Reason 1 of 10
The universe had a beginning. Buddhism says it has none.
The Buddha taught that the round of rebirth has no known beginning and set the origin of the cosmos aside as a question not worth asking. The universe we can measure did begin, and the Bible names who began it.
What the Buddhist texts say
In the Pali discourses, the oldest Buddhist texts we have, the Buddha says the wandering from life to life has no first point that can be found. When a monk demanded to know whether the cosmos is eternal or not, finite or infinite, the Buddha put the question among the points he left undeclared. Another discourse lists speculation about the world among four things that should not be thought about at all.
So Buddhism does not offer a rival account of creation. It declines to give one, and treats the question as a distraction from the path.
“Mendicants, this transmigration has no known beginning. No first point is found of sentient beings roaming and transmigrating, shrouded by ignorance and fettered by craving.
Samyutta Nikaya 15.1:1.7-1.8, Grass and Sticks (tr. Bhikkhu Sujato) · context
“There are several convictions that the Buddha has left undeclared; he has set them aside and turned them down. For example: the cosmos is eternal, or not eternal, or finite, or infinite; the soul and the body are one and the same, or the soul is one thing, the body another; after death, a realized one still exists, or no longer exists, or both still exists and no longer exists, or neither still exists nor no longer exists.
Majjhima Nikaya 63:2.2-2.3, The Shorter Discourse With Māluṅkyaputta (tr. Bhikkhu Sujato) · context
“Mendicants, these four things are unthinkable. They should not be thought about, and anyone who tries to think about them will go mad or get frustrated.
Anguttara Nikaya 4.77:1.1, Unthinkable (tr. Bhikkhu Sujato) · context
Speculation about the world … These are the four unthinkable things. They should not be thought about, and anyone who tries to think about them will go mad or get frustrated.”
Anguttara Nikaya 4.77:1.9-1.11, Unthinkable (tr. Bhikkhu Sujato) · context
Why that answer fails
Where everything came from is not an idle question. It decides whether we are an accident or a creation, whether there is anyone to answer to, and whether the world has a purpose. A path that cannot say where we came from cannot really say where we are going either.
And it is not unanswerable. Astronomers measure the expansion of the universe and the light left over from its earliest moments; the standard model dates the beginning of the observable universe to about 13.8 billion years ago. Something that begins to exist has a cause. The Bible says the cause is God, who is not part of the world he made.
1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 (WEB) · context
1The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork.
Psalms 19:1 (WEB) · context
3By faith we understand that the universe has been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which are visible.
Hebrews 11:3 (WEB) · context
26Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these, who brings out their army by number. He calls them all by name. By the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power, not one is lacking.
Isaiah 40:26 (WEB) · context
20For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse.
Romans 1:20 (WEB) · context
The God Buddhism leaves out
The God of the Bible is not one more being inside an endless cycle. He is eternal, he made all things by his word, and he made us to know him. That changes everything: life is a gift, not a trap to escape.
2Before the mountains were born, before you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
Psalms 90:2 (WEB) · context
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made.
John 1:1-3 (WEB) · context
24The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands. 25He isn’t served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath and all things. 26He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons and the boundaries of their dwellings, 27that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28‘For in him we live, move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’
Acts 17:24-28 (WEB) · context
What Buddhists answer
Many Buddhists answer that the Buddha was a physician, not a cosmologist: like a doctor treating a man shot with an arrow, he dealt with the urgent problem of suffering and left the rest aside (the parable of the arrow in Majjhima Nikaya 63). Some modern Buddhists add that a beginningless universe is no stranger than an eternal God.
Why that answer falls short
The arrow parable assumes we already know who we are and what is wrong with us. But the diagnosis depends on the origin: if we were made by a good and personal God, then our deepest problem is not craving in a beginningless cycle but a broken relationship with our Maker, and the cure is reconciliation, not extinction.
An eternal God is not the same kind of claim as an eternal universe. The universe is physical, changing and measurable, and the measurements point to a beginning. God is not a physical thing that began; he is the reason anything began at all.
Where scholars and traditions differ
- Cosmologists debate what, if anything, came before the hot dense early state (inflation, cyclic or multiverse models). Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin argued in 2003 that any universe that has, on average, been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past; others contest how far that result reaches.
- Buddhist traditions differ on cosmology: the Abhidharma describes world-systems that arise and dissolve in vast cycles; many Western Buddhists today read these passages symbolically.
Sources
- Earliest source Samyutta Nikaya 15.1 and 15.3; Majjhima Nikaya 63; Anguttara Nikaya 4.77. Translation: Bhikkhu Sujato (CC0), SuttaCentral.
- Planck Collaboration, Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters, Astronomy & Astrophysics 641 (2020) A6.
- A. Borde, A. H. Guth, A. Vilenkin, Inflationary spacetimes are incomplete in past directions, Physical Review Letters 90 (2003) 151301.