An atheist may have a concept of a personal/impersonal God in mind but rejects it. A Buddhist does not reject such a concept: he just doesn’t deal with it at all, unless he comes from a western culture.
An atheist may have a concept of a personal/impersonal God in mind but rejects it. A Buddhist does not reject such a concept: he just doesn’t deal with it at all, unless he comes from a western culture.
Well, that’s not strictly true. The concept of God certainly is not found only in western culture. The country in which the Buddha lived had quite a rich heritage of thought about God. And there is this tradition of Buddhism and that tradition of Buddhism, this school and that school, and people even came to the Buddha himself, asking questions about God.
In the higher trainings of Buddhism the concepts of God and gods are dealt with extensively. And the possibility of them existing as absolutes is firmly rejected.
One must be so careful of making sweeping statements about a religion as if it were only one narrow manifestation rather than a vast and deep scope of traditions, schools and teachings. Buddhism as practiced by many (I suspect mostly in the West) is more New Agey wishful thinking than actual Buddhism, being a result of reading instead of practicing with a true teacher; and most things on Buddhism I’ve read written by westerners are full of misrepresentations, misunderstandings and downright silliness. Reading the actual texts of Buddhism (even in translation, the way I have to) is much preferable to reading most of that other stuff.
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