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For most people, God is a dualistic concept. Meaning, for a typical person the unspoken assumption is: "I am*here*and God is*over there". So when I think about God, when I speak to God -- I inevitably imagine some power outside of myself. It is in this power that I place hope for good life and for salvation; it is this power that I blame for unfairness etc.
There are several problems with this approach. First by attributing to God the power to save us or to send difficulties etc. we alienate ourselves from our own power. In Buddhism (except Pure Land) our liberation is always in our hands. (As Trungpa said, no one is going to descent in the golden chariot to take care of you. In fact this very feeling of loneliness/hopelessness is one of the main ingredients for the gunpowder of Bodhi.) As long as you keep looking up to some higher power, how can you be the master of your life?
Second, by relating with external God, we confirm our*own*existence, our illusory ego. "I pray to God, therefore I exist." -- This is good old dependent-coarising at work. When*that*is,*this*is. From the arising of*that*comes the arising of*this. So the more we praise God, the more we cement this little "I", the subject of God.
Instead, from the non-theistic perspective, "I" and "God" are two equally illusory ends of the same stick. It is not that I am infinite, and therefore I am God. Nor is it that "I" does not exist and everything is God. Neither is it that the little "I" is inside of, or a part of, God. Nor is it that God only exists as a concept of my mind. Rather, all of these are interpretations of the fundamental situation in which my power and the power of God is the same power, my will and the will of God is the same will, and my spontaneity and the spontaneity of God is the same spontaneity. Perhaps even this is implying too much. There is power / will / spontaneity, but no one who wields it. It just is. Using it and being used by it refers to the same activity.
Two of my teachers preferred to emphasize one side:*using it. My Zen Master said: "People say, 'God bless you', but Enlightenment is when*you*bless God". My current teacher says: "utilize God". Both of these serve to remind us of our inherent mastery. The power is us, and we are the power.
So a regular prayer, addressing God as "You", from Buddhist perspective is counterproductive. It dependently co-creates "I", takes away our power, and leads astray from enlightenment. A better perspective is, as Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" (i.e. my true nature and the nature of God is one and the same). This corresponds to what Buddha called "a state of Brahma" (brahmapatta, AN 4.190) and praised as a valuable intermediate attainment. In Tibetan Buddhism there is*this beautiful prayer, spoken from the perspective of Kuntuzangpo, the Primordial Buddha -- i.e. the nature of intrinsic awareness, before separation into beings, which is another way to refer to God. This prayer is perhaps as good as a prayer can get from Buddhist perspective.
Chogyam Trungpa.
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