Siddhatta Gautama (Buddha) was born in Lumbini, Northern Nepal, near the border of India (c. 563 BC). Gautama lived a sheltered life of his noble family but was soon faced with the human condition of suffering and death. Dissatisfied with the life he lived, he became an ascetic fasting to the extreme approaching death but soon realized that this too was suffering. So he began to eat moderately and meditate under a fig tree till the day came when he experienced Nirvana or Enlightenment. He began to teach that suffering was due to attachments, selfish desires and possessive love. The way out of suffering was to practice the moral way of life known as the EIGTHFOLD PATH.

Buddha did not believe in the creator God. One of his arguments was, "If this world is indeed created by God, then there should be no such thing as sorrow or calamity or evil, for all the pure and impure deeds must come from Him." Since the universe was not created it always existed. However, Buddha did recognized that good and evil acts come from us, "It is neither God nor the self nor some causeless chance which creates us. It is our deeds which produce both good and bad results according to the law of causation." Ultimately he encouraged his followers not to worship as he stated, "We should therefore 'abandon the heresy of worshipping God [Braman] and of praying to him. We should stop all speculation and vain talk about such matters and practice good so that good may result from our good deeds.' " He did not reject the gods but they were unimportant since like men they were subject to rebirth. The important thing was to eliminate the cycle of suffering caused by karma (cause and effect of our deeds) and to attain Nirvana or Enlightenment by self effort, a state of peace and tranquility which would end the cycles of rebirths. Was Buddha an atheist? On the intellectual level yes, but since he was seeking the Good and the True which are attributes of God, not really.

What is the essence of Buddhism?

Buddhism seeks direct experience of reality through a transformation of consciousness. The four noble truths and the noble eightfold path of Buddhism are a METHOD to transform man's mode of thought and to transcend thought and thereby experience reality directly, without words or other concepts getting in the way: beyond thought, beyond feelings, DEEPER than that to our ground of being, experiencing the awareness of being to the point where there is no difference between the experience and the experiencer, where the experiencer and the experience are one. (Webpage: Chris Watson, "My Take on the Essence of Buddhism", 2007) "To obtain deliverance from birth, all forms of desire must be absolutely quenched, not only very wicked craving, but also desire of such pleasures and comforts as are deemed innocent and lawful, the desire also to preserve one conscious existence." (Web: Catholic Encyclopedia/Buddhism) When all is said and done Buddhism is an attempt to recover the happiness and peace of man's original nature now disfigured by the illusions of self. Buddhism maintains that the the "soul", "self" or the "I" is an illusion and does not exist in the metaphysical sense of the word. Since Buddhism does not believe in God and that man was created in the image of God, it has no way of differentiating between the self as pure consciousness created by God and the self formed by our thought, imagination, feeling, bodily concerns, sins and culture. Despite the no-God premise, Buddhism tends to be pantheistic because all there is, is what is. "Dr. John Noss states, 'there is no sovereign Person in the heavens holding all together in unity, there is only the ultimate impersonal unity of being itself, whose peace enfolds the individual self when it ceases to call itself 'I' and dissolves in the featureless purity of Nirvana, as a drop of spray is merged in its mother sea." (World Religions Index: Buddhism by Pat Zukeran) Further, Buddhism has not escaped the influence of Hinduism that is, purification by rebirth.

9. The God of Revelation