Buddhists and God

Posted originally as a reaction to a post on Tricycle Editors' Blog concerning Buddhists and belief in God...

If you were to ask if there is a Universal Consciousness, if you were to ask if there is a greater Meaning in existence, if you were to ask if there is infinity within the finite, what would people say? Just because Asia did not have a Jehova or Yahweh doesn’t mean that there was a deficit in terms of a sense of the Ultimate, that which calls us from and to that which is beyond our delusions and ordinary ways of knowing. Even among Abrahamic traditions there is a broader and more humbling view of the Divine than the popular depictions, and there is often a concurrent aversion to any and all terms and qualities associated with these depictions among those who have rejected these depictions, even if there is no other reason to object to these qualities than guilt by association.

Whether or not you adhere to this conception and call it God or that conception and call it Amida or some other conception and give it no name, these concepts are still placeholders for the truth of our naked, humbled experience of genuine Awareness. I suspect more of us than we could ever believe spend time pretending, preferring a comfortable groomed image of this encounter. Images modeled after the genuine inspiration of saints and bodhisattvas, but with all the glory and revelation and little of the actual frustration and suffering. I am most certainly guilty of this - I could be the poster boy for it. But I get this feeling, for whatever it’s worth, that once you have submitted completely to these first-hand encounters with such Awareness, the debates over whether you choose to call it I AM or Tao or the Great Spirit really kind of loses its appeal.

I think this is a vitally important discussion for the (Western convert) Buddhist community to have as an ongoing dialogue, however we label ourselves in terms of God.