A BUDDHIST CRITIQUE OF ‘GOD’

The quality of permanence or eternality is clearly incompatible with the primary insight of the
Buddha that everything is impermanent. At a fundamental level this quality of God is deemed
impossible, and the authority for this is the founder of the Buddhist tradition, although analytic
meditation is thought also to bear out this same truth. A number of sophisticated arguments were
developed and rehearsed in Buddhist intellectual circles, and a concise summary of the most cogent
of these (from a Prāsa gika-Mādhyamika point of view) can be found in Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra,
a Mahāyāna treatise on the Buddhist spiritual path written at Nālandā, the premier monastic university
in India in the eighth century CE, and widely used since especially in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions.13
Śāntideva presents his anti-theistic arguments in chapter nine (vv. 118–125), which deals with
understanding (prajñā) or wisdom. Śāntideva situates his refutation of God near the start of a lengthy
discussion of causality, and initiates it by querying God’s identity:
‘God is the cause of the world.’ Tell us, what is God? If [you claim] he is the same as the elements, then that’s OK, but what a
fuss you’re making about what’s really just a label! (9.118)

His opening point, aimed at the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas,14 confirms that the equation of God with the
elements, i.e. pantheism, is entirely acceptable as it reduces God to the elements, the existence of
which Buddhists admit. The term ‘God’ is thus just a redundant label. In the next verse he moves on to
point out that the elements themselves simply do not partake of a number of crucial characteristics
that are definitive of God: they are many, while God is supposedly unitary; they are contingent, when
God is supposed to be permanent; they are also inactive, whereas God is supposed to be the ultimate
agent.
Anyway, earth and the other elements can’t be God because they are multiple, impermanent, inert and not divine.

Worst of all in the context of Indian religion (and here he raises a somewhat emotive argument) the
elements—being all around us—are demeaned beneath our feet and are ‘impure’—the sense of the
latter being a ritual impurity rather than simply ‘soiled’. This is simply and viscerally inappropriate
for any concept of high divinity in Indian religion.
We can walk on them, and they’re ‘dirty’. (9.119)

Even space, he goes on in the next verse, while being unitary and permanent, is disqualified from
being equated with God, because it too is inert and therefore has no agency.
Nor can God be space, because space is inert.

Those who want to identify God with the ātman have already lost because that is definitively
deconstructed by Buddhist analysis, something he has already done earlier in his chapter.
Nor can God be the ‘personal inner essence’ (ātman), which, as has already been demonstrated, does not exist.

His final shot in this discussion of God’s identity, is to dismiss those who want to assert that God is
inconceivable—discussion, or indeed any meaningful assertion, about something that is
inconceivable is impossible and pointless.
 If [you say] the creative act belongs to [a God] that is unknowable, what meaningful discourse can be had about what is
unknowable? (9.120)

These points made, Śāntideva moves on to examine various perspectives on God’s creative role. He
starts by addressing the issue of immutability. The personal inner essence ( ātman), is supposedly
unchanging but this is incompatible with the transmutation involved in being created. Similarly, the
fundamental character (svabhāva) of the elements is unchanging, as indeed, supposedly, is God
himself. Here Śāntideva teases out the contradiction inherent in claiming that an immutable agent
creates immutable creations—how can immutable objects be created; how can God himself be
unchanged by the act of creation?
And what is it that God seeks to create? If [you say that] it is the personal inner essence (ātman), surely that is supposed to be
unchanging, as also is God himself and the fundamental character of earth and the other elements.

Śāntideva then changes tack. Even the act of knowing (jñāna) cannot be assigned a ‘start point’ since
cognition arises in conjunction with the thing that is cognized (jñeya) and necessarily (in Buddhist
eyes) has done so without beginning. (It is therefore not sustainable to maintain that God is a primary
intelligence who sets things in motion—as a ‘knower’ there had to have been a co-existent ‘known’.)
The same goes for the consequences of actions—the functioning of karma in Buddhism is an
impersonal process that has also run through time without beginning and does not require the
intervention or administrative support of God.
Likewise, without any beginning, cognition [of anything] has been dependent on that thing which is known; (9.121)
As also both pleasure and pain have arisen from actions. Explain what it is that is made by him? If there is no beginning to
causation, where can a beginning to any results come in? (9.122)

Śāntideva’s critique then turns to the nature of God’s agency. If God is creative then he should be
creative all the time and his creative action be continuous and a part of his unchanging nature. The
alternative could only be that he is in some way ‘deferring’ or ‘keeping an eye on’ (apekṣ) some
factor external to himself. This would mean that his agency is qualified. But this alternative is not
viable anyway as by definition every other existent is his creation, so he would hardly need to defer to
his own creation.
For what reason is he not always doing things on his own behalf, if he’s not deferring to anything else? If there is nothing else that
is not made by him, to what does he need to defer? (9.123)

At this point Śāntideva moves on to address the theistic scenario in which God creates by acting upon,
or in conjunction with, pre-existent raw materials (creatio ex materia), a theological perspective that
has been quite widely held in India. If, he argues, God perforce operates in conjunction with
independent factors, his own agency is qualified. He is just part of a system of some sort. He
presumably has no choice but to act if all other conditions are present and cannot perform his
creation if they are not.
If he defers to the totality of conditions [in some way] then God is not ‘the’ cause. God cannot act when there is the totality of
relevant conditions, and is unable to act when the totality of such conditions is absent. (9.124)

In his final verse in the sequence dealing with God, Śāntideva turns to God’s will. If God created the
world without desiring that outcome, then he was not acting at his own behest but must have done at
the behest of some external influence. He would thus not be independent. However, the alternative
would be that he acted under the force of desire. Desire is transient and thus God’s immutability is
once again destroyed. It also means that God himself is subject to the power of something transient,
which means that he is not omnipotent.
If God takes action while not desiring some outcome, then he must be at the disposal of something other than himself. On the other
hand, if he acts while desiring something, then he would be at the disposal of desire. Where’s his Divinity in that? (9.125)

One might reasonably query the role of texts such as this in Buddhist intellectual life, and Griffiths
(1999) makes a credible case that the primary objective of rehearsing arguments in this way was not
the conversion of theistic opponents so much as the training of the monks in the doctrinal
ramifications of Buddhist teaching.