There Is No God and He Is Always with You by Brad Warner

Author:Brad Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608681846
Publisher: New World Library

*In the Shobogenzo chapter “Deep Belief in Cause and Effect,” or “Shin Jin Inga” in Japanese.

†In “Karma in the Three Times,” or “San Ji No Go” in Japanese.

*In “The Will to the Truth,” or “Doshin” in Japanese.

*“The way of the Buddha.”

†From the Shobogenzo chapter “Buddhas Alone Together with Buddhas,” or “Yuibutsu Yobutsu” in Japanese.

CHAPTER 11

IS BUDDHA GOD?

In the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha says,

Now this triple world

All is my possession

And living beings in it

All are my children.

Sounds as though he’s claiming to be God, doesn’t it? Jesus made the same sort of claim in John 10:30 when he said, “I and my Father are one,” and in John 17:5 when he said, “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” And look what happened with him! Lots of people took him at his word and said, “That guy Jesus over there is God. I’m not God, but he is. So I’m going to worship him. And furthermore, I’m going to give anybody who doesn’t agree a very hard time.”

Both the Gospel of John and the Lotus Sutra, though they claim to record the words of Jesus and Shakyamuni (the historical Buddha), respectively, are historically suspect. Passages from the Lotus Sutra first began to appear around 400 years after Shakyamuni died, and the full sutra itself doesn’t seem to have existed until around 200 CE, some 700 years after Shakyamuni was dead, gone, and had his teeth and bones scattered into stupas all over Asia. The Gospel of John was the last of the gospels to be written and appears to date anywhere from 90 to 120 years after Jesus left this world, perhaps even considerably later. Interestingly enough, both these works appear to have been composed around the same general time period, though the Gospel of John is historically much closer to the time of Jesus than the Lotus Sutra is to the time of Shakyamuni.

One of the cornerstones of contemporary mainstream Christian faith is that Jesus is God. The rest of us are not God, but Jesus is. Jesus is, therefore, a very special person, to say the least. This probably wasn’t always the way Jesus’s followers thought of him. But it’s pretty much the norm today. Buddhism, in spite of passages like the one quoted above and others like it, has never held the idea that Shakyamuni Buddha was God, at least not in the sense that he alone was God and the rest of us schmucks are not.

Having said this, I am well aware that you can find branches of Buddhism in which people do believe that Shakyamuni Buddha was some kind of supernatural being. You could make a strong case that there are Buddhists who regard Shakyamuni as a god or even as the God of their religion. To give you just one example, I have encountered some Thai Buddhists who seemed to regard Shakyamuni Buddha as God in much the same way that Christians regard Jesus Christ as God.

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