Why the Buddha Isn’t A God

Last week we looked at our relationship to refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. This week let’s begin a little journey where we look at each in more detail.

Stephen Batchelor has done an amazing job of picking out all the tiny details about the Buddha’s life that are scattered throughout his discourses. Together these paint a picture of him as being born as Siddhartha Gautama in either around 563 or 480 BCE - there is no certainty about these dates - the son of one of the elders of the Sakya tribe whose land straddled the Indian-Nepali border. If we want to imagine what this might have been like then it was very similar to the Celtic society of Britain. A settled farming culture living in small communities and having, like the Celt’s Druids, a group of people who acted as the communitie's priests. What we know of this time is that it was sufficiently settled and prosperous to allow some of the young men within it to begin to ask questions about the ‘meaning of life’ and those that were particularly intent on this became ‘spiritual drop outs’, ascetics called Shramana’s who entered the forests and studied with the teachers who resided there. Gautama was one of these and after studying with several teachers who taught him valuable meditation methods that he later drew on, and also experimenting with the outer extremes of asceticism - virtually to the point of death - he had his final breakthrough in his early thirties and became what he described as a ‘Buddha’. An awakened one who has brought suffering to an end by knowing how things truly are. At first it seems he was resistant to teaching others what he himself had discovered but for whatever reasons he finally did. This began a pattern in his life where he repeatedly walked back and forth between the two great kingdoms that straddled the river Ganges, teaching to those that came to him, creating a community of monks and nuns, and during the monsoon, holding retreats under the shelter of groves of trees. In this way he continued until around 80 when, probably having dysentery from polluted food, he died by the side of the road with some of his most devoted monks around him. When he died he is said to have entered his ‘parinirvana’ where he, like the flame of a candle when extinguished, is entirely gone for ever. As the Buddhist Heart Sutra says, ‘Gone, gone, gone beyond, so be it’, but what exactly did this mean? Was he really utterly gone or was there still someway in which he may still be contacted?

The answer to this must have come from the monks several generations on thinking about the Buddhist notion of reincarnation. If it exists then the Buddha must have been someone, a bodhisattva, during his previous incarnations, who was lining up to become a Buddha. And if this was so he must have resided within a heavenly realm such as Tushita before coming to Earth. And if that is so, maybe he now also resides in some heavenly way where he is able to respond to our prayers and extend his blessings. In this way, the teacher who had explicitly spelled out that he was just a man, was elevated to something that was very close to - but not quite - a god. And with this Mahayana Buddhism - the way of awakening through the Greater Vehicle - gradually came into existence. The Buddha was not dead, though gone beyond, he was also immanently present. And with this the cat was out of the bag for no end of future speculations about the nature of the Buddha, his exact location and our relationship to him.

Now let’s jump on another three or four hundred years to the appearance of the first buddha-nature sutra, the Tathāgatagarbhasūtra. I think with this we have our first glimpse of what will become the final and most profound understanding of taking refuge in the Buddha. Again, someone must have reasoned that, if what the historical Buddha realised when he became enlightened was an innate awakened nature, then it followed that this awakened nature must exist in everyone else as well. After all, the Buddha had taught that awakening was essentially the same for everyone (even though the Mahayana Buddhists had argued that his version was made a bit more special because of his kindness and generosity). Later, this got slightly more complicated. Did this awakened nature exist as a seed to be cultivated - a gardening metaphor. Or was it more like the sun covered by clouds - a disclosing or discovering metaphor? And as you would expect, some Buddhist’s jumped one way and others the opposite. But either way, it was now official, we all have an awakened nature, whether in potential or already fully established, and the path is to either remove the weeds or the clouds that obscure it and realise the awakening that is waiting for all and everyone who is able and willing to tread that path. And therefore, it is not just a man from some time two and a half thousand years ago, nor only a kind of universal awakened spirit residing throughout the universe, but also our own, entirely present awakened nature that we are (attempting) to take refuge in.

And this takes us to our next enquiry - what exactly is this awakened nature? Which of course is explored in the teachings that are the Buddha’s Dharma, the second of the three jewels of refuge.

NW. 6 October 2025