God in Buddhism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Buddhism is generally regarded as a non-theistic religion. Although it does teach the existence of “gods” (devas), these are merely heavenly beings who temporarily dwell in celestial worlds of great happiness. Such beings, however, are not eternal in that incarnational form and are subject to death and eventual rebirth into lower realms of existence.
However, a distinction needs to be drawn between the seemingly non-deistic and non-theistic teachings of the Buddha in the Pali Canon and the “agamas”, and the mystically-hued ideas attributed to the Buddha in some Mahayana sutras and Tantras, where expression is given to an apparent Ultimate Ground of all things - the immanent, omniscient and transcendent Reality of the Awakened Mind.
