Vacha@TVachaW
There’s a certain type of argument against God that I often hear from Buddhists, which I find unconvincing.
The argument essentially seems to be that because there is no stable sensation / perception / field of consciousness etc findable in our minds that corresponds to God, God cannot exist.
But - even assuming that is the case - why should God be assumed to be something that’s represented substantially in our minds?
Why couldn’t God be a function rather than a substance?
In Mahayana Buddhism, they teach that under conditions of maximal awareness, the default functioning of the universe is pure compassionate love and wisdom.
What could be more divine than that?
What higher intelligence than compassionate love could we hope for the universe’s default operating principle to be?
And it certainly accords with my experience of the contemplative path.
That when I am able to release craving, aversion and ignorance, compassionate love spontaneously emerges as the default functioning without any need to create or design it.
People might object something like “OK, but that’s not a *personal* God.”
But then, according to Buddhist theory - what is a person?
A person is not a substance but a function.
A person is essentially just the way a certain set of phenomena unfold.
So, what makes the default loving compassionate functioning of reality any less of a person than the karmically driven functioning of a human person.
“OK, but it’s not a God that punishes and rewards,” could be the next objection.
But again, according to Mahayana theory - and according to my own experience - the degree to which we suffer is essentially determined by the degree to which we either divert from this compassionate wisdom function or conform to it.
When we release craving, aversion and ignorance, we default to the compassionate-wisdom function and we don’t suffer.
When we hold onto craving, aversion and ignorance, we limit the scope of that function and we suffer.
On a practical level, this isn’t meaningfully all that different to reward/punishment on the basis of adherence to or denial of this divine function.
Really, all the things that feel truly important about God are all features of the universe.
A loving intelligence is the default functioning of the universe and the degree to which we conform to it determines the degree to which we suffer in the world.
It’s a pretty similar story to the God story.
It’s why I think the Tibetans were able to design a complete path to enlightenment that revolves around building a relationship to a divine humanoid figure that represents wise compassionate default functioning of the universe.
It’s also why, as a Buddhist, I often find more common ground spiritually with Christians who earnestly have live their life on the basis of a faith in a force of universal love, than I do with the type of Buddhist who envisage themselves to be living in a universe of dead matter that operates on blind and arbitrary principles.
