Shakyamuni Buddha

This atlas files buddhas and bodhisattvas among its deities. That is a comparative decision made by the atlas, and it should be stated rather than left for the heading to assert quietly.

A buddha is an awakened being. He does not create the world, does not govern it, does not judge the dead and does not answer prayer in the sense a theist means. Buddhist cosmology is populated with devas, and they look at first glance like gods, but the doctrine is careful about them in ways that matter. Devas are not immortal: they were born into that state by past action and will die out of it. They do not create or shape the world; they arise from their own karma and are subject to cause and effect like anything else. And they are not among the objects of refuge. Some may possess great moral authority, but no deva can serve as the escape from samsara or control anyone's rebirth. There is a further point that surprises people: a deva's life is so pleasant that the beings living it generally cannot perceive that anything is wrong, which makes it a worse position from which to practise than a human birth.

What Buddhists take refuge in is the three jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. Devas appear in that framework as an audience for the teaching, not as a refuge within it.

So the accurate statement is that this atlas includes, among its Buddhist entries, figures who receive devotion and who are not gods in the sense the rest of the group implies. The alternative would have been to leave Buddhism out of a listing of figures who are honoured, offered to and addressed, which would misrepresent the practice of hundreds of millions of people in the other direction. Neither option is neutral. The atlas has taken the first and labelled it.

Ask whether a buddha is a god and the answer depends on which tradition is asked. This is not vagueness; the schools hold genuinely different positions and have argued about them.

Theravada gives the clearest negative. A buddha is a human being who attained what a human being can attain. He is a unique class of person, a great person, distinguished by attainment and not by nature. A living buddha has a physical body with its limitations, feels pain, ages and dies. The gods are lower than he is, not higher, and after final nirvana he is not available to be petitioned. Devotion in Theravada is directed to the memory, the teaching and the relics of a teacher who has gone.

Mahayana reconceives him substantially. A buddha becomes a transcendent being, all-knowing, immeasurably powerful and of unlimited lifespan, and the historical Shakyamuni becomes one appearance of something much larger. The organising doctrine is the trikaya, the three bodies: dharmakaya, ultimate reality itself; sambhogakaya, a celestial enjoyment-body in which buddhas teach bodhisattvas in pure lands; nirmanakaya, the manifested form that appears in history. Paul Williams describes the Mahayana buddha as a spiritual king, relating to and caring for the world. The tradition takes a broadly docetic view of the earthly life: the birth, the search, the illness and the death are display for the benefit of those watching rather than literal biography. This is functionally close to a deity, and it remains formally non-theistic, because there is still no creator and because buddhahood is held to be attainable by anyone.

Vajrayana keeps the Mahayana buddha and adds a move of its own, which is the subject of the next article.

None of these positions is a corruption of the others in the view of the people who hold it, and the atlas does not rank them.

The Vajrayana practice usually called deity yoga, Sanskrit devatayoga, Tibetan yidam, is where the question of whether Buddhist figures are gods becomes sharpest, because it looks the most like worship and is doctrinally the furthest from it.

The practice involves detailed visualisation of a deity and the deity's mandala, together with mantra recitation and liturgy. A practitioner may spend years with Vajrayogini or Chakrasamvara or Yamantaka, building the image in precise detail, making offerings, reciting. To an observer it resembles the cult of a god closely.

The doctrinal position is that the deity is not an external entity. It represents an aspect of the practitioner's own awakened nature, and it is a form to be realised as oneself rather than a being to be petitioned from outside. This is not a modern rationalisation; it is what the systematising literature says the practice is for.

The mechanics are set out in two stages. In the generation stage, utpatti-krama, ordinary perception is first dissolved into emptiness, and reality is then reimagined through the enlightened form, the practitioner developing what the texts call clear appearance and divine pride, the settled sense of being the deity. In the completion stage, nispanna-krama, the practitioner works with the subtle body and its energies to realise the nature of mind directly.

Divine pride sounds dangerous and the tradition knows it. Ju Mipham grounds the practice in an understanding of emptiness, without which the visualisation would be an elaborate fantasy. John Powers notes that divine pride rests on emptiness and compassion together, which is what is supposed to stop it inflating the ego rather than dissolving it.

This is why a yidam is not straightforwardly a deity and why the tantric material is transmitted under initiation rather than published. Without the emptiness teaching the practice is understood to be not merely useless but actively harmful.