Can you still be a Buddhist if you believe in God?

 This question was asked on the Quora forum.  This was my reply.

I’m always amazed at how easily people can say “believe in God” as if it means something objective, that is, the same thing for everyone who says it. Saying “do you believe in Sol or believe in Earth?” (the names of our star and planet) requires a category distinction from the concept of “believe in God”. It is thus impossible to answer *your* question, because you have not defined the terms “believe” and “God.” So any attempt to answer the question requires the responders to provide their own definitions of believe and God, meaning they will be answering their question, not yours. Here, your invitation includes the BYOB that means “bring your own beliefs.”

First let’s address “believe.” There are several terms with a shared meaning element: belief, trust, confidence, and faith are in the overlapping rhetorical region. I can say, “I believe that when I sit down on it, the chair will support me.” Is that the “believe” you mean? Or do you mean “I believe in unicorns, because people have drawn pictures of them.”? Same word, with completely different bases for its use. When Carl G. Jung was asked if he believed in God, he said, “No, I don’t believe, I know.”

And this brings up the second issue to address, what is meant by the word “God”? What is the concept, the meaning, the image, that is within the word and it’s use? This is the holy grail of the question. What is your God concept? Two people can both say, “I believe in God” but their concepts of God can be completely different when saying the identical word. Carl Jung was talking about the psychological experience of God, so he could say he “knows,” and “belief” was not part of the question, any more that whether the quenching aspect of water is a matter of belief. In other words, only people who have no experience of God, speak of believing in God, like believing in Unicorns.

If the question is “Can you still be a Buddhist if you believe in the God of another religion?” then the answer is “it depends.” What is a Buddhist? The word means a follower of the Buddha Dharma (Pali: Dhamma). The traditional declaration of being a follower of the Buddha Dharma is “I go to the Buddha for refuge; I go to the Dharma for refuge; I go to the Sangha for refuge.” All three words, Buddha (the Awakened One), Dharma (the teaching, method, and pattern of life articulated by the Awakened One), and Sangha (Community of followers of the Buddha Dharma) have multidimensional meanings, but primarily each word has three levels of meaning: the conventionally concrete, the imaginatively metaphorical, and the absolutely ultimate.

If you are in fact and in deed a follower of the Buddha Dharma, then you have thrown in with a different view of the universe than the one that has a Father-Creator-God as the Supreme Person who is objectively separate from you. In fact, that is not even “the Father” of Jesus’ teaching, because Paul’s Christianity used an entirely different conception of God than Jesus had. We Buddhists don’t deny the God realm or the God beings who populate it, or what Carl Jung called the Archetypal Realm populated by the Archetypes, but we have a different view of it because, like Jung, we see that there is an inherently subjective aspect to the God realm that cannot be removed. In terms of the “personage” of God, Buddhist see the “person,” “personality,” or “self” of both humans and gods as an illusion, a phantom, or a dream, i.e. a psychological and imaginal construct. In this context, one of the titles of the Buddha is “the Teacher of Gods and Humans.”

As a Buddhist, you can believe in or imagine the God whom the Buddha teaches as his student. But there is no room for belief in a God that creates the Buddha. This is because if you are a follower of the Buddha Dharma you have at least a basic understanding that nothing is “created” in such a supernatural sense and all things appear by the causes and conditions of deeds and events from moment to moment through causes bearing fruits, and fruits becoming seeds for successive causes (to use the traditional agrarian symbolism).

Alternatively, you can re-frame the whole concept of God into Buddhist terms. Buddhism has many terms for the ultimate reality: Tathata (Thusness), Dharmakaya, Sunyata (Emptiness), True Suchness, One Mind, etc. The LankavataraSutra has a list of names that include the names of Hindu Gods as well as names like “the Sun” and “the Moon” as names of the Buddha Tathagata. "The same, Mahamati, can be said of myself, for I come within the range of hearing of ignorant people, in this world of patience, under many names, amounting to a hundred thousand times three asamkhyeyas, and they address me by these names not knowing that they are all other names of the Tathagata. " (pp. 165-166) That is, when surveying the highest representation of every other religion, the Buddhist sees that name as a synonym of the Buddha Tathagata of Buddhism. In this context, believing in God is believing in the Buddha Tathagata by another name.

The first Zen Buddhist to come to America 120 years ago was Soyen Shaku who was accompanied by D.T. Suzuki as his young translator. After his visit he wrote a book titled Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot [Zen For Americans] published in 1906. The Zen Teacher Shaku addressed this question as “The God-Conception of Buddhism.” He said that Buddhism was not theism (God as objective transcendent person) or atheism (no God), or pantheism (God identified with the objective universe), but the closest Western term for Buddhism is panentheism (absolute and transcendent, simultaneously all and one). He comments,

“[H]ere Buddhism is speaking of our inmost religious experience, which deals directly with facts and not with their more or less distorted intellectual reflections. It is, therefore, really idle to say that Buddhism is pantheistic or atheistic or nihilistic. Buddhism is not a philosophical system, though it is the most rational and intellectual religion in the world. What it proposes is to make clear facts of the deepest spiritual life and to formulate a doctrine which leads its followers to the path of inward experience.

“Thus, according to the proclamation of an enlightened mind, God or the principle of sameness is not transcendent, but immanent in the universe, and we sentient beings are manifesting the divine glory just as much as the lilies of the field. A God who, keeping aloof from his creations, sends down his words of command through specially favored personages, is rejected by Buddhists as against the constitution of human reason.”

One way it has been said is that Buddhists have faith that every person can awaken and become a Buddha and that the essential nature of people and Buddha are one and the same, and therefore a belief in a God as a heavenly entity or personality is essentially irrelevant to walking the path of the Buddha Dharma for one’s own realization of liberation and Buddha's awakened knowing and seeing.

What is the Ekayana?

 Eka = one, single. Yana = vehicle or the way or track the vehicle travels on. 

 I translate Ekayana as "One Vehicle," Mahayana is Great Vehicle, Dviyana is Two Vehicles, and Triyana is Three Vehicles. There is, in some circles, confusion about the word because of the similarity to the Christian term "One Way." In Buddhism, the One Vehicle is not "the One Way" in the Christian sense of exclusivity as "the one and only way to get salvation by professing faith in Jesus Christ." In Buddha Dharma, the One Vehicle is an all-inclusive way, the one great Buddha vehicle that allows all people to work out their liberation and become Buddhas.

 In the Lankavatara Sutra the Buddha declares, "The way to realise the path of the Ekayana is to understand that the process of perception is due to discrimination; when this discrimination no longer takes place, and when one abides in the suchness of things, there is the realisation of the Vehicle of Oneness.” (Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, by D.T. Suzuki, p.361.)

 

 D.T. Suzuki wrote: "Besides this Ekayana and Dviyana, the Mahayana sutras generally speak of Triyana, which consists of the Sravaka-yana, Pratyekabuddha-yana, and Bodhisattva-yana. But we must remember that the Ekayana has really nothing to do with the number of Yanas though eka means 'one'; eka in this case rather means 'oneness,' and Ekayana is the designation of the doctrine teaching the transcendental oneness of things, by which all beings inclusive of the Hinayanists and Mahayanists are saved from the bondage of existence." (Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, by D.T. Suzuki, p. 359.)

 

 Zen in China is the lineage of the One Vehicle brought by Bodhidharma. As stated in the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks, the Second Ancestor Huike taught the Lankavatara Sutra according to how he learned it from Bodhidharma by "relying on the One Vehicle (Ekayana) lineage of Southern India (依南天竺一乘宗)."  (Cf. Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, by D.T. Suzuki, p. 51-51 and 54-55, and The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch by Philip B. Yampolsky, p.29,n.87.)  The essence of the One Vehicle is what Bodhidharma called “entering by principle”: awakening with the deep faith that holds beings are the same one true nature.

 The origins are clouded in historical uncertainty, but approximately 500 years after the Buddha, a new movement came out of the clouds restoring vitality to the Buddha Dharma. The story as I see it, necessarily briefly: the One Vehicle movement was the response to the sectarianism of the period known as “the Eighteen Schools.” Under the schism between the school of the Elders, the Sthaviravada, and the new school of the Great Assembly, the Mahasanghikas, each branch further subdivided over splitting hairs of doctrine. There is no definitive count, but for conventional purposes they were called “the 18 schools.”  The One Vehicle movement held that nit-picking divisions like those of the 18 Schools were nonsense in the light of the Buddha’s Dharma that teaches one taste of liberation.  The One Vehicle perspective is that all schools teaching awakening are the One Vehicle of the Buddha, i.e., the One Buddha Vehicle. As a synonym, the term Great Vehicle, Mahayana, arose to indicate that the One Vehicle was so great that followers of all vehicles had a place in the Buddha’s Vehicle. “Again, we see that the term ‘Ekayana’ appears in the place where Buddha’s Ontological doctrines are dealt with, while on the contrary when there is an indication of Buddha’s personality or his theory upon nhuman beings then the terms ‘Buddhayana’ and ‘Bodhisattvayana’ were used.” (Buddhist Sects and Sectarianism, by Bibhuti Baruah, p. 79.)  At this phase, the monk-scholars of the 18 Schools and of the Mahayana “worked, each in his own tradition of scholarship, side by side in the monasteries of India, but their works were resultantly different in form as well as in kind and quality.” (Buddhist Monks and monasteries of India, by Sukumar Dutt, p.248.)

 However, as are human proclivities to grasp onto concepts for personal gain and imaginings of superiority, even  Buddhists succumbed to the temptation to put their views above others, and these people among the Mahayana then appropriated the term Great Vehicle in a narrowed sense to denigrate the followers of the 18 schools as the Small or Lesser Vehicle, the Hinayana.   These followers interpreted the Mahayana as an exclusive vehicle not an all-inclusive vehicle. They then said that their Great Vehicle was the Bodhisattva Vehicle, the third vehicle as opposed to the small vehicles of the two vehicles of listener-disciples (sravakas) and pratyekabuddhas. In this scheme, all the 18 Schools were swept into the first of the two-vehicle categories of sravakas, the listener-disciples. The second of the two-vehicle categories was the pratyekabuddhas; these are people who awaken not by following the teaching that is heard, but by working out or receiving their liberation by awakening independently.  

 

 The third vehicle, that of the Bodhisattavayana, established the family of the Prajnaparamita Sutras and elaborated the Six, and later the Ten, Paramitas as the path of the Bodhisattva in contradistinction to the Eightfold Path of the listener-disciples.  The Dharma taught in what is now the extant Pali Canon was called the First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma in accord with the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: “Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion.”  To distinguish the teaching of the Prajnaparamita Sutras, this family of Sanskrit Sutras was proclaimed to be “The Second Turning of the Wheel of Dharma,” and with its usual self-erasing language, the Prajnaparamita states “They turn the wheel of Dharma, but they do not turn any dharma forward or backward. They do not behold any dharma, nor do they demonstrate any dharma. And why? Because that dharma cannot be apprehended which could turn forward or backward.” (As translated by Edward Conze in “The Large Sutra of Perfect Wisdom” p..311.)

 

 The relation of these two turnings of the Wheel of Dharma was that of thesis and antithesis. Without going into the ins and outs of the controversies, suffice it to say that this Second Turning itself became misunderstood.  Where the Prajnaparamita Sutra said that the three inherent and universal positions of reality, as the three gates of liberation, emptiness, signlessness, and desirelessness (the third interpreted in Zen as “wuwei” non activity and “buji” no-affairs) are equal, in the analysis of the later interpreters like Nagarjuna, emptiness became valorized as the primacy of the three. And on the question of own-being or own-nature (svabhava) the Sutra said “Moreover, Subhuti, all dharmas have emptiness for own-being, the signless, the wishless.  Moreover, Subhuti, all dharmas have Suchness (tathata) for own-being, the Reality limit (bhutakoti), the Dharma-element (dhrmadhatu).” Thus, emptiness and Suchness are synonyms in the Prajnaparamita Sutra. However, the Prajnaparamita scholars emphasized emptiness above Suchness and treated Suchness as a reified delusion.  

 

 The Prajnaparamita scholars saw themselves as correcting the mistakes of the First Turning of the Wheel by their antithesis philosophy. However, others said that they went too far and in turn reified emptiness making it into a nihilistic philosophy. This brought forth the resurgence of the One Vehicle movement that said the equation of the Bodhisattva Vehicle with the Mahayana was really an error and the true Great Vehicle was the One Vehicle, not a Bodhisattva Vehicle that is a third vehicle in relation to the two vehicles called Small Vehicles.In other words, Ekayana does not accept the idea that the so-called Hinayana and Mahayana are mutually exclusive or irreconcilable.  This One Vehicle movement produced the Mahayana One Vehicle Sutras that became called the Third Turning of the Wheel of Dharma, as the synthesis of the First Turning, as thesis, and the Second Turning, as antithesis, to create a coherent whole to the Buddha Dharma.  These One Vehicle Sutras include:

 

The White Lotus of the True Dharma Sutra - Saddharmapundarika Sutra;

The Union With Deliverance Sutra - The Samdhinirmocana Sutra;

The Lion's Roar of Queen Srimala Sutra  - Srimaladevi Simhanada Sutra;

The Going Down to Lanka Sutra - The Lankavatara Sutra;

The Flower Garland Sutra - Avatamsaka Sutra;

 The Great Complete Nirvana Sutra - Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra;

Shurangama Sutra -  Śūraṅgama Sutra;

The Diamond Samadhi Sutra – Vajrasamadhi Sutra;

The Great Dharma Drum Sutra - Mahābherīhāraka-parivarta Sutra;and

The Non-regressing Wheel Sutra - Avaivartikacakra Sutra.

A quick look at this list shows that these are considered among the most important Mahayana Sutras that are not in the Prajnaparamita family of Sutras. Each of these sutras presents the One Vehicle perspective on the theme generally presented in the sutra, for example, the Lankavatara Sutra is on the theme of the psychology of awakening and the Lotus Sutra is on the theme of faith in awakening and the use of expedient means to arouse the faith.  

 The Sutra of Queen Srimala’s Lion’s Roar has the distinction of being the Sutra that presents the Entry into the One Vehicle most comprehensively as the Acceptance of the Real Dharma. The protagonist, Queen Srimala, is unique among Buddhist Sutras as a lay person and a woman who is at the highest Bodhisattva stages and receives the affirmation of future Buddhahood by the Buddha. Queen Srimala’s Sutra has sections presenting the One Vehicle perspective on all the major themes of Buddha Dharma, the Four Noble Truths, Nirvana, Emptiness, Tathagatagarbha, etc.

 

 Notable masters of the Zen lineage teaching the One Vehicle include Bodhidharma, “the first Ancestor” of the Chinese lineage; Sengcan, "The Third Ancestor" (“If you desire to take hold of the One Vehicle (Ekayana), do not despise the six dusts.”); Hongren, “The Fifth Ancestor” (“Indeed, for this reason the Tathagata accords with this gate of mind to lead them to enter the One Vehicle.” “This discourse reveals the One Vehicle to be the lineage, so that it arrives at the meaning for those destined for confusion about the Way.); Huineng, “The Sixth Ancestor”; Shitou; Matsu; Baizhang; Zongmi; Huangbo; Jinul of Korea; Dahui; Dogen; Hakuin; and Torei.  

 

As you can see, many Zen masters taught the One Vehicle.  I'd like to ask people to share and post in the comments section any references to the One Vehicle by these or other Zen/Chan masters that you have come across.

 In gratitude, _/|\_