Is there any counterpart to a judgmental God? Are reward and punishment absent in Buddhism?
There is a Buddhist analog, in a way, in the teaching of karma. Karma is the Sanskrit word that literally means action and intention behind actions. Although we mostly are not conscious of it, our every intentional action has the profound and subtle effect of imprinting within us the capacity to be happy or unhappy, and the capacity to discover our inmost nature of compassion or to be lost to it. Therefore our actions, virtuous or nonvirtuous, matter very much. But karma does not involve a deity who stands above or apart, judging our behaviors as good or bad. It is simply a natural law. Earlier you mentioned that there are various Buddhist traditions. What do Buddhists disagree on? The diversity within Buddhism is comparable to the diversity within the other great religious traditions, such as Christianity. Some 2,500 years ago, the Buddha taught four noble truths: The first was the truth of suffering; the second concerned the causes of suffering, including karma and self-clinging patt
