THE BUDDHIST GOD

I began to study Buddhism when I was 31, mostly by attending talks

and zazen practice held by a Zen Buddhist monk named Gudo Nishijima
in Tokyo. After I'd being doing it for a while I started to wonder whether
Buddhists believed in God or not. There wasn’t much talk about God or
Jesus at any of Nishijima’s talks, and none of the people who went there
seemed to mention it much.

I was brought up as a Christian, more particularly as a Catholic, and

even though I’d lost interest in Christianity by then, deep down I felt like
I still believed a lot of the ideas I learned about God when I was growing
up.

I eventually decided to ask Nishijima about it. I started by asking if

Buddhists believe in Jesus. It sounds like a stupid question now, but at
the time I thought maybe Buddhism believed in some Christian ideas too.
Nishijima told me that as far as he was concerned Jesus was a historical
person. Nishijima's answer wasn't quite the answer I was looking for so
I pushed a little further and asked if he thought Jesus was, you know,
the son of God and that. I don’t remember him replying to that one, but I
guess he must have thought it was a bit of a strange question to ask a
Buddhist monk.

I thought about his answer about Jesus for a while, and next time I met
him I decided to ask whether Buddhists believed in God or not. Nishijima
said that as far as he was concerned Buddhists believed in God. But he
followed up by talking about the Buddhist definition of God. He said
Buddhists don’t believe in a God that exists outside the universe but that
created the universe. Instead, Buddhists believe that God is the universe
and the universe is God. So the object of Buddhist belief and reverence
is the universe itself, or reality itself.

That made a big difference to me. I’d always found it hard to believe in
the idea of a God who had somehow created the universe. So the
Buddhist idea of God and the universe being the same thing was easier
to accept. But Nishijima’s answer still didn’t quite satisfy me. If God is
the universe and the universe is God, then who made the universe? This,
of course, is the big question. I don’t know why I was asking Nishijima –
there's no way he could know. But I asked anyway. He told me that the
Buddhist idea is that the universe has always existed.

I spent a while trying to figure out the idea that the universe has always
existed. Eventually though, I realized it’s one of those things no one can
ever really know – kind of like what happens to all those odd socks that
get lost at the laundry.