Principled Atheism in the Buddhist Scholastic Traditionpdftex

In their systematic presentations of religious philosophy, the Indian Buddhists consistently defended the position that belief in an eternal creator god who superintends his creation and looks after the concerns of his creatures is a distraction from the central task of the religious life. This was clearly the position taken in the early Pāl.i literature and in the Theravāda philosophy based on that literature, but even in the later Mahāyāna writings such as the Lotus Sūtra and the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, in which buddhahood is portrayed not as the feature of the isolated career of Siddhārtha Gautama but rather as a constant feature of the entire cosmos at all times, great care is taken to try to distinguish the concept of the cosmic Buddha-nature in the forms of the dharmakāya or tathāgatagarbha from the concept of a creator god. The Buddhists were, for whatever reasons, eager to avoid falling into a theistic position. The motivation behind the present paper has been to discover what those reasons were. Section 1 will outline how the issue of God’s existence is treated in the early Buddhist literature, especially in the Suttapit.aka, where systematic Buddhist philosophy begins. Section 2 will review the treatment of the question of divine creation as an issue in the systematic philosophy of such thinkers as Vasubandhu (ca.400–ca.480), Dharmakı̄rti (ca.600–ca.660), Śāntaraks.ita (ca.725–788) and Kamalaśı̄la (ca.740–795). And section 3 will show how the arguments for atheism are isomorphic with the arguments for a variety of other positions to which the Buddhist philosophers were committed.