Here's a fascinating podcast by Dr. Alan Wallace, Buddhist scholar and author, who discusses Buddhism and atheism. A bit of transcript:
"In the framing itself, the question is already skewed. It's not so obvious to a person who's totally immersed in Western civilization and has almost no understanding of anything outside of Western civilization. Frankly, so much of this antireligious rhetoric from the likes of Richard Dawkins is just wildly unconsciously and uncritically ethnocentric. Do the Buddhist themselves ask, 'are we atheists?' Well, I've never seen that question posed. In Buddhism that would be regarded as such a dumb and uninformed question that is not even worthy of a response."
Dr. Wallace devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford. Dr. Wallace has taught Buddhist theory and meditation worldwide since 1976.
Such a dumb, vacuous, and elaborate non-answer. It reminds me of extreme postmodernism.
Bawk Bawk Bawk — you say it’s a stupid answer, but from a Buddhist perspective it’s a stupid question.
In keeping with my own Buddhist practice, I would not consider any question asked of me dumb or unworthy of an answer. I praise the courage and honesty of one who says, “It may seem foolish, but I don’t understand this.”
Wow! Thank you for saying that instead of letting the other answer stay the only voice. I’m not a buddhist mind you, but “dumb question” (?) that’s not the impression I’ve ever gotten from my buddhist friends who seem very open minded and interested in discussing such issues- To be fair, more even than my (fellow) atheist friends are..
Even the Buddha said there were dumb questions (see, for example, the Sabbasava Sutta). In this case, the “dumbness” of the question rests on a kind of logical fallacy — that Buddhism contains some concept of theism that it either affirms or refutes. But this amounts to shoving Buddhism into a western conceptual box that it doesn’t really fit, which is what Alan Wallace is saying.
Or, to put it another way, the concepts of “theism” or “atheism” are so alien to Buddhism that one cannot give a meaningful answer to the question — neither yes nor no would be exactly right. The “answer,” then, is to help the questioner understand why it’s a dumb — or, if you will, irrelevant — question.