The History of Buddhist Thought c27.40

c27.40

Buddhism agrees with the other world-religions in recognizing an ultimate eternal reality, but it nowhere describes this reality in positive language. Mahāyāna Buddhism indeed came to describe the Tathāgata in terms hardly to be distinguished from the monotheistic terminology of Hinduism, but this was only relative truth. In reality there was only the inexpressible absolute, and this differed from the earlier conception of Nirvāṇa by being described not only as an individual state, but as a cosmological ultimate. God is a cosmological ultimate, but evidently this bare concept cannot be made to cover what is meant by God in a theistic system.