Is
Buddhism
an Atheistic Religion?
This question
requires you to show some knowledge of Buddhism using
primary source material, but it also requires you to
think about the meaning of two words that do not
originate in Buddhism: 'God', and 'Religion'. (The word
God does not appear in the title, but you cannot define
'atheism' without defining 'God').
This might seem easy: when you want to know the
meaning of a word, don't you just use a dictionary? The
thing to remember is that people who write dictionaries
defer to specialists. A dictionary would say that a
whale is a mammal, not a fish, because scientists
classify a whale as a mammal. Scientists did not learn
that whales were mammals by using a dictionary,
lexicographers learned from scientists. When studying
biology, you would learn the biological reasons for
classifying a mammal as a whale. So too, you need to
consider the reasons for (and, perhaps, against),
defining Buddhism as a religion.
Whales are not baboons, and baboons are not pigs,
but all of them are mammals, and so some lessons that
are learned from the physiology of the whale can be
useful for understanding the physiology of a baboon. All
of these species are linked by natural history. It was
in the 18th and 19th Centuries that
scholars tried to study the history of religion in a
scientific manner, hoping to separate religions from
other movements, and to draw up a family tree of
religions just as we can have a family tree of animal
and plant species. One of the founding figures of the
comparative study of religions was Max Müller, a German
who spent most of his career in Oxford. In his Gifford
Lectures, Müller argued that one cannot include
belief in God as a defining characteristic of a
religion, because Buddhism is an example of an atheistic
religion (see Lecture V, pp.103-114 of the original
text). In attempting to understand religion, we are
trying to understand an important social force. One of
the founding figures of the sociology of religion is
Emile Durkheim, and he too referred to Buddhism when
arguing that religions do not involve belief in God, in
fact, they need not involve any belief in the
supernatural at all. (This argument is found in The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Book
1, Chapter 1, Part 2).
The work of Müller
and Durkheim is important because it shaped the future
direction of religious studies. For example, our text
book, like most text books, classifies Confucianism as a
world religion – that is part of Müller’s legacy. Their
writings should spur you to think about the question
‘what do we mean by ‘religion’. However, neither Müller
nor Durkheim was a specialist in Buddhism, and in any
case, studies of Buddhism have advanced since their
time. For further discussion and criticism of their work
on Buddhism, there are two useful articles available via
the EZ-Proxy server: “Durkheim, Buddhism and Religion”
by Marc Orrú and Amy Wang in the Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 32, No. 1
(1992), pp.47-61 and “Comments on Max Müller’s Buddhist
Interpretation of the Buddhist Nirvāņa” by G. R. Welbon
in Numen,
Volume 12, Fasc. 3 (September 1965), pp. 179-200. Both
of these articles are worthy of careful study, and each
suggests a different path your inquiry might take.
Welbon points out
that Müller’s interpretation of Buddhism was based on
the work of his teacher, Eugéne Burnouf, who was the
first European to make a thorough study of Buddhism.
(The French
version of Burnouf’s study is out of copyright and
can be downloaded free of charge, but the English
translation is more expensive). Burnouf thought that
whereas the religion of the Brahmins was superstitious,
the Buddha was a rational thinker. However, led by the
Brahmins, Hindus aimed to achieve a union with God.
Buddhism, on the other hand, rejected the world as full
of pain, and sought relief from this pain by embracing
nothingness, so Buddhism is a rational but nihilistic
and pessimistic religion. So, says Welbon, a crucial
question for Müller, and indeed, for anyone trying to
understand Buddhism today, is the interpretation of
nirvāņa. Is the search for nirvāņa simply a quest to
embrace the void, or is it something more positive, a
quest for something that followers of theistic religions
would recognize as communion with God?
This question came to
the fore when John Paul II published Crossing The Threshold
of Hope in 1995. In this book, he argued that Buddhism
was an atheistic religion with a negative view of the world.
In fact, his view of Buddhism owed a lot, perhaps
indirectly, to Burnouf’s work. However, when he visited Sri
Lanka, many Buddhists protested his view of their religion.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, a Buddhist monk and one of the foremost
living translators of Buddhist scriptures, wrote a response
called Crossing
the
Threshold of Understanding. Bhikkhu Bodhi does not
dispute the use of the term ‘atheism’, but he does argue
that Nibbana should not be considered a negative goal. Some
Christian thinkers have argued that it is legitimate to
extend the concept of God to include Nibbana. So, for
example, Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity at
Oxford, stated in a
lecture given in 2008:
I think that if
you look
at all the main religious traditions of the world you
will find that they all do have something in common.
They affirm that there is a reality - the most
fundamental reality
of all - which has the nature of consciousness,
wisdom, intelligence, bliss, compassion and
hope; and that is called by some of us ‘God’. Others
such as Buddhists
do not call it God, but they certainly believe in a
fundamental reality – Nirvana - which has the nature
of consciousness and bliss. This reality not only
exists, but
it is possible for us to have a conscious relationship
with it, which will transform our lives so that we
mediate its reality in our world.
Once again, we
come to the question of definition, this time, the
definition of ‘God’. I suggested above that the task
of defining religion falls to scholars like Müller and
Durkheim, who are interested in building up a
systematic account of religion and the role it plays
in human society. As such, they take a stand outside
any particular religion. However, the task of defining
terms like ‘Nibbana’ or ‘God’ falls to people within
the religions where those terms are used. Keith Ward
is an Anglican clergyman, and speaks as a theologian –
he is attempting to articulate, as a Christian, the
concept of God that he believes in, and he thinks that
this concept covers the same reality that Buddhists
call ‘Nibbana’. So, part of your investigation could
be the meaning of Nibbana and the meaning of ‘God.’ If
by God we mean the Creator and Ruler of the universe,
then it is clear that the Buddha rejected such a god.
Evidence can be found in this
set of texts from the Pali canon. (Your paper
should demonstrate some familiarity with these texts,
but don’t limit yourselves to repeating what they
say). The Buddha did not believe in all-powerful
creator. However, if by ‘God’ we mean the goal of
human existence, that whose essence is pure happiness,
then perhaps ‘Nibbana’ is another word for God.
So, Welby
discusses Müller’s work, and raises the point that
Nibbana might be the same as (communion with) God.
Orrú and Wang criticize Durkheim’s work. They argue
that Durkheim overlooked the fact that the Buddha is
treated as a supernatural savior. Durkheim, like
Müller, wrote under the influence of Burnouf. Before
Burnouf, Europeans thought that Buddhists worshipped a
god called Buddha. Burnouf thought that the Buddha was
a rational man who taught people a method of achieving
happiness by escaping from a world of pain. Only later
were his teaching misunderstood, and people began to
think of the Buddha as a god to be worshipped rather
than a teacher to be followed. But was there ever a
form of Buddhism in which the Buddha was not treated
as a being with supernatural, indeed, godlike powers?
When we discuss Greek mythology, we say that figures
like Herakles were born as humans but became gods (a
process called apotheosis). So too, we might say, the
Buddha was a human being, not the creator of the
universe – Buddhists do not believe in a creator of
everything. However, if we look at what Buddhists
believe about the Buddha, and their attitude to him,
do they not treat him as a god? This means thinking
about the difference between humans with super-powers
and gods. One important factor is soteriology, that
is teachings about salvation. Many religions teach
that we are in some kind of bad situation and we need
to be saved. If the Buddha is the only possible source
of salvation, if that is something that he can offer
that nobody else can, that would be grounds for saying
that, even if he is not the creator, he is a God. If,
on the other hand, he is simply a man who figured out
a useful guide to happiness, then he is not a god.
This, in fact
raises another way of looking at the question. Müller
and Durkheim both thought that Buddhism was atheistic,
and concluded that there is at least one atheist
religion. Perhaps, if we stretch the concept of God,
and if we study carefully what Buddhists believe about
Nibbana or about Buddha, we will conclude that
Buddhists are not atheists. But another option would
be to conclude that Buddhism is not a religion, or
more carefully, that it was not a religion although,
as the Buddha’s message has been misunderstood,
perhaps it has become one. Sometimes it is said that
Buddhism is not a religion, it is a way of life. This,
however, is not very helpful: every religion is a way
of life. You could just as well say that FSU-Panama is
not a university, it is a center of higher education.
A more interesting – but less credible suggestion – is
that originally, Buddhism was a science rather than a
religion, based on evidence rather than faith. Donald
Lopez discusses this in his book Buddhism and
Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2008). Lopez does not claim that Buddhism is more
scientific than other religions, but, in the fourth
chapter of his book, he explains how it was that
Buddhism managed to acquire a reputation for being
scientific. Once again, this story features Burnouf
(Burnouf translated the Sanskrit term ‘prajñā’ as
‘science’: today it is usually translated as
‘wisdom’), but the main impetus for treating Buddhism
as a science came from the Theosophical Society, who
wanted to validate their own views as scientific. To
read Lopez’s work, you will need to go to the library.
I have already given a
link to a set of scriptures that present the Buddha’s
teachings on whether there is an all-powerful Creator, but
as you consider the other topics listed above, you might
need to refer to more Buddhist scriptures. I will leave some
useful material in the library. A good translation of the
Pali canon is available on-line here. This web-site
is not complete, and the full set of scriptures would take
up several bookshelves, but if secondary sources contain
references to the Pali canon, you might be able to find the
relevant sections there.
Back to REL 1300