Buddhist critiques of divine creation in the Yogācārabhūmi and the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya

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ABSTRACT In this article I discuss two early but highly influential sources in the long history of Buddhist-Hindu debates on theism and creation: the Yogācārabhūmi and the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. The paper is structured around the Yogācārabhūmi’s argumentation, often overlooked in scholarship, which attacks the existence of a supreme being who creates and rules the universe on four fronts. It argues that 1) God does not have the capacity to create the universe; 2) God cannot be either immanent or non-immanent in the created world; 3) God cannot create with or without a purpose; 4) nor can God create with or without instrumental causes. Besides examining the Yogācārabhūmi's arguments, I consider how the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya complements them, for instance, by emphasising that the causal power of ordinary beings and objects, or the successive unfolding of events in the world, cannot be explained if we accept that God is the sole cause of the universe.