Translating the concept of Īśvara in Indian philosophy

It has become a cliché to ask whether Buddhism is a philosophy or a religion. It is usually framed as something like:

Buddhism is considered a religion.
But Buddhism does not claim the existence of any god(s).
(Religions claim the existence of god[s].)
Therefore Buddhism is not a religion, but a philosophy.

This is wrong. Buddhism is not atheistic, as it is often said, but nirīśvara, without a belief in (an) Īśvara or Lord, i.e. a highest god/deva who has some sort of ontological primacy. This does not always amount to being the first cause of all things ([the/an] Īśvara is only one of many independently existing entities in Yoga; in different systems of Vedānta, he is identical to or secondary to Brahman). Buddhism does accept the existence of devas, gods, as an important part of the world. If a god is anything that is worshipped, the Buddha and other Bodhisattvas may also be regarded as gods in analytical terms.

The problem is that nirīśvara is misleadingly translated as "atheistic", seśvara (with a belief in [an] Īśvara) as "theistic", and Īśvara as "God". Superficially, this may not seem problematic, as a highest, ontologically primary god does seem more or less the equivalent of the Abrahamic God. But the divergences are significant enough for the terminology to be essentially incorrect. Of the Abrahamic God, it may be rightly said, in Islamic terms, that "There is no god but God", since "god" is usually understood to mean a very powerful sentient entity deserving of worship, and God is regarded as by definition the only such entity. The Īśvara, on the other hand, is usually considered to be one and unique, but he is not the only deva, and neither Īśvara nor devas are the only recipients of worship in most Indian religion, be it Hindu, Buddhist or Jain, even though there are in all of these traditions some who discourage such worship. (The case is different for Sikhism, of course).

"Atheistic" usually means a belief that there are no gods (and so, no God). When the term God, which conflates what, in an Indian context, are at least three different concepts (Īśvara, deva, recipient of worship), is used to translate one (and only one) of those concepts, we get an apparent opposition of "atheistic" vs. "theistic" that masks the real complexities of thinkers' and traditions' disagreements about both cosmology (the Īśvara, as I said, can have different roles in different systems) and the nature and hierarchies of the recipients of worship (including Buddhas, devas, etc, which it is difficult to clearly distinguish; it is largely a bias that human and god are wholly different which makes Westerners underestimate the Buddhas' and Jinas' role as objects of worship and devotion).

It may be asked what is problematic about using an established English word in a new, specific sense to translate a foreign word. There are many such usages in Anglophone writing on Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophy after all. The problem is that the use of "(a)theistic" all too often comes to be seen as identical to "(not) religious" and "(non)supernaturalist", and, perhaps the more widespread problem, "theism" in the sense of belief in an Īśvara is seen as the standard from which some thinkers deviate—thinkers who are less religious, who reject the sense of religion as it is to be expected. But this expectation only comes in with the Western commentator, as the belief in an Īśvara emerges out of what really is to be expected, the belief in the devas, which is much more rarely questioned, problematized or even brought up in philosophical texts. (I don't know enough about the so-called sectarian literature to say whether rejection of the devas either as existing or as objects of worship exists or is widespread in it). That this is so is often masked by rather dishonest accounts of Indian philosophy which use "God" to translate both Brahman and Īśvara, thus reducing a host of different ways of conceptualizing and contextualizing these two terms to a question of "impersonal God", "personal God" and "no God", with "God" as an element that is to be expected. That there are systems that have a room for both Brahman and Īśvara (some Vedāntins, and already the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad, which makes Īśvara primary and uses Brahman apparently in the sense of reality/existence/the world), others that have room for neither (Buddhism, Nirīśvarasāṃkhya), some that use them interchangeably (other Vedāntins) and some that use only one of them (Sāṃkhya) is glossed over.

Should we then propose the use of "(an)īśvaristic" and "(a)devistic" as replacements for "atheistic"? I think that all such -ism are misleading because they suggest that calling a system as X-istic or a(n)-X-istic is a statement about its overall nature. The different roles of Brahman and Īśvara in different philosophies undermine this approach, and shows that, in essence, "This philosophy is īśvaristic" tells us only that the philosophy uses the word Īśvara, but not in what meaning. Even if we made a list of -isms that encompass every term that either exists or does not exist in any given Indian philosophical system, a mere list of these would still not give an actual account of it, just as Roman Catholicism is not encompassed by calling it "theistic, monotheistic, trinitarian, apostolic, dualistic, deontological, ...". These are shorthands that only make sense if one already knows how to unpack them and relate them to one another in the specific case of Roman Catholicism. The truth is that every philosophy, if it is to be described, deserves a proper description, and not just a handful of terms that distorts it into a checklist with a few tics and a few items crossed out.

In addition, "adevism", which might go along with "anīśvarism" as the more general terms, i.e. "belief in no gods" as opposed to the more specific "belief in no God", was coined by Max Müller in a very different sense, as disbelief in the devas specifically, but not in all deity:

"But we must remember that to doubt or to deny the existence of Indra or of Jupiter is not Atheism but should be distinguished by a separate name namely Adevism. [...] This is not Atheism in the true sense of the word and if an historical study of religion had taught us that one lesson only that those who do not believe in our God are not therefore to be called Atheists it would have done some real good and extinguished the fires of many an auto da fe." (Natural religion, vol. 1, Lecture 9)

He uses "a well-known hymn of the Rig-veda" that "expresses [...] doubts whether Indra the chief god of the Vedic Indians really exists" as substantiating this adevism, which is "doubt as to the real existence of such gods as Indra that had grown into impossible beings by the accumulation of all kinds of misunderstood legends about them". I believe the hymn in question is Rig veda 8.100.3, where doubt in Indra is mentioned as other people's position, only to have Indria himself reply in the next verse: "Here I am." Of course there was adevism in this sense throughout the history of India, especially, it seems, in the now-lost Cārvāka school, which rejected belief in all supernatural entities. But the fact is that one of the constants of Indian religion, in a way that the Īśvara is not, is the belief in devas; the belief in a specific Īśvara always occurs in a wider cultural context in which this entity, e.g. Śiva, is considered a deva, and many ritual interactions are not with the Īśvara but with one or many of the devas (or other recipients of worship, like ancestors). In an Indian context, therefore, only a thinker who rejects a belief in all devas, and, if they believe in an Īśvara, reject that he is a deva (the more usual position would be that he is all the devas, a position that after all very much affirms the existence of many devas), may begin to qualify as adevistic. All this is just to show the uselessness of such a term, not to make any strong claims about what meaning it should have. It should not be used.

Note:

As an example of the privileging of a belief in a (Western-type) God that comes about through applying the categories of "theistic" and "atheistic" to Indian thought, consider the following excerpt from Wikipedia's article "Atheism in Hinduism", which defines its subject as "Atheism [...] or disbelief in God or gods", but gives "nir-īśvara-vāda" (i.e. belief in no Īśvara) as the Sanskrit word for atheism and in fact discusses only this:

"The Rig Veda, the oldest of the Vedas, deals with significant skepticism around the fundamental question of a creator God and the creation of the universe. It does not, at many instances, categorically accept the existence of a creator God. Nasadiya Sukta (Creation Hymn) in the tenth chapter of the Rig Veda states:
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe."

The presumption of the Wikipedia contributor here is clearly that the idea of a creator God was the current main conception of deity or theism available for acceptance or rejection to the author of the hymn; because it is the standard assumption for theistic belief now, it is projected into the past (the sin of perennialism). In fact, there is an incredible diversity of opinions about the origin of the world in Vedic-Upanishadic literature, and what was traditional, more or less uniform and available for acceptance or rejection was a belief in gods (devas), which the Vedic author takes completely for granted.