Comments
on “Is
Buddhism an Atheistic Religion¨?
This
paper requires you to
approach the study of religion from a philosophical perspective,
and that
requires precision.
For
example, a student
quotes the Ituvikatta, a Theravada scripture:
¨there is,
monks, an unborn – unmade –
unfabricated. If there were not that unborn – unbecome – unmade
– unfabricated,
there would be emancipation from the born – become – made –
fabricated…”
The
student then comments:
Here it is
saying that we are
impermanent beings, we can break out into a permanent state that
is bliss.
It is
good to have a direct
quotation from a primary source, but notice that the source does
not say
anything about Nirvana being permanent. It is contrasting our
having a
beginning with Nirvana´s lacking a beginning. But being
permanent is about not
having an end – the quoted text does not say that Nirvana is
permanent. The
Buddha taught not merely that we are not permanent, but that
nothing is permanent.
This
raised a big problem
for later Buddhist thinkers: is nirvana permanent? It would seem
wrong to say
that it is temporary, as though we pass through Nirvana and
return to Samsara.
But we cannot say that it is permanent because nothing is
permanent. Nagarjuna,
one of the greatest Buddhist philosophers, argued that in fact
Nirvana is
Samsara, and Samsara is Nirvana. This is definitely a puzzle,
but there would
have been no need for this puzzle if the Buddha had simply said
that everything
is impermanent except for Nirvana, but he didn´t say that –
certainly not in
the passage quoted.
Nirvana
is a rich concept,
that defies easy definition. The same is true of God. One
student wrote:
God is a
supreme being, creator and
ruler of the universe. (Jayatilleke, Facets
of Buddhist Thought, Kany: Buddhist Publication Society,
1971). The most
important thing about God is that he created the universe, it
doesn´t matter if
he created it out of nothing or from himself but that he
created.
Monotheists
believe that God
created the universe. But is this the most
important thing about God? To find out the most important
thing about God,
I would turn to a monotheistic author rather than a Buddhist,
just as to find
out about nirvana, I would turn first to a Buddhist writer. The
question is, of
all the attributes that monotheists ascribe to God, which are
the ones that
should be used as defining features?
We say
that Thor was the god
of thunder in Norse mythology, and that Shiva is the god of
destruction in
Hinduism. Neither Thor nor Shiva is a creator. We usually
translate the Norse
word Aesir as ´gods´, treating the Aesir as the equivalent of
the theoi in
Greek mythology. (The Greek word theos gives us monotheism,
atheism, etc.) All
of these beings were thought of as gods, but they were not all
creators.
They were
gods because they
were worshipped – that is venerated as sources of value.
Odysseus, the crafty
warrior, worships Athene, the goddess of cunning, sophia, (which
we usually
translate as “wisdom”). He values cunning, he lives by his
cunning, he is
protected by his cunning and he worships Cunning in the person
of Athene. In
Norse mythology, or at least in one version of Norse mythology,
it was believed
that, in the final battle, the ice giants would defeat the
Aesir. The Aesir –
Odin, Thor and so on, represent the forces of heroism and valor.
They fight
against the forces of winter, darkness, cold and death. In the
end, it is death
that has the final word, but a true hero, although he faces
inevitable defeat,
will still fight on the side of life. That is why the Aesir are
called gods.
Monotheists
believe in a
single entity that embodies all the values we live by, a being
who is goodness,
wisdom, truth, love and justice – values that can never be set
against each
other. So, consider this passage, quoted by a student;
On seeing him,
(Dona) went to him and
said, “Master, are you a Deva (God)?”
“No Brahman I
am not a Deva.”
That is a
useful piece of
primary source material, especially since the translator gives
the original
word that has been translated as god – a reminder that this kind
of translation
involves a value-judgment.
In a
Hindu context, we can
certainly translate Deva as “god”, since it means more or less
the same as
Theos in Greek. However, in a Buddhist concept, the translation
becomes more
difficult, since the Buddha accepts the existence of Shiva,
Vishnu etc. (or
appears to; this could simply be upaya in action), while denying
that they are
sources of ultimate guidance, because they are themselves beings
in need of
enlightenment. So, the student who cited the passage above also
comments:
Buddhism is in
no way a non-theistic
religion as it evolved to oppose Hinduism and does not deny its
many gods but
rather negates their importance by treating them as irrelevant.
If you
can treat a being as
irrelevant, then it ceases to be a god. Keith Ward reported that
in Sri Lanka,
a Buddhist monk said that gods are real, but they are not
religious. You can
ask a god for help if your roof is leaking, or if you are ill,
but they cannot
help you attain enlightenment, the one thing that matters. In
that case, the
word “god” ceases to be an appropriate translation. In Asia,
people acclaimed
Augustus as a god. Christians did not deny that Augustus was a
real person, but
of course they denied his deity. They knew what he did when he
was alive, but
they did not see him as a source of value.