That Old Time Religion

One reason that I like Buddha’s teaching so much, is that it doesn’t require that I believe in a personified god, an omniscient, all-powerful being who created everything, and sits up there in the sky somewhere, judging how I’m doing at being a human. The Buddha tells us we can never know the first cause, and it is fruitless to try to trace our karma back to its origins. Furthermore, according to the Buddha’s teaching, our rewards and punishments come not from some deity who watches us and hands out judgement, but from the laws of cause and effect. Everything that goes around, comes around.

In Theravadan Buddhist texts, Brahma and other Hindu deities appear now and then, but one gets the sense that they just happened to be hanging out in the Buddha’s neighborhood, and he doesn’t seem to pay them a lot of heed or obeisance. In fact, in the Pali Cannon, the gods are usually portrayed as bowing down to Buddha. Sometimes the Buddha can be found teaching to the gods themselves. At one point the Buddha even tells one of his disciples that Brahma must be a little confused if he really thinks that he, Brahma, created everything. According to the Buddha, the gods can’t even become enlightened, because they are just too infatuated with being gods.