Gods in Buddhism

Are there gods in Buddhism? Buddhism is always differentiated from other religious traditions because its practitioners don’t believe in a creator god or a supreme being. According to the Pali Canon (the mother of all Buddhist scriptures), the Buddha didn’t deny the existence of Brahma (the supreme Indian god), but he saw him and all other gods as subject to change and death, as all other beings in Samsara.

The truths of Buddhism are not dependent on the gods, and attempts to use their influence are deprecated as vulgar practices. So, a belief in gods in Buddhism is not essential to your understanding of reality and doesn’t affect your path to Nirvana. However, there are some branches of Buddhism which see celestial Buddhas as god-like and depend on this deities for their salvation.

The Mahayana vision of the universe expanded dramatically. The Mahayana begins to imagine a universe that is not populated just by human boddhisattvas, people like you and me, but also by celestial boddhisattvas and Buddhas that have infinitely greater power than we have.

These celestial boddhisattvas have the ability to intervene in this world and save people as if they were gods. These powers make it possible for celestial boddhisattvas to reside in the heavens, hence the name celestial. These powers also make it possible for them to function as the Buddhist equivalents of the Hindu gods.

Buddhists insist, though, that these great boddhisattvas have gone so far from the Hindu gods in their power and in their understanding of reality, that is it not appropriate to think of them as being gods at all.

So, a belief in gods in Buddhism is not essential to your understanding of reality and doesn’t affect your path to Nirvana. However, there are some branches of Buddhism which see celestial Buddhas as god-like and depend on this deities for their salvation.

Return from Gods in Buddhism to Buddhism FAQs

Mahayana Devotion

The Mahayana vision of the universe expanded dramatically. It wasn’t anymore just a group of monks imitating the ideal of Siddharta Gautama. The Mahayana begins to imagine a universe that is not populated just by human boddhisattvas, people like you and me, but also by celestial boddhisattvas and Buddhas that have infinitely greater power than we have.

These celestial boddhisattvas have the ability to intervene in this world and save people as if they were gods. Here we are going to talk about these “deities” and how they affect the lives and practices of Buddhists in the Mahayana world.

1. The Celestial Boddhisattvas: These celestial boddhisattvas have the ability to intervene in this world and save people as if they were gods. These are advanced practitioners, you might said, of the boddhisattva path, who have passed through the ten stages and achieved extraordinary superhuman powers.
   


2. How Avalokiteśvara is Invoked: Avalokiteśvara is one of the most important bodhisattvas in the Buddhist world. If we call on the name of Avalokiteśvara, we will achieve some kind of connection with the compassion of that great deity. It is also possible to invoke the compassion of Avalokiteśvara by chanting a Mantra, a technical phrase that embodies the power of that great celestial figure.


3. Maitreya: The Future Buddha: Maitreya is venerated throughout the Mahayana world and Theravada countries as well as the future Buddha, the next in the line. He is waiting in heaven until the situation is right in this world for him to come and to start the teaching of Buddhism all over again.


4. The Celestial Buddhas: In addition to celestial bodhisattvas, there are celestial Buddhas as well. I said earlier that not everyone is limited to the bodhisattva path, there are beings who reach the end of the path and achieve Buddhahood.

The Celestial Buddhas

In addition to celestial bodhisattvas, there are celestial Buddhas as well. I said earlier that not everyone is limited to the bodhisattva path, there are beings who reach the end of the path and achieve Buddhahood.

Amitābha and the Pure Land

One of the most important of these is the Buddha Amitābha, a name that means infinite light. The story of Amitābha is that when he was a bodhisattva he made the promise that when he became a Buddha he will establish a Pure Land. In that land, anyone could be reborn if they chanted his name with faith.

From the descriptions of the land, it is depicted as a place that is full of lotuses. Amitābha himself sits in a lotus throne. If the devotees chant the name of Amitābha with faith, they will be reborn in that land and he will see the light of Amitābha’s face.

Chanting of the Name

One of the classic practices in this tradition is to chant the name of Amitābha at the moment of death. If you can chant with faith at that crucial moment, Amitābha will come to you bedside surrounded by crowds of bodhisattvas and will take you soul to the Pure Land.

Like the invocation of Avalokiteśvara’s name, this practice is a deliberate attempt to open the possibility of salvation to anybody who approaches the deity with faith. It is a genuine attempt to open the possibility of salvation to anyone who can approach this celestial being with a sense of sincere aspiration.

Devotion to Amitābha Buddha, known as Pure Land Buddhism, has been influential throughout China and Japan. It is also an important variety of Buddhism in America.

A Radical Change in the Tradition

I think that it is important for us to know in what ways is really related to the kind of Buddhism that we already know. It seems to me that the devotion to Amitābha Buddha takes us above and far away from the tradition of self-reliance that we saw in the early tradition and we thought of as one of the fundamental characteristics of Buddhism.

The Buddha taught that you should rely in your own efforts and you could achieve Nirvana by yourself. Now, you don’t rely in yourself, you rely in the influence of a celestial Buddha. How did that happen? Is this even Buddhism anymore? We entered a world where Buddhism is so deeply transformed that it has become somewhat unrecognizable.

The Emphasis Changes: The Most Important is to Start

I argue that what we see here is simply an example of the adaptability of the tradition. You can see how the logic of the Buddhist tradition has given rise to this new way of thinking about Buddhist life. First of all, in the Mahayana tradition we aren’t talking anymore about one single lifetime, or two or three lifetimes in the pursuit of Nirvana. Now, the passage has been stretched out over many more lifetimes, as the bodhisattva comes back into this world to help others.

There is much more emphasis now not in perfect wisdom but in simply having the faith that gives you access to the beginning of the path. This emphasis on salvation by faith has to do with the importance of simply entering the path of the bodhisattva. Getting started is more important than anything that may come later.

This article is part of the series about Mahayana Devotion.

Maitreya: The Future Buddha

Avalokiteśvara is obviously an important deity in the Mahayana world, but there are others too. I want to mention a few others. One of these is the celestial bodhisattva Maitreya.

Waiting In Heaven

Maitreya is venerated throughout the Mahayana world and Theravada countries as well as the future Buddha, the next in the line. He is waiting in a heaven called “Tusita Heaven”, a name that simply means “the pleasurable heaven”. He is waiting until the situation is right in this world for him to come and to start the teaching of Buddhism all over again.

Since he is up there in heaven, it’s possible for us to invoke his aid. In fact, in some respects, he may be closer to us than other kinds of celestial bodhisattvas and Buddhas. You can find remarkable stories of devotion to Maitreya, specially in China, where he seems to play a particularly important role.

The Story of Xuanzang

A story that I’m particularly fond of is the story of Xuanzang, an important Chinese Buddhist monk who visited India in the 7th century. When he came down into India, he traveled like other travelers. He was floating down the Ganges on his way to visiting a monastery in the Southern part of the Ganges basin and his group was attacked by pirates.

The pirates grabbed the pilgrims and brought them to the shore, they stole all of their goods and then, as it turns out, these pirates where devotees of the goddess Durga, who in this period used to recieve human sacrifices. They saw this fat and attractive Chinese monk and they thought: “A-ha, this is the guy we need to sacrifice to Durga”.

A New Kind of Meditation

As the story is told, they formed a little mud altar there at the shore of the Ganges, they tied up Xuanzang and got ready to sacrifice him. He asked them to give him a moment to prepare himself for passage into the next life.

He sat down and he meditated. Instead of calming his mind, the way we have talked about, he visaulized Maitreya in heaven. In an imaginative process, he ascended out of this world into Maitreya’s throne room and payed homage to him. He engaged in an act of visualization of Maitreya in his heaven.

At that moment, a great storm came and blew out the waters of the Ganges into great waves, it knocked the pirates’ boats out and wiped them away into the river. The pirates bowed down and asked him to convert them to Buddhism.

How much of that story can we have confidence in I don’t know but one thing that we can take from it is that it gives us a glimpse of visualization practice. This is a different kind of meditation. Visualization here is associated with the figure of Maitreya, a celestial bodhisattva who is capable of stepping right into this world and save somebody from trouble. We can see that this is a powerful new form practice in Buddhism that has a lot of influence in the way the tradition will develop.

This article is part of the series about Mahayana Devotion.

The Celestial Boddhisattvas: Buddhist Deities?

In the past articles we said that the Mahayana vision of the universe expanded dramatically. It wasn’t anymore just a group of monks imitating the ideal of Siddharta Gautama, but began to imagine themselves as actors on a drama that was really cosmic in scope. The Mahayana begins to imagine a universe that is not populated just by human boddhisattvas, people like you and me, but also by celestial boddhisattvas and Buddhas that have infinitely greater power than we have.

The “Buddhist Deities”

These celestial boddhisattvas have the ability to intervene in this world and save people as if they were gods. These are advanced practitioners, you might said, of the boddhisattva path, who have passed through the ten stages and achieved extraordinary superhuman powers.

These powers make it possible for celestial boddhisattvas to reside in the heavens, hence the name celestial. These powers also make it possible for them to function as the Buddhist equivalents of the Hindu gods, because here they are still operating under the traditional world view of India.

Buddhists insist, though, that these great boddhisattvas have gone so far from the Hindu gods in their power and in their understanding of reality, that is it not appropriate to think of them as being gods at all.

What we do then? We call the celestial boddhisattvas “Buddhist deities”, or call them simply celestial boddhisattvas to distinguish them from the Hindu gods.

How are they like?

What I’d like to do here is give you some indication of what these celestial boddhisattvas are like and how people are related to them in the practice of Mahayana devotion. There are many, as the world view of the Mahayana expanded, it became populated by celestial boddhisattvas. Some of them appear only in a few instances in Mahayana literature, but there are a few great celestial boddhisattvas that are worth mentioning.

Avalokiteśvara: The Lord of Compassion

The first one is Avalokiteśvara. Avalokiteśvara’s name is probably the most complicated name that we will mention. It is made of two parts, the word īśvara that means “lord”, and the word avalokita, that means “to look down”. The image that you have of Avalokiteśvara is a great celestial embodiment of compassion, standing up there in the heavens, and looking down on the people in this world.

Often in the text you read about Avalokiteśvara’s tears, as he sees the suffering of the people in this world.

In the Lotus Sutra, Avalokiteśvara is described as being a deity who takes on all sorts of different forms in order to manifest compassion to people in this world, specially to people who call on his name.

This idea of invoking the compassion of Avalokiteśvara often is involved in the simple practice of calling on the name of the deity himself. This simple practice actually leads us into the heart of the Mahayana. I sometimes think that the most basic form of religious practice, specially in theistic religious tradition, is simply to call on the name of the deity.

This basic expression of human piety in the face of the divine now makes its appearance in the Mahayana tradition for the first time.

This article is part of the series about Mahayana Devotion.

Mahayana: The Great Vehicle

It is time for us to look at a reform movement that made a radical change in the way people enacted the Buddhist ideal. It changes the style, the tone and the content of Buddhist practice in profound ways, only a few centuries after the lifetime of the Buddha. We call this movement the “Mahayana”, or the “Great Vehicle”.

A Reform Movement

Theravada Buddhism in South East Asia is in some ways very different from Buddhist practice at the time of the Buddha, but still represents, quite deliberately, a conservative option. It looks back at the example of the early community. We saw that in King Mongkut’s reform movement, that deliberately attempted to reapply the ideal of the Pali Canon.

The Mahayana movement emerged in the Indian Buddhist community around the beginning of the Common Era. Eventually, the Mahayana spread to China, Tibet, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Of course there are many varieties of Mahayana Buddhism.

The name Mahayana comes from the literature of the movement itself. It is a name that is used to distinguish itself from what it saw as the Buddhism that came before. Mahayana texts refer to themselves as a great vehicle, in contrast to what they call the Hinayana, or lesser vehicle, that preceded it.

The Meaning of The Mahayana

The best place for us to look in an scriptural source for an account of the contrast between the Mahayana and the Hinayana is the Lotus Sutra. This is a text we will refer to quite often in our study of Buddhism in China and Japan. The key passage in the Lotus Sutra that talks about the Mahayana is a passage that is known as the “Parable of the Burning House”. I will tell you the story and then comment on the distinctive features of it, so we can get a sense of the shape not just of the Mahayana itself, but also how it distinguished itself from the earlier tradition.

The story goes something like this. There is a father who lives in a large house with a large number of children. When the father was outside, the house catches on fire. He looks up at the house, the children are playing and are not aware of the fact that the house is on fire. The father looks up at the children and says: “Kids, come out of the house! All is burning!” The kids say: “Why? We are having such a great time here. Why should we come out?” The fathers says: “I’ve got cards here for you to play with. If you come out of the house, you can play with these.” The children, excited by this, come running out of the house. They go to look for the cards the father offered them and then he says: “Well, it’s great that you’re outside, but I don’t have those cards. I’ve got an even greater card: a vehicle. So, hop on and take it for a ride”.

The text begins to offer some commentary about the story. It obviously makes the connection that you expected it would make. It says that the Buddha is like this father. The little cards that he first promised were those lesser vehicles that were preached before the coming of the Mahayana. They were meant to lure the people who were caught in the burning house of Samsara out, in order to receive the real teaching the Buddha has to offer them.

What’s that real teaching? It’s the Mahayana. This is the great and beautiful card the Buddha finally offers the children once they escaped the burning house.

Return from "The Great Vehicle" to Mahayana Buddhism

Mongkut: King and Monk

King Mongkut reigned Thailand from 1851 to 1868. He is one of the most striking examples of a righteous king in modern history. He is remarkable because combines the roles of monk and king. He served as a monk for over twenty-five years before he ascended to the throne. He came to his position of king as a person who already had been deeply infused in monastic practice, something that is not common in the Buddhist world. It is striking that King Mongkut brought that background with him to the throne.

A Modernist

As king, he believed that Thai monastic life needed to be reformed, purged of superstitious practices and return to the pristine model of the early canonical scriptures, the scriptures that we call the Pali Canon.

In addition to being a monk and a king, he was also a modernist. He wanted to reform the Sangha, to bring it back to what he thought was the pristine ancient practice of the Buddha as it was reflected in the Pali Canon. This is an important aspect of contemporary Buddhism you would encounter throughout South East Asia, and in fact, throughout the world. There is a modernizing impulse, an impulse to strip away what people think of as being superstitious practices, things that have been added to the tradition over the course of his history and return to the ancient practice of the Buddha.

The Reform Movement

He gave institutional expression to these ideas by creating the Thammayut movement. During the reign of his son, king Chulalongkorn, this reform movement was extended throughout the Thai Sangha and was given the status of an official orthodoxy. So, King Mogkut created a reform movement that eventually was extended to the whole Sangha and became the modernizing matrix of Thai monastic life. This is one of the reasons why the Thai monastic system has been able to adapt to the challenges of modernity.

Thailand continues to be an example, even today, of the close alliance between king and Sangha in the extension and protection of Buddhist values. This is something you should keep in mind if you ever have the chance of visiting in Bangkok the Royal Shrine, called the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. In that place, you will see clearly the intersection of royal and Buddhist values. It is a Shrine that honors the monarchy, and also at the same time, the central place of the Buddha within the structure of the Thai national identity.

This article is part of the series about Theravada Buddhism.

Buddhist Art

If I ask many of you how you came in contact with Buddhism and how you began to develop some kind of impression about the tradition, I suspect that for many of you, the first contact with this tradition has been through Buddhist art.

Many times I see little images of the Buddha in the offices of people who are not particularly religious. Sometimes the fat little images you see in China. Sometimes the more elegant images that come from India. Whatever the style of the images, they show that they have some kind of respect or connection to the Buddhist tradition and they show it through Buddhist art.

Our job in these series of articles is to comment on this tradition of Buddhist art. We will understand how Buddhists have expressed the Buddha through visual media. We will see what is the function of these images in Buddhist life. We will also study the different types of images so that we can begin to recognize them when we encounter them.

• Buddhist Shrines: Early in the Buddhist tradition, we don't find statues or images of the Buddha, but holy places that are connected with the presence of the Buddha.
  
• Buddhist Worship: How are you going to worship at a Buddhist Shrine?
  
• The Power of Images in Buddhism: What is the meaning of these images of the Buddha? In what sense do these images represent the Buddha?
  
• Images of the Buddha: What are the types of Buddhist images?
  

Images of the Buddha

What are the types of Buddhist images? Some of the early ones are called aniconic images. They represent the Buddha through symbols, places associated with his life or simply by his absence. We often see images of people bowing down in devotion to the Bodhi Tree and to the empty Throne of the Buddha’s awakening. These images are quite common early in the Buddhist tradition. These are found in many great American Museums and the British Museum.

Footprint of the Buddha with the inscription of the Eight-Spoked Wheel

You can see similar images on one of the most important early Buddhist monuments: The Great Stupa at Sanchi. In these cases, the Buddha would be represented by a symbol or by a place that the Buddha once occupied but now is absent.

The Meaning of the Early Images

There is a debate about the meaning of these aniconic images. Some scholars say that these images are evidence of the tradition that prohibited representation of the Buddha in physical form. Others say that they don’t represent the Buddha but represent Shrines associated with the Buddha after his death. I’m somewhat sympathetic to the second argument because I think many Buddhist Shrines do function as reminders of the Buddha’s absence.

The interpretation of these images is uncertain, but they constitute for us an important category of early representation of the Buddha.

The Mathura Style

Near the beginning of the common era, craftsmen began to create images of the Buddha’s physical form. These images appeared in a number of distinctive sculptural styles.

One of the first is the so called Mathura style, associated with the region of Mathura in the Ganges basin. Buddha images in the Mathura style often have a large and fleshy body, typical of an indigenous Indian way of expressing the form of the human body.

Buddha in the Mathura Style

The Gandhara Style

Another style that you’ll see quite commonly is the style associated with the region of Gandhara, a region on the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, the Buddha images show the influence of Greek craftsmanship. Alexander The Great, who invaded the Persian Empire and managed to travel all the way to the plains of Northern India, left behind in Afghanistan a series of Hellenistic kingdoms that had Greek craftsmen. These were enlisted to provide images of the Buddha.

These images show Greek influence in the muscular and anatomical quality of the image itself. You are much more aware in a Gandhara image of the gracefulness and strength of the Buddha as a physical being. You can see a lot of Gandhara images representing different stages in the Buddha’s life. You’ll often see images of the Buddha’s victory over Mara.

Buddha in the Gandhara Style

The Gupta or Classical Style

The Mathura and Gandhara came together to create what became eventually the classical style of Buddhist art. This style developed during the Gupta period in Indian history. In this style, the Buddha images are more fluid, graceful, and in a sense, more abstract. The Buddha’s body is more slender. The expression on his face often is more delicate and refined.

Buddha in the Gupta Style

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art.

The Power of Images in Buddhism

In the last article we talked about how Buddhist worship in a Shrine. Another questions you might ask about Shrines are: In what sense do these images represent the Buddha? Is the Buddha present in the image? Is the image the Buddha himself?

The Sustaining Power

For Hindus, the answer to these questions would be relatively easy. In Hindu worship, the deity is called to become present in the image. You can say quite appropriately that when you worship an image of a god like Shiva or Vishnu, you are worshiping the god that is present in that image.

In the Buddhist case, the Buddha has achieved Nirvana and is no longer available. It is no longer present in that image. The image stands in a somewhat more complex relationship to the Buddha.

How does that relationship take place? It is understood historically that when the Buddha died, he left behind, in his relics and in the objects that he used, a certain power, a sustaining power. This power resides in that object in such a way that can make that object effective for you when you worship it. So, to pay homage to something like the Buddha’s begging ball allows you to plug into the lingering power of the Buddha’s presence. The Buddha himself may be gone, but there is a power that he has left behind which you can access by engaging in an act of worship.

What Do We Get From It?

You might ask one more question. In what sense do you touch the power of the Buddha? On one level it is physical power that is present. On another important level, for Buddhists specially, it is a power that grows out of your own response to that object. So, you might say that it is a meditative connection that you make, that reminds you of the Buddha’s presense.

All that is meant to describe the sophisticated vocabulary of Buddhist worship. You don’t just worship the Buddha in a particular Shrine, you get access to his power in a way that reminds you of the Dharma and helps you to embody it in your own experience.

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art.

Buddhist Worship

How are you going to worship at a Buddhist Shrine? The Indian word for worship is Puja. In many respects, Buddhist worship is very similar to the worship you would find in the Hindu tradition. You make offerings to the image: fruit, flowers, incense, sometimes a candle. In South East Asia, one of the most important things you can do for an image, is to stake in just a little bit of gold leaf and add it to the image.

Visual Contact

Another important thing to do is simply to see the image. This is where the worship of an image becomes the static contemplation of an image. In classical Indian worship, one of the things that you do is to go to the image, look at it, and get the sensation that it is looking at you. An emotional connection it is established by this visual relationship between you and the image.

In a Shrine in India, there are very few of them in operation there, the image sits in an enclosed area right on the center of the temple, there is a curtain over the place where the image resides. Inside that enclosed area there will be a group of Brahmins performing some rituals. You hear some drumming and chanting, you can smell the incense. And then, there is a moment when there is a burst of drumming, a bell rings, somebody pulls the curtain aside, and there it is staring at you. You feel the hair stand up on the back of your neck. It is a strong experience and not comparable to anything in Western religious traditions.

Why Worship?

When lay people go to an image and worship it, the principal goal would be to make merit. That is to perform good karma so it would be possible for them to have a better rebirth in a future life. The vocabulary of worship is connected with prosperity and good luck, not merely with the pursuit of Nirvana.

Strictly speaking, a monk or a nun would not use the Shrines in this way. They would use the Shrines as a focus of meditation, to be reminded of the Buddha’s teaching in order to prosper themselves on the way to Nirvana. The distinction between the lay person’s use and the monk or nun’s use of an image is like the distinction of the Form Body and the Dharma Body.

The lay person would worship the Form Body to get good karma. The monk or nun meditates on the image or on the Shrine in order to understand the Buddhist Dharma and appropriate it in their own experience.

Not so Simple

The practice of lay people and monks is more complicated than that and it doesn’t fall so easily into such a simple distinction.

Lay people often use the Shrine to meditate on the Buddhist teaching, it is not just a way of getting merit, but it is a way of reminding themselves of what the Buddha teaches them about their own life.

It is also true to say that, practically speaking, monks and nuns are not at all averse at gaining merit in some kinds of situations. One obvious reason for this is that not all monks and nuns are going to achieve Nirvana in this life. It is not inappropriate to act with for purposes of merit making.

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art.

Buddhist Shrines

If we look back historically at the very earliest representations of the Buddha, we find not statues or images of the Buddha, but Shrines. Holy places that are connected with the presence of the Buddha. The earliest of these Shrines contained relics of the Buddha’s cremation. Later ones were associated with events or objects that were connected with the Buddha’s life.

Places of Worship

In the early Shrines, the ones that were established shortly after the death of the Buddha, the relics of the Buddha’s cremation were taken to funerary mounds. Big, solid, round mounds that had a square structure on the top. The relic of the Buddha’s cremation was put inside that square structure.

As time went on, the relics of the cremation of the Buddha were taken out, redivided and further distributed. What was originally a set of only about six different holy places became a vast profusion of places associated with the relics that lingered from the Buddha’s creamation.

But this wasn’t the only option, there were objects that the Buddha owned, in one way or another. I mentioned in other article that an important Shrine held the Buddha’s begging ball. There are other Shrines like that, associated with objects that were part of his life.

A common form of Shrine is the Shrine associated with the Buddha’s footprints. You can find footprints just about anywhere. All sorts of stories could be spawned to explain how the Buddha might landed there.

Pilgrimage

How do they work in Buddhist devotion? One of the things that these Shrines made possible was the early Buddhist tradition of pilgrimage. Some of the early reliquary mounds were set up in places that were associated with particularly important events in the Buddha’s life, like the great reliquary mound near the Deer Park where the Buddha gave his first sermon.

When you visit a pilgrimage site like this or come into the presence of one of these Shrines, you engage in what we would call an action of worship. It is important to be aware to some degree of the vocabulary of Buddhist worship. How are you going to worship at a Buddhist Shrine? We will see that in the next article.

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art