Buddhist Theism

Cataphatic Ātman, Apophatic Anattā

THIS article is owed as an explanation for why I so comfortably speak of Buddhism—famously an ‘atheistic’ religion in common understanding—in terms analogous and often identical to theistic religions. There is much ado, particularly thanks to western atheists, about Buddhism being a supposedly (marginally—western atheism cannot relinquish its superciliousness that easily) more educated, sensible alternative to popular religion, disabused of all the theistic fantasies of other major faiths. To a certain extent, this designation is accurate: very few, if any, Buddhists would be inclined to describe their religion as ‘theistic’ in the sense of purporting belief in an absolute Being, and even then one would require a fairly substantial set of clarifications. But I do believe that with such clarifications in place, there can be much consonance. I am wary as an outsider (a western one at that) there is a risk of hastily painting over cultural differences which I am not adept to handle, but I do take my lead from thinkers belonging to the traditions.

One such is Swami Sarvapriyananda, who reminds us that when we consider Hinduism and Buddhism in conjunction, we are already riding a wave of at least a millenium of intellectual, ritual, and spiritual disagreement. That we must first take into account when we consider why there might be such intractable discord in spite of seemingly overwhelming congruence. Since Buddhism’s emergence as a ‘heterodox’ (nāstika) school from its Vedic milieu at the great Śramaṇic turn through the 6th-5th centuries BC, hostility—not least due to the polemical style of authors on both sides of the divide—has been commonplace. But I might also point out that the notion of a long historical agon between traditions without all that much substance to stoke the division is something we have seen elsewhere: in the case of the Chalcedonian Definition, which split Oriental Orthodoxy away from miaphysite Churches, both East and West. As of late, there have been concessions from all manner of churches admitting that the distinction was never all that grand, even though it has lasted for centuries.

With these preliminary considerations in mind, we can speak to some concrete conflicts. For instance: a classic argument for Buddhist ‘atheism’ is articulated by Dharmakīrti, a 6th-7th century CE Indian philosopher who makes the case against Vedic theism with a number of premises, among them:

How, if an entity is a cause,
(But is said) sometimes to be
A non-cause, can one assert in any way
That a cause is a non-cause? One cannot so assert.¹

That is, how could God be an abiding source when things in the world arise and pass away? Surely this would denote change in God, being what Roger Jackson describes as ‘a single entity’.² Under a similar guise, Jackson also mentions Vasubandhu’s claim that ‘the various dharmas do not arise from a unique cause like īsvara, because dharmas are successive and īsvara is not’.³ And we should also acknowledge the Brahmajālasutta, in which the Buddha rejects the suggestion that brahm is creator of all that follows him, even as he exists alone at the very start of a ‘world cycle’. This is a ‘mistaken inference’ on the part of brahm: he is ‘the first being to arise’, and in his subsequent loneliness ‘he wishes for other beings as companions, and they appear. He concludes that he has created them, but is mistaken, for by the Buddhist explanation the beings simply are arising due to their own karman—karman, rather than the will of a deity’.⁴

We should ask ourselves, however, whether this ‘deity’ is actually what is being referred to when we speak of God in Vedanta (or any other great theistic tradition, for that matter). What is the Buddhist alternative? In Madhyamaka, there is a continual, abiding ‘emptiness’ (śūnyatā) in which beings manifest and decease according to their karma; immortal, unchanging, but never manifest itself as a being: because, per Dharmakīrti and Vasubandhu, such a thing is an impossibility. As such, all that really can be said to be are mutable, conditioned, empty entities, arising and wiling away ab aeterna. As Jackson bluntly states:

For the later Buddhist philosophical tradition… the most important early arguments are perhaps the implicit ones: those many passages in the Nikāyas where the concept of a permanent attā or ātman is rejected, principally on the grounds that no permanent entity is or can be encountered in experience or justified by reason. It really is Buddhism’s emphasis on universal impermanence that is at the root of its aversion to the concept of God….⁵

This is the key. No thing in reality is permanent. All is conditioned by and subject to dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda). But are we not reminded in the Brahma Sutras that Brahman is categorically not a mere ‘superintendent’ standing over and against the world, not its ‘efficient or operative cause’⁶—precisely because Vedanta appreciates this very impossibility, as ‘(There would follow from [this] doctrine the Lord’s) being subject to destruction or His non-omniscience’?⁷ There is a primary thrust against theism in Buddhist literature that is oriented against what David Bentley Hart has labelled a ‘monopolytheism’: that is, the worship of a supreme entity that supposedly bears all Divine characteristics whilst remaining a mere ‘thing’ within the fold of conditioned existence. With this definition dismissed from the picture, we have our first major consonance fall into place.

This does not only apply to the Being (sat) of God, but so too his nature as absolute Consciousness (cit). A recent debate with a good, philosophically-inclined friend on this topic has obliged me to return to it with some vigor. Unfortunately, despite the intensity of our argument, I believe both of us were labouring under a linguistic misapprehension at the time. Whilst trying to reconcile the two traditions, our fear was that what was at stake between Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamaka Buddhism was consciousness itself. That is, Advaita advocates for an infinite, absolute consciousness that is known as satcitananda; an eternal repose of bliss at the heart of all Being. Whilst Madhyamaka, with its emphatic rejection of all permanence, would not allow even this, and so dismissed consciousness—the ‘cit’ in the middle of that mantra—as something that might be clung to, and so something that was not essentially permanent. Our error, I now realise, was in failing to clarify definitions. We both assumed that when the Buddha lays out the five aggregates (skandhas), when he refers to viññāṇa (which in translations we had read was rendered ‘consciousness’) it was referring to ‘consciousness’ as we understood the word: that is, the pure light of awareness itself in which all the world is experienced. Thus we took Buddhism to insist on the negation of consciousness or experience itself, which could only be nonexistence; and so ultimately nihilism.

I could tell this was wrong (because Buddhism has always been adamantly opposed to nihilism⁸) but the tension for a long while remained due to a misunderstanding of what was being asserted by Buddhist sources, primarily due to my absolute ignorance of Pāli and Sanskrit. Citta, viññāṇa, and manas have been variously translated from the Pāli as ‘consciousness’, but if we examine their usage we see they are not univocal. Viññāṇa refers more precisely to ‘discernment’ or ‘discrimination’ rather than ‘consicousness’, as we had understood it. Léo, if you’re reading: our problem, happily, is solved. Experience itself is not one of the skandhas; only the faculty of discernment, which belongs to cognition—only a part of experience, a member of the mental apparatus which constitutes the mind, but not consciousness itself. We thus have further concordance. It is awareness itself to which both Vedanta and Buddhism alike seek to draw us, the truth that

There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks, there were no unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned. But because there is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned.⁹

The following are fundamental consistencies between the two traditions, as I see them, that prompt my swift dismissal of the vast separation between ‘theistic’ and ‘atheistic’ religion that is emphasised in the West. 1) Both advocate for the ‘existence’ (as it were) of what can generally be described as an ‘Absolute Reality’; that is, a sphere, dimension, or realm where the change and becoming of common experience is absent, residing independent of space and time. In Vedanta this is typically referred to as ‘Brahman’, often adorned with a Vaishnava bhaktic flush (and so venerated as Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, etc.) whilst depending on the Buddhist tradition this can be ‘nirvāṇa’, ‘buddhadhātu’, ‘dharmakāya’ and more. 2) Both advocate for an ultimate ontological unity in that Absolute Reality mediated by gradational modulations that, again depending on tradition, range (at most minimal) from sheer illusion (māyā most generally in Indic thought) to (at most maximal) nothing more than a devotional distance—as in, say, the Dvaita Vedanta of Madhvacharya. (Which, incidentally, although a ‘dualistic’ school by designation, is really no more so than Platonism: certainly matter is different from the Good in Plato on the lower rungs of the ordo essendi, but still emerges from it, and could not be without it; Plotinus would later use the word ‘aporrhoe’ or ‘emanation’ to describe even those bottommost features of the cosmos, farthest from their Source).

If one’s conception of theism and atheism is influenced by the assertions of the New Atheists, one will likely believe that the former entails blind postulation of the existence of ‘some entity’ floating up there in the invisible aether, and the latter the rejection of that entity’s existence. This, as I have said before, is laughably incorrect. But if one were to subscribe to it, we should understand that by those lights both Buddhism and Vedanta are atheistic traditions. Indeed, to reiterate the beleaguered point, it would also render the likes of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism atheistic religions, because none of them accept that definition of God.

What I want to make categorically clear is that I do not believe Buddhism and Vedanta can be collapsed or reduced into one another, or that they are merely culturally contingent expressions of the very same religious ideas (and so lacking in any valuable conceptual disagreements). One of these important distinctions—where I take the Buddhist lead over the Vedantic—is what scholars recognise as one of the Buddha’s guiding concerns: forming a ‘middle way’ (majjhimāpaṭipadā) between, amongst other things, the extremes of eternalism (sassatavāda) and annihilationism (ucchedavāda) which prove thoroughly damaging to our relationship to the karmic structure of the cosmos.

In spite of my fawning adoration for the text, it must be conceded that the ethical consequences of eternalism are seen most clearly in the Bhagavad Gita, which comprises the three central textual sources of Vedanta (the ‘Prasthānatrayī’), alongside the Upaniṣads and the Brahma Sūtras. Scholars and general readers alike object to what is a rather unavoidable condoning of violence on account of enlightenment: the spirit of radical acceptance and devotion to Krishna above all results in an attitude that may take leave of any karmic scruples regarding what we take to be supposedly dharmic action. The Kurukshetra War between the Pandeva brothers (to whom Arjuna belongs) and their cousins, the Kauravas, is legitimised and endorsed by Krishna in spite of Arjuna’s own reasonable and deeply sympathetic doubts.

Killer of Madhu,
how will I fight
Drona and Bhishma
with arrows
in battle?
How will I fight
these honourable men,
Killer of the Enemy?

[…]

Facing the sons
of Dhritarashtra,
we do not know
which has more weight for us:
should we conquer them,
or should they conquer us?
Even after we’ve killed them,
we would not want to live!

My own nature is struck
by pity, and a sense of wrong,
and my mind is clouded
as to dharma:
I ask you which is best -
tell me! I am your student!
Correct me, who lies
fallen before your feet.¹⁰

…says Arjuna, to which Krishna eventually responds:

I am time that has aged,
who makes the world perish.
I have come forth
to destroy the worlds.
Even without you,
these warriors
facing off against each other
will no longer exist.

So stand up, and gain honour!
After conquering enemies,
enjoy an abundant reign.
I’ve already destroyed them.
You who sling arrows
from the left and the right,
be an instrument,
and nothing more.

All these heroes of battle,
Drona, Bhishma,
Jayadratha and Karna,
have been struck down by me.
Do not be troubled, but strike!
Fight! For you will
conquer enemies
in battle.¹¹

There is real cause for moral concern here. A bloody war with one’s own family is nightmarish enough, but we tremble at the recognition that there is no feasible way to prevent such a religious attitude being employed to justify the most abhorrent evil—so long as one is convinced that it is merely one’s dharma.¹² Can we really find a way to concretely reconceptualise the Gita’s narrative such that its endorsement of violence could not be equally applicable to Nazi ideology? Could a Hitler-type not reasonably think the violence of global conflict or ethnic cleansing to be a necessary—even, dare I say, pious—function of his dharmic duty on account of the Gita’s morality? If it cannot pass even that most rudimentary of moral tests, we should be thoroughly hesitant to embrace this eternalism unreservedly. Which is why Buddhism provides an important moral corrective. The Buddha recognised that believing this world to be entirely inconsequential—either because it has no bearing on the eternal soul, or because the soul does not exist and we shall all perish—entails dangerous ethical ramifications.

That is merely one of many possible digressions I could dive into regarding real and consequential doctrinal distinction between the traditions. And it was also not a pledge of allegiance; I would take the Vedantic lead on other matters, too. All I want to suggest is that both traditions are deeply rich, imperfect (as are all traditions) gravitations toward the same ineffable Reality, which manifests or reveals itself in the form of real distinctions.

My subtitle gives a clue as to the fashion in which I conceive this peculiar relationship. The rich intercourse between cataphatic and apophatic theology in the Christian tradition provides a framework that I think to be perfectly applicable to our understanding of the real and intractable differences in Vedantic and Madhyamaka dispositions. I would—and these are not exclusive, exhaustive, or absolute, by any means—generally associate Vedanta with a more cataphatic affirmation of God’s Reality as one of absolute Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, and on the inverse link Madhyamaka to an apophatic sensibility, one which underlines the Divine’s total transcendence of objecthood, and so actual state as no-thing, never graspable in the conceptual or linguistic discourse we apply to it.

Madhyamaka possesses a particularly brilliant wariness of the way in which we can fall prey to idolatry, even at our most earnestly devotional. Because consciousness itself, or Brahman, or the Buddha-nature, or whatever name we use, is still something we talk and think about, its concept contains the latent possibility—its concept, to be clear, rather than it in itself—of being objectified and idolised, and so becoming an impediment to its own realisation. All our theology can be impeccable, but the moment we start talking about Ultimate Reality as though it were a ‘thing’ amongst things, we have moved away from Ultimate Reality and are merely dealing in our own fantasy, the same old imperial spirit of conquering the world and belief in lack, albeit now dressed in the vestments of a religious endeavour—and so much more subtle, and difficult to acknowledge. Hence why the Buddha draws us to the understanding that ‘consciousness is infinite’, and then takes us one further, explaining that ‘by completely transcending the base of the infinity of consciosuness, aware that “there is nothing,” a monk enters upon and dwells in the base of nothingness’.¹³ The Reality we ultimately gravitate toward insists (as Gregory of Nyssa would tell you) that we leave our profane words at the door before entering the sanctum sanctorum of His Presence.

The reason I find myself drawn to Madhyamaka is because it happens to provide the spiritual aspirant with exactly the kind of radical ‘negativity’ I set out in a previous post. There is a spirit of such delightful iconoclasm in Zen, for instance, which will swipe all religious practice in a heartbeat—with the fury of Christ in the temple—if it finds that these things are distracting us from our true Being. All things are declared, resoundinlgy, as empty (śūnya). Madhyamaka is radically apophatic: just like the radical apophasis of Christians such as John Scotus Eriugena or Angelus Silesius, it is bold enough to describe God as nothing, simply to underline the fullness of his transcendence and the animosity we should hold toward any worldly object which attempts to take his place (which I also think Islam and Judaism do exceptionally well).

Again, this could be thought to give Buddhism the edge, insofar as it speaks to a more ‘ultimate’ form of truth, but this would be unfair. In Christian theology, the cataphatic and apophatic are categories in a discourse. Unequal, yes—and vitally so—but a discourse nonetheless, in which neither is ultimately more important than the other. And in any case it is ridiculous to suggest that Vedanta somehow lacks the same acute cognisance of the ‘ontological difference’ that divides creature and Creator. To return to Jackson, we should note the absolute disjunction between conceptual discourse and Brahman that Vedanta appreciates:

[The] Vedantin disinclination to proffer inferentially based arguments for its theistic beliefs is seen clearly in later commentators such as Śaṇkara, who denies that brahman’s origination of the cosmos ever can be established inferentially, since brahman is imperceptible and inferences must be perceptually based, and Ramanuja, who refutes various rational arguments for theism so as to pave the way for knowledge of God through scripture and devotion.

And, on the flipside, Madhyamaka at no point claims that we can dispense with the cataphatic. Nāgārjuna is quite clear that: ‘The ultimate truth is not taught independently of customary ways of talking and thinking’, and Candrakīrti ‘likens conventional truth to the cup that a thirsty person must use in order to satisfy a need for water.’¹⁴ God’s true Being demands a mystical silence, but His boundless glory inspires an endless garrulity. This is the dance, the play (lila) of creation with its Creator, the purpose of existence itself. The Silence calls you; you shall sing in response until you have finally captured it. And thus you shall be singing forever.

1. Roger Jackson, ‘Dharmakīrti’s Refutation of Theism’, Philosophy East and West 36, no. 4 (1986): 330.

2. Ibid., 330.

3. Ibid., 321.

4. Ibid., 320.

5. Ibid., 320.

6. Brahma Sutras, trans. Sri Swami Sivananda (Uttarakhand, India: The Divine Life Society, 2008), II.2.37 pg. 226.

7. Ibid., II.2.41, pg. 230.

8. See, for instance, Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakikarika, trans. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2013), XVIII.10

9. In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pāli Canon, trans. and ed. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, Inc., 2005), 366. From Ud 8:3; 80-81.

10. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Laurie L. Patton (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), II.4-7.

11. Ibid., XI.32-34.

12. We can see this play out in real time: the burgeoning Indian nationalism of Narenda Modi, with its frightening anti-Muslim undercurrents, finds a basis in a real belief that he has been ‘sent by God’.

13. Buddha’s Words, 398. From MN 64: Mahāmāluṅkya Sutta; I 434-37.

14. Nāgārjuna, MMK, XXIV.10 pg. 232; translator’s commentary pg. 233.