Epiphanies Without God

Abstract

The understanding of a religious epiphany as the appearance of God or a god, or the manifestation of the divine or religious reality, clearly includes epiphanies as they occur in theistic traditions. However, this understanding also embraces epiphanies as they are, or can be, recognized in nontheistic traditions that in contradistinction to the theistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam give no place to a supreme God, but allow instead that there is a transcendent impersonal, or nonpersonal, religious reality. The religious reality recognized by a tradition is in large measure defined by that tradition. In some of the major religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for instance—the highest reality is God. But in other major traditions—Buddhism and nondevotional Hinduism, for example—the highest reality is not theistic. Accordingly, these latter traditions, if they allow an interaction with the religious reality they recognize, admit of nontheistic epiphanies. In this chapter, the ways in which different forms of nontheistic Buddhism can recognize epiphanies are examined, as is a way a nondevotional form of Hinduism allows epiphanies.