Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 130
BUDDHISM to worship something. It is this which is manifested in their veneration of Buddha. The same unquenchable innate thirst for God etched deep upon the human soul urges them to worship Him, or something, if not Him. So it is to fill this void that the Buddhists worship the Buddha without formally recognizing him to be a god. . It must also be mentioned here that in the Tibetan form of Buddhism not only is the existence of superhuman deities or demons a part and parcel of their faith, but also they certainly believe in communication with them. The selection of a new Panchen Lama for instance, requires many rites and rituals to be performed, to obtain guidance from gods as to which one of the newborn Tibetan children should be the future Panchen Lama. . Among the so-called atheistic Buddhist sects, it is commonly alleged that Buddha himself denied the existence of God. They support their claim by pointing at the hostility shown to Buddha by the contemporary Hindu pundits. That hostility, they maintain, was largely due to the contempt shown by Buddha to their gods. The Buddhists in general do not bother to analyse the real factors at work which generated misunderstandings leading to the persecution of Buddha. It is quite sufficient for them to believe that Buddha must have rejected the idea of God in totality. . However, as we shall presently establish by reexamining some facts of history and some important relevant passages in the Buddhist sacred literature, it can be clearly shown that Buddhaas is absolved from all such allegations. Yet it must be said, at the very outset, that the historical evidence to which the adherents of both view points refer, is in itself meagre. This difficulty, however, can be offset to a large degree by having recourse to other circumstantial evidence. 130