Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 3/5/2009

Question
Hi, I understand that Buddhist generally don't accept the concept of a god of creation, if so, what then is the purpose of the creation?

Answer
Thank you for letting me answer your question, Marc.

You ask what the purpose of the creation is. As you mentioned, Buddhists do not believe in a god of creation, so the best I can do is answer the questions of why we are here and why we do not believe in the creation.

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)which was not created by a god 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; therefore there was no Creation.  The reason we believe this (as I understand it) is because of what we call the belief in dependant arising. 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 God created us or we could not have created the karma to be created by the god of creation.

So as to why we exist at all,it 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)which keeps us coming back. The purpose of our being reborn or created, if you will, each life according to Mahayana Buddhism as I understand it, 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.

It is difficult to answer a question about the purpose of something in which we do not believe, but I hope this begins to answer your question.  If you have any further questions or comments, don’t hesitate to ask them.