Question

I haven't heard much discussion by the Buddha about a creator God. While the emphasis on a practical way to lead oneself from suffering is refreshing and enormously helpful, did the Buddha say anything about this? In other words, is there a God?!

Answer

The creator. Let's separate the creator from the image of God that we have from our Judeo-Christian societies. The creator is you. You are creating your whole world. The Buddha talked often about how you are the creator of your Dukkha, and that's the Four Noble Truths. Your thoughts, your desires, your cravings, that's creating your Dukkha. So, you're the creator in that sense. Now as to a creator as a God, some being that is so enormous, and creates us and everything else, in the scriptures, the Buddha more or less avoided this question. He avoided a lot of questions, sometimes he would say it can't be answered, sometimes he would say even he doesn't know, sometimes he would simply say "Look, it just doesn't matter." And he answered them in various ways like that, but as to gods it is taught, "Yeah, there are plenty of gods." There are, I think, 32 different realms of existence. The human realm is one level of existence, the animal and insect realm is another level of existence. There are, I think, four or five of what they call "hell" realms, and there are about 24 or 25 of what they call "heaven" realms. But "heaven" is not really the right word, because some of those realms are kind of like what we picture as heaven from Judeo-Christianity, but some of them aren't really, they are more or less like human realms but without a physical body. So, if you want to read about all these different heaven realms, there are actually many, and different types of gods. But as to a "creator God," in Judeo-Christian teachings, no, that is not a concept in Theravadin Buddhism.

Be careful, Buddhism can be very "intellectual". There are lots of neat stuff. It's fun. People can get carried away with it, so we have to remind ourselves to come back to the practical level. What do we have to do now? We don't really need to believe in rebirth, we don't really need to believe in heaven realms, hell realms, etc. We don't actually need that. It is helpful to consider, but those things are not the basic tools we are going to use to let go of the fear and the anger in the moment.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.