system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is Buddhism atheistic? Is Hinduism theistic?

My two main questions are as stated above.

1) Are there any aspects of theism Buddhism accepts? From what I understand it adopts anātman and rejects the idea of ātman and even otherwise rejects the aspects of the Vedas that Hinduism held on to that were instrumental in making it reach the current seemingly polytheistic religion it has become. Since there is no self in Buddhism and it doesn't cling on to any ideas of there being a higher power, is it essentially atheistic?

2) Having said that, Hinduism relies on the idea of ātman or there being a self that transmigrates until it fully realizes the brahman (conscious universe). Both believe in nirvana or moksha but Buddhism describes it as a state of overcoming or losing all consciousness while Hinduism describes it as becoming conscious or achieving extreme consciousness or awareness. Buddhism rejects a sense of self and Hinduism retains it. In saying that the ideas of god that Hinduism retains are essentially metaphors for different energies and states of being, is it right to call it theistic if they didn't believe in corporeal beings such as an elephant god or gods with multiple hands but rather in them being representative. But then aren't most religions based on the same idea, of representing? Such as the pantheon of Greek gods. So is deification a result of watered down religion? What makes a religion qualify as theistic and is Hinduism it or not?
gpt
This depends on what you mean by "atheistic." Westerners tend to view buddhism from an extremely contemporary western lens where the emphasis is placed on the lack of monotheism. But that is somewhat bizarre and western centric. We wouldn't call the ancient greek religion atheistic just because it didn't have a supreme universal god. And it makes little sense to say that buddhism is either.

Buddhism is of course full of gods, and they play a major part in the religion. They don't have absolute power over reality, but this is not unique to buddhism, and is a common staple of polytheism. Mahayana buddhism even expands this further, talking about the truth body and buddha nature, which gives buddhahood a more universal, if surreltive feature. The metaphysical pointers about how all beings are empty of substance isn't really a good reason to deny that there's gods in the religion, because in the colloquial sense there obviously are, and this opens a weird argument about how you have to deny everything existing in any religion that doesn't have an explicit metaphysics of substance. The entire point of the two truths doctrine is that the contingent things do exist in a sense, even if them being discrete things is not the ultimate perspective.

That aside, using theistic language to refer to it, either in affirmation or negation is still trying to apply a potentially western lens to a non western idea. There are gods, but whether it is "theistic" is a question that doesn't really make sense unless we delineate what we mean by theistic. Because in its most wide scope it means anything that has gods. But in some narrow contexts it is limited to beliefs where there is a universal god that is also the telos of all existing things. How narrow we use the term is going to affect how we see it. It doesn't really make sense to call it not theistic, because that is a misleading depiction. But at the same time we wouldn't call it theistic either, since these gods are not a telos in the sense we normally understand. This is an issue we simply run into when trying to use concepts designed for one context in a context they weren't designed for. Its kind of like trying to ask biological questions about a rock.

One term that was coined in part to refer to these traditions is *transtheistic*, which can also be expanded to *transpolytheistic*. Which in its most simple meaning means beliefs that don't really easily fit into a western theistic binary. Mainly because there are gods, but the understanding of them may not match western conceptions of theism. But which are nonetheless important in the system. For context to how people in these traditions described themself, look at how easily the japanese in the kyoto school started equating the zen "one mind" to god, after western influence. The idea that you should deny that there is variants of theism involved in these traditions is one born in the west.

In terms of hinduism, most hindus did believe that gods literally existed. Even if they also believed that in some vague sense you could personify random energies without contradiction. Saying that most religions are based on representation glosses over the fact that just because these things aren't necessarily physical in the way they are depicted doesn't mean they aren't saying they exist. It is always the nature of religion to describe the gods as beyond us in a way it may be difficult for us to understand. In terms of hinduism, there even is a supreme godhead, so it makes even less sense to deny the theistic aspect of it.

Your description of deification assumes that people are starting by describing natural processes, and then over time these stories morph into theism. That might be true in an overall sense when describing the beginnings of human consciousness in pre history. But it would be a misleading way to talk about the emergence of specific religions. To these people, that gods were part of the worldview was a given. Even if they meant the stories to be non literal, they generally still conceptualized that something *like* that happened, and the story was an aproximation. Which is not the same as denying the existence of gods. For people at this time the existence of gods was the baseline, not the other way around. That they personify natural parts of the world, and may be immanent forces at the same time wasn't meant to be a denial of this. Even if how it works was often a detail haggled on heavily.