I’m always a little bemused when atheists describe Buddhism as an atheistic religion. I understand the reasoning: Buddhism doesn’t centre on a creator God, and some forms of Buddhism can certainly be practised without belief in a personal deity. But I wonder whether “atheistic religion” is really adequate as a description of Buddhism. Perhaps “atheism” is being used less as a description of Buddhism and more as a category for anything that doesn’t fit the familiar Western idea of God. That seems worth exploring, especially when the category is applied to a religion with such a rich supernatural and devotional life.
Look at prayer, for example. Across Buddhist traditions, people pray to or invoke Buddhas, bodhisattvas, devas and other spiritual beings. They make offerings, chant sacred names and mantras, and ask for protection, compassion, guidance or assistance. Obviously, this doesn’t make Buddhism equivalent to Christianity, and Buddhist understandings of these beings vary enormously. But it does make the confident statement “Buddhism is atheistic” rather strange. I sometimes wonder whether the people making the claim are working with a definition of religion in which only belief in a supreme creator counts as genuine belief in the divine. If so, they may be overlooking the very religious practices that make Buddhism much more complicated than the category “atheistic religion” suggests.
For me, Jesus provides a different way of looking at what is going on. The important question isn’t simply whether someone ticks the box marked “theist” or “atheist,” but what they are actually reaching towards in their religious practice. A person who prays for compassion, wisdom, protection or liberation is expressing something about what they believe is ultimately important and where they believe help might be found. Jesus reframes those longings around a person: not merely an impersonal ultimate reality or one supernatural being among many, but the God who comes towards us and invites us into relationship.
So my invitation to the atheist making such a claim is: look again. Don’t assume that your categories are neutral descriptions of religion simply because they make sense from within your own worldview. If Buddhists pray to supernatural beings, perhaps “atheistic religion” isn’t the obvious category you thought it was. And if your definition of atheism requires you to redefine prayer, devotion and gods as something other than what practitioners themselves understand them to be, perhaps the more interesting question is not whether Buddhism is atheistic, but whether the category is broad enough to recognise what is actually happening.
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