Do Buddhists believe in God?
It depends what you mean by God. Within the various schools of Buddhism there is a great deal of variation in the belief in a Supreme Being. Beliefs range from atheism, through agnosticism, monotheism (‘ground of being’) up to multifaceted aspects of Enlightened Mind.. One of the preponderant deities of Tibet is actually a Goddess – Tara, the compassionate rescuer and Holy Mother. She is often seen as being equivalent to the Virgin Mary in the Christian pantheon. At a more philosophical rather than devotional level, there are certain difficulties with accepting the Judeo-Christian idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, logically necessary being or First Cause. Within Buddhist philosophy this view of God would be regarded as suffering from a number of internal logical contradictions, and possibly a rather dubious politically motivated history.
