Question:

I have been wondering what the Buddhist take on creationism is? I have long believed in reincarnation and never really thought much about it, but this morning BBC radio 4 had a thought for the day and a Sikh was talking about most major religions believing in the one god having created everything but that that god had different names, i.e. God, Allah, Krishna etc this lead me to think, as we don’t have a god as such, is there a Buddhist view on creation? Your thoughts, as always, would be welcome

Answer:

Like the question of God, Buddhism generally doesn’t concern itself with this. There is no specific story about the creation of the universe in Buddhism. In fact, Buddha, in the Acintita Sutta, is supposed to have said, “Conjecture about [the origin, etc., of] the world is an unconjecturable that is not to be conjectured about, that would bring madness & vexation to anyone who conjectured about it.”

Many of the ideas that influence Buddhism came from Hinduism, and creation stories fall into this category as well. The most common Hindu stories tell that Brahma created the universe, or at least is the oldest being in it. The universe was created, changes, and then is destroyed. This cycle is called a kalpa, and has happened an uncountable number of times already. Just as people a born, live, die, and are reborn, so is the universe as a whole. Again, the idea of a creator god is not generally accepted in Buddhism, but the stories are often repeated in the texts, mostly because people at the time knew the stories.

Of course in more modern times, we have the Big Bang theory, and the idea that eventually gravity will pull the universe back in on itself, finally re-exploding outwards to start the cycle over again. There is a lot of scientific evidence that shows this is probably the way it works, but the two ideas are not that far apart. They both show the universe living and dying in repeated cycles.