Question: Was Buddha an Incarnation of God?

Answer from Ven Dr K Sri Dhammananda:

The Buddha never claimed that He was the son or messenger of any God.The Buddha was a unique human being who was self Enlightened. He had no one whom He could regard as His teacher. Through His own efforts, He practised to perfection the ten Paramitas—supreme qualities of generosity, discipline, renunciation, wisdom, energy, endurance, truthfulness, determination, goodwill and equanimity. Through His mental purification, He opened the doors to all knowledge. He knew all things to be known, cultivated all things to be cultivated, and destroyed all things to be destroyed. Indeed, it is difficult to compare other religious teachers to Him in terms of cultivation of the mind, mental purity and supreme wisdom.


So special was He and so electrifying His message, that many people asked Him ‘What (not so much Who) He was’. The question of ‘Who He was’ would be with respect to His name, origin, ancestry,etc., while ‘What He was’ referred to the order of beings to which He belonged. So ‘godly’ and inspiring was He that even during His time, there were numerous attempts by others to turn Him into a god or a reincarnation of a god. He never agreed to be regarded as such. In the Anguttara Nikaya, He said: ‘I am indeed not a deva nor any other form of divine being; neither am I an ordinary human being. Know ye that I am the Buddha, the Awakened One.’ After Enlightenment, the Buddha could no longer be classified even as a ‘manusya’ or an ordinary human being. He belonged to the Buddha wangsa, a special class of enlightened beings, all of whom are Buddhas.

Buddhas appear in this world from time to time. But some people have the mistaken idea that it is the same Buddha who is reincarnated or appears in the world over and over again. Actually,they are not the same person, because then there would be no scope for others to attain to Buddhahood. Buddhists believe that anyone can become a Buddha if he develops his qualities to perfection and is able to remove his ignorance completely through his own efforts. After Enlightenment, however, all Buddhas become identical in their attainment and experience of Nirvana.

In India, the followers of many orthodox religious groups tried to condemn the Buddha because of His liberal and rational teachings which revolutionised Indian society at that time. Many regarded Him as an enemy as His teachings contradicted their age-old religious traditions but more intellectuals as well as people from all ranks of society began to follow Him and accept His teaching. Some tried to reduce His stature by introducing Him as a reincarnation of one of their gods. This way they could absorb Buddhism into their religion. To a certain extent, this strategy worked in India since it had, through the centuries, contributed to the decay and the subsequent uprooting of Buddhism from the land of its origin.

Even today there are certain religious groups who try to absorb the Buddha into their faiths as a way of gaining converts to their religion from among Buddhists. Their basis for doing so is by claiming that the Buddha Himself had predicted that another Buddha would appear in this world, and that the latest Buddha will become even more popular. One group even claims that Jesus Christ who lived 600 years after Gautama the Buddha is the latest Buddha. Another group says that the next Buddha had arrived in Japan in the 13th century. Yet another group believes that their founder came from the lineage of great teachers like Gautama and Jesus. These groups advise Buddhists to give up their “old” Buddha and follow the so-called new Buddha. While it is good to see them giving the Buddha the same status as their own religious teachers,we feel that these attempts to absorb Buddhists into another faith by misrepresenting the truth are in extreme bad taste.

Those who claim that the new Buddha had already arrived are obviously misrepresenting what the Buddha had said. Although the Buddha predicted the coming of the next Buddha, He mentioned some conditions which had to be met before this can be possible. It is the nature of Buddhahood that the next Buddha will not appear as long as the dispensation of the current Buddha still exists.He will appear only when the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path have been completely forgotten. The people living then must be properly guided in order to understand the same Truth taught by the previous Buddhas. We are still living within the dispensation of Gautama the Buddha. Although the moral conduct of the people has, with very few exceptions, deteriorated, the future Buddha will only appear after some incalculable period when the Path to Nirvana is completely lost to mankind and when people are again ready to receive Him.

Some people have already started to erect the image of the future Buddha and have started to worship and pray just because of that belief. They have moulded the image and features of that Buddha according to their own imagination.