Buddhist because suffering is more important than God in Buddhism.

Sometimes a student will ask me how everything in this world got started... "If you don’t have God in Buddhism then who or what caused the universe?"

When the Buddha was asked how the world started, he kept silent. In the religion of Buddhism we don’t have a first cause, instead we have a never ending circle of birth and death. In this world and in all worlds, there are many beginnings and ends. The model of life used in Buddhism has no starting place... It just keeps going and going.

Now having said that... If you’re a Buddhist it’s OK to believe God was the first cause... It really doesn't go against the teachings of the Buddha, his focus was on suffering... It's also OK to believe science has the answer… Like the big bang theory, etc... Some Buddhist’s don’t even care how it all started, and that’s fine too. Knowing how the world started is not going to end your suffering, it’s just going to give you more stuff to think about.

I hope you can see that God is not what Buddhism is about... Suffering is... And if you want to believe in God, as some Buddhists do, I suppose it's OK. But, Buddhist's don't believe God can end suffering. Only the teaching's of the Buddha can help us end suffering through wisdom and the activity of compassion.

In his whole life and in all his teachings the Buddha never said anything about the One God of the desert.

Buddhists believe that there are beings that inhabit the various celestial realms. These are variously called angels, spirits, gods and devas by various cultures. But do Buddhists believe that a God created everything and manipulate human lives? No, we do not. There are several reasons for this. Modern sociologists and psychologists, believed that religious ideas and especially the Creator-God idea have their origin in fear. The Buddha says:

"Gripped by fear men go to the sacred mountains, sacred groves, sacred trees and shrines ~ Dhammapada 188"

Primitive man found himself in a dangerous and hostile world, the fear of wild animals, of not being able to find enough food, of injury or disease, and of natural phenomena like thunder, lightning and volcanoes was constantly with him. Finding no security, he created the idea of a God that gives him comfort in good times, courage in times of danger and consolation when things went wrong. To this day, you will notice that people become more religious at times of crises, you will hear them say that the belief in a God gives them the strength they need to deal with life. You will hear them explain that they believe in a particular God because they prayed in time of need and their prayer was answered. All this supports the Buddha's teaching that the God-idea is a response to fear and frustration. The Buddha taught us to try to understand our fears, to lessen our desires and to calmly and courageously accept the things we cannot change. He replaced fear, not with irrational belief but with rational understanding.

The second reason the Buddhists do not believe in a Creator-God is because there does not seem to be any evidence to support this idea. There are numerous religions, all claiming that they alone have God's words preserved in their holy book, that they alone understand God's nature, that their God exists and that the Gods of other religions do not. Some claim that God is masculine, some that she is feminine and others that it is neuter. They are all satisfied that there is ample evidence to prove the existence of their God but they laugh in disbelief at the evidence other religions use to prove the existence of another God. For centuries, men have prayed to God for protection from war, from natural calamities and disease. Yet till today, these prayers remain unanswered. This is not surprising. Even less surprising is that so many different religions having spent so many centuries trying to prove the existence of their God there remains no real, substantial or irrefutable evidence.

The third reason the Buddhists do not believe in a Creator-God is that the belief is not necessary. Some claim that the belief in a God is necessary in order to explain the origin on the universe. But this is not so. Science has very convincingly explained how the universe came into being without having to introduce the God-idea. Some claim that belief in God is necessary to have a happy, meaningful life. Again we can see that this is not so. There are millions of atheists and free-thinkers, not to mention many Buddhists, who live useful, happy and meaningful lives without belief in a God. Some claim that belief in God's power is necessary because humans, being weak, do not have the strength to help themselves. Once again, the evidence indicates the opposite. One often hears of people who have overcome great disabilities and handicaps, enormous odds and difficulties, through their own inner resources, through their own efforts and without belief in a God. Some claim that God is necessary in order to give man salvation. But this argument only holds good if you accept the theological concept of salvation and there is no reason nor any other reasonable basis to accept such a concept. Based on his own experience, the Buddha saw that each human being had the capacity to purify the mind, develop infinite love and compassion and perfect understanding. He shifted attention from the heavens to the heart and encouraged us to find solutions to our problems through self-understanding.

"He who has eyes can see the sickening sight, Why does not God set his creatures right?

If his wide power no limit can restrain, Why is his hand so rarely spread to bless?

Why are his creatures all condemned to pain? Why does he not to all give happiness?

Why do fraud, lies, and ignorance prevail? Why triumphs falsehood -- truth and justice fail?

I count your God one among the unjust , who made a world in which to shelter wrong." ~ Bhuridatta Jataka"

But so many people believe in some form of a Creator, it must be true.

Not so. There was a time when everyone believed that the world was flat, but they were all wrong. The number of people who believe in an idea is no measure of the truth or falsehood of that idea. The only way we can tell whether an idea is true or not is by looking at the facts and examining the evidence. If people continue to believe in God, they do so through faith, and faith is simply holding on to a belief when reason, logic and the evidence says otherwise.

So if Buddhists don't believe in God, what do you believe in?

Each human being is precious and important, as all have the potential to develop the qualities of a Buddha – a perfected human being. Human beings can outgrow ignorance and irrationality and see things as they really are. Hatred, anger, spite and jealousy can be replaced by love, patience, generosity and kindness. All this is within the grasp of each person if they make the effort, are guided and supported by fellow Buddhists and inspired by the example of the Buddha.

So if Buddhists do not believe in God, is it an atheistic religion?

Buddhism is an atheistic religion only because it rejects the theistic and primitive concept of a Creator-God. The idea of God as a bearded old man looking down at us from the heavens and manipulating humans like in a puppet show appears ridiculous. Instead, Buddhists have as their highest ideal the state of Nirvana. The Buddha calls it the highest bliss. It is a state beyond all conceptual thought and is described by the Buddha as the Unborn, the Uncreated.

"There is O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. Were there not, o monks, this Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, there would be no escape from the world of the born, originated, created, formed. ~ Udana, 80-81"

Buddhism teaches that the focus of our attention should not be an imaginary God and pointless speculation about what such a God did in the past and what he will do in the future. Instead, Buddhism is immensely more pragmatic. It teaches to focus our attention on ourselves, - to determine what is the cause of our sorrows and pain and to find a way to liberate ourselves from these. These teachings are encapsulated in theFour Noble Truths.