Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 4/22/2009

Question
1. Do Buddists believe in a Devine God or in a human being?

2. Who is the Dali Lama?

Answer
Hello Rich -

Thank you for letting me answer your question.   Sorry it took so long to respond, iroically, I was out of town attending a lecture by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. So I will answer that question first.

The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political head of Tibet.  He is the spiritual head of the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism.  He was born in Tibet and now lives in exile in India.  He is a Tibetan monk. He is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. He is also considered by some to be the emination of the Buddha of Compassion.

I assume you mean that do Buddhists believe in God as Divine or as Human for of course we belive in human beings. The answer is that Buddhists do not believe in an external God at all, Divine or Human.

We do believe that every human, in fact every sentient being has Buddha Nature, which is the potential to become a Buddha. And eventually every sentient being will attain Buddhahood.

A Divine 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 Mahayana Buddhism,  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. 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 Divine power outside ourselves does it for us.

There is no need for a God to judge us.  Our karma does that for us. Furthermore, we can eliminate our own suffering because we created it. There was no outside being that created the suffering we are experiencing nor for that matter, the joy we experience.  We create both.  It is called the law of karma. When we do any action (or think something for that matter) it plants a seed in our mind or psyche (or mental continuum as the Buddhists would say) If we do or think something positive, we plant a positive seed, when we do or think something negative, we plant a negative seed and when we do a neutral action or have a neutral thought, we plant a neutral seed. Karma is the law of cause and effect.  It is a natural law. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.  So when bad things happen, for example, there is no outside God allowing them or causing them to happen. They happen due to the karma of a past action ripening. So the more good things we do in the present, the more good things will happen to us in the future.  The more bad things we do in the present, the more bad things will happen in the future.

God did not create us. We have existed from beginningless time.  Buddhist believe in reincarnation.  We believe 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 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 Rich.

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 Rich at 10 years old, Rich at 5 years old, Rich 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 Rich’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.

Therefore, there is no being outside ourselves, there is no being that created us, that rules over us or judges us, because there is no God that we follow, there is no one to worship.  Buddhists also believe that once we gain all the realizations we can, and attain complete Buddhahood, that this complete Buddha Nature does not lack anything. There is no need to worship a God because we do not need to find devotion or love outside ourselves. As I mentioned before, we work very hard to develop Boddichita. Boddhichita is ultimate compassion – the sincere wish to free all living beings from their suffering.  When we have ultimate compassion for all sentient beings, there is no need for worship.

We do, however, honor, pray to and prostrate to beings that have reached Enlightenment.  But that is not worship.  We are honoring them for achieving what we are striving to achieve.  We pray for their guidance to help us get there and we even prostrate (bow to) them in order to help us eliminate the main cause of our lack of progress on our spiritual path, which is our own self cherishing, which places us and not others first.

All this is not to say that one has to give up the belief in God to practice Buddhism.  For example, there are Christians who practice Buddhism as a philosophy as opposed to a religion.  They do so because they can gain things from the study of Buddhism which they can use to augment their own spiritual practice.

I hope these answers were what you were looking for - if not, don't hesitate to ask any further questions