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

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

Buddhist Proverbs

We find that the Buddhist tradition is expressed in very simple and memorable verses. Proverbs are one of the ways traditional teachings are conveyed, specially in an oral one like this. I’ll write a couple of them to give you a flavor of what these proverbs sound like. They come from the text called the Dhammapada, one of the very early collections of the Buddha’s spoken teaching.

“Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, and to purify one’s mind. This is the teaching of the Buddha.”

It seems extremely simple. I suppose if somebody told you: “Well, what’s my teaching?”. “Don’t do evil, do good”. It is hard to disagree with that. But note that little bit added at the end: “Purify your mind”. That’s Buddhist. That’s the Buddha speaking. You’ve got to find some way to purify the mind of ignorance and desire. Then you can really strike the root of the issues of evil and good.

In its simplicity it also conveys a distinctive message. Another proverb like this:

“You are your own protector. What other protector can there be? With your self fully controlled, you obtain a protection that is hard to obtain.”

We know that Buddhists are self-reliant. We know their concern about achieving Nirvana for themselves and not depending on others. This seems simply to be an affirmation of that. This word protector has a little hook in it. It is also a word you can use to refer to God. The Buddha is saying here: “You are your own god”. Strong teaching. It stands the Buddhist tradition in open opposition to what was happening in Hindu life at that time.

You get a flavor here of some of the distinctive aspects of the teaching of the Buddha.

The Three Refuges of Buddhist Faith

There is a fundamental formula that is used in the Buddhist tradition to express faith in the tradition itself. It is called the Three Refuges. Some people have said that it functions in Buddhism a little bit like The Lord’s Prayer or some other very common affirmation of faith in others religious traditions.

In English it would sound simply like this: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha.” The Sangha is the Buddhist community.

These are the three focal points of faith in the Buddhist tradition. People would recite this as part of an ordinary daily ritual. Some people use it as a formula when they want to assert their own Buddhist identity.

Self-reliance and Devotion in Buddhism

Buddhism is commonly known for the very austere tradition of self-reliance, found in the early Buddhist monastic community. Relying simply on yourself in order to achieve the experience of Nirvana. One example of this is the monastic practice in Theravada Buddhist countries of South East Asia, particularly Sri Lanka. There, the center of Buddhist activity lies largely in the monastery, among a group of yellow-robed monks who go out in the morning with their begging balls, walking from house to house holding out their balls, taking off the lead and inviting members of the community providing them with the aids that will sustain them for that day.

Young monks in Tibet

One of the classical rules in traditional Buddhism is that monks can’t carry food from one day to the next, so, every morning those monks have to go out in their robes with their balls to beg their food. That austere simple tradition is a tradition that really grows right out of the experience of the Buddha, from the earliest stages in the growth of the Buddhist tradition.

Self-Reliance in Zen

You find the same kind of self-reliance in the Zen tradition in Japan. I was just visiting in Japan a couple of weeks ago and visited a monastery with a Zen master. I was talking to him and taking photographs. As I focused my camera on him, I told him how important it was going to be for my students to be able to show them a picture of a Zen master, who was clearly so accomplished and who clearly embodied in a powerful way that tradition. He looked me straight in the eye and said: “I want you to tell them when you speak to them about this tradition: to be courageous, to stand up straight and to rely on themselves”. Like many people in my business have a little scholar's stoop, I found myself just standing a little straighter.

Devotion in Pure Land Buddhism

There is also another important aspect of the tradition that insists that is not possible and perhaps not even desirable to achieve salvation purely on your own merit. Instead, you have to rely on the power of some deity, some figure that is infinitely greater than you.

One example of this we’ll study in more detail in other articles is the worship of the Amida Buddha by Pure Land Buddhists in Japan. Pure Land Buddhism has come to North America, like many other varieties of Buddhism, and in some of its manifestations in this country in particular it looks often a lot like Christian devotion.

I was visiting not so long ago one of the Pure Land temples in Hawaii and being the curious scholar that I am, I opened a little hymnal in the back of the temple and looked at it. It had words that seemed mysteriously familiar to me. It began: “Buddha loves me, this I know for the Sutras tell me so”.

The Devotion to Guan Yin in China

Another example of Buddhist devotion with which we’ll occupy some of our attention is Chinese Buddhist devotion to the bodhisattva or Future Buddha, not a Buddha per say, but a deity that will become a Buddha in a future life. The bodhisattva Guan Yin.

Guan Yin

Guan Yin is often pictured as a beautiful standing female figure holding a baby. In Chinese civilization, Guan Yin is viewed as being the emodiment of compassion, but of compassion particularly associated with the development of a healthy and happy family and the gift of children.

When I was visiting a Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage site in Shangai, I ran into a group of Chinese Buddhists, ethnic Chinese Buddhists who came from the Philipines and Indonesia. I asked why they had made the long and rather arduous, and rather expensive trip to pay homage to the deity Guan Yin, and they said that it was for the wealth of their family, and particularly as a way of fulfilling the hope to have children.

The Overlooked Aspect of Buddhism

Devotion is an aspect of Buddhism that for many people might seem unfamiliar, but it too is deeply rooted in the practice of the Indian tradition. We’ll also need to occupy some of our attention in Tibet. One of the most important aspects of religious devotion is focused not necessarily on these great celestial figures but on the human beings who embody their power. The Dalai Lama in particular is one of these. People think of the Dalai Lama sometimes as being a living Buddha, technically that’s not correct, he is a living manifestation of the compassion of the same bodhisattva who is manifested as Guan Yin in China. But he too has an extraordinary ability to make the power of compassion present for people. I’ll occupy some articles on the important figure of the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama

Devotion is an important aspect of the Buddhist tradition, not just relying on yourself, but opening yourself to the power that comes from a figure that embodies an influence much greater than you.