Endnote 1 – Part II

Buddhist and Christian scholars in the past often said that the Buddha rejected the notion of God or “the sacred.” But more recent scholarship suggests that what the Buddha rejected was the god of supernatural theism—that is, God as a personlike, supernatural being separate from the universe. But there is another notion of God, namely, the sacred as the unborn, uncreated, undifferentiated formless source of all that is, present right here as well as more than right here. This way of thinking about God is found in both Christianity and Judaism, as well as Asian religions. In this sense, one may speak of the sacred as central to the Buddha.