Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 10/14/2009

Question
Hi, other religions believe in a Creator God and that concept gives tgheir belief meaning.  IE, the Christians believe in Christ and Christ wants us to forgive our enemies and accept God's grace.  This gives their religion meaning.  Jews believe God exist, that God is good, and therefore God wants us to be good to eachother.  But if Buddhism does not believe in a creator God, what is the believe in creation.  I know we are suppossed to abate suffering, to have compassion, but what is the meaning of creation in Buddhism with no belief in a creator?  Thanks for asnwering

Answer
Hello.  Thank you for letting me answer your question. It is a good one.

The Buddhist belief in creation in some ways is like all religions in that none of them that I know of know or accept a beginning of time or start of creation. Growing up Catholic, I was taught that God always was, always is and always will be.

Buddhists also believe that there was no beginning of creation. The reason is that we believe in what is called dependent arising. This means that something can only come from the thing that precedes it. One moment comes from the one before it.

The reason there is no Creation is because Buddhists believe that we have existed from beginningless time.  We believe in reincarnation; that we have a mental continuum (read soul) that we carry from one life to the next which keeps the record of all our deeds.  We believe this continuum never began and never ends.  The reason we believe this (as I understand it) is because of what we call the belief in dependant arising as I mentioned before. It may sound hard to fathom, but if you think about it logically, it does work.  Take your life as Marc.

Dependant arising means that this moment you are reading this exists based on the causes and conditions of the previous moment before you started reading this. And that previous moment exists based on the causes and conditions of the moment that preceded that.  This makes sense logically, right? So follow each moment backwards, and you get the causes and conditions that produced Marc at 10 years old, Marc at 5 years old, Marc at birth – okey so where does it stop?

If it does stop, it is only because we choose a random arbitrary stopping point.  Can that point be found or proved? Can we say Marc’s first moment started at birth? Well then what about conception?  What about the split second before conception? Did you really not exist then and suddenly you existed?  Buddhists say that if you had the causes and conditions to exist at conception, there must have been causes and conditions that existed the split second before that that caused the conception to happen and for you to enter the womb of your mother; because, they reason, if there are causes and conditions that can be traced every second from the moment you were born till now, how can there suddenly be no causes and conditions when you die, for example?  If causes and conditions are occurring that produce the next second of your life, and the next, there must have always been causes and conditions at work creating us from beginningless time and going on with no end.

The Creation in Judeo Christian terms says that God made the heaven and earth.  According to the Judeo Christian belief, God has no beginning and no end. If God made us, we would have a beginning. But this does not make sense for Buddhists for several reasons – one being the belief in karma.  We would have had to have had karma that would have caused us to be made by God.  Where did that karma come from? Nothing is random in the Buddhist perspective. Somehow we would have had to have created the karma to be created. So there would have to be some existence before The Creation of the World or we could not have created the karma to be created by the god of creation.

So as to why we exist at all, is a combination of creating the karma to exist and because we have not figured out how to let go of our attachment to samsara (the cycle of birth and death in this realm of suffering.) The purpose of our being reborn or created, if you will, each life according to Mahayana Buddhism is to work off our karma and to learn to become enlightened so that we get out of the constant cycle of birth, death and rebirth and help others do the same.
We do not have an exterior God to give our lives meaning. Buddhists believe that we all possess Buddha nature; the ability to be a Buddha.

A traditional God has qualities I assume we can agree on.
1)   It is a being or power outside ourselves that created and rules the universe and ultimately judges us.
2)   It is a being or power that we worship.

So, from the perspective of taking Mahayana Buddhism as one’s religion for example, there is no one being who created, rules or runs the universe. Why? There is no need. Why? Buddha Shakyamuni, (who started life as a Prince named Siddhartha) the fourth primordial Buddha, whom we generally refer to as just “The Buddha” began teaching for one major purpose.  He saw all the suffering in the world and wanted to free himself from it and later also wished and taught some 84.000 teachings in order to rid all sentient beings from suffering.

He became The Buddha because he realized through his experiences and his meditation the ultimately perfect nature of reality. He realized that all sentient beings can eliminate suffering in their own lives, find perfect happiness and bliss and help others to do the same. He realized that he was no different from anyone else and because he could attain this liberation, so can all sentient beings.  Buddhists believe that we all have Buddha Nature.  And when we truly practice the path of Buddhism correctly, we can access our own Buddha Nature which means that we become free of suffering. We attain enlightenment. We become perfect because we train our mind to seek its true nature of complete clarity and complete wisdom, we train our hearts to have perfect and unlimited compassion for all sentient beings and we use this wisdom and compassion to help all other sentient beings reach this perfect state as well. This nature of perfection resides naturally in all sentient beings, we simply have to develop it. No power outside ourselves does it for us. No other power gives our lives meaning.

You ask what is the meaning of creation if there is no creator?  Who is the creator? When we develop ourselves to the height of our potential by following the Buddhist path, we develop complete compassion for all sentient beings. When we develop ourselves to the height of our potential by following the Buddhist path, we develop our minds to understand exactly how the world works and therefore are completely omniscient and wise.  When we develop ourselves to the height of our potential by following the Buddhist path, we let go of our egos and do not abide in any negative place. With that complete wisdom which is the ultimate nature of our own mind, we then can create our world. Once we become Enlightened as Buddha did, we no longer need an outside creator to make our lives or to make our reality or to make things for us or to give us happiness or to teach us.  All those things I just mentioned exist currently within each and every one of us.  We just have to use what ever spiritual path works best for us, Buddhist or otherwise to make them part of us again and make ourselves whole.

I hope this answered your question at least somewhat. If you have any further questions based on this answer or any new questions, don’t hesitate to ask.