The problem of evil in Buddhism

Classical Buddhism cuts the knot of the problem of evil by refusing one of its premises. The question 'why does an all-good, all-powerful creator permit suffering?' only has bite if there is such a creator. The Buddha declined to affirm one. Cosmologies including gods appear in the canon, but no deity is omnipotent, no deity is responsible for the world's existence, and no deity escapes the wheel of rebirth. The problem of evil, in its Abrahamic form, simply has no target.

What Buddhism does have is a diagnosis of suffering. The First Noble Truth names it: dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence. The Second identifies its cause — tanha, craving or grasping. The Third promises that cessation is possible; the Fourth lays out the Eightfold Path. Karma, as in Hindu thought, provides the micro-mechanism: actions have consequences that ripen over lifetimes. Unlike monotheistic karma, there is no supreme agent enforcing or overseeing the law — it simply is the structure of conditioned reality.

When Buddhism meets Western theodicy, the interesting move is often in the opposite direction: Buddhist thinkers have sometimes argued that the Abrahamic problem of evil is a symptom of a deeper error, namely the attempt to anchor moral meaning in a single omnipotent person. Thinkers like the Dalai Lama have noted that Buddhist ethics rests on interdependence and compassion rather than on divine command, and that this leaves the tradition less exposed to the arguments Hume and Mackie pressed. Whether that is a virtue or a dodge depends on what one makes of the theism being dodged.