Beings are numberless: I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible: I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are endless: I vow to enter them.
Buddha’s way is unsurpassable: I vow to become it.
--The Four Bodhisattva Vows
To do something for God’s sake is really not to do it for anyone’s or anything’s sake at all. Rather, it is to do it solely because it is to be done.
The Bodhisattva vows are therefore done “for God’s sake,” given the proper understanding of what that expression means, when it is not misused idolatrously. At any rate, that is how one might well put it, if one is using the language of the Biblical tradition.
If using the language of the Buddhist tradition to which the Bodhisattva vows themselves belong, one would put the same point differently, of course. However, since what I am concerned with in this post is the clarification of the phrase “for God’s sake,” which belongs to the Biblical tradition, I am using those Buddhist vows as a rhetorically effective way to make my point.
That is a point that goes beyond all differences between the world’s genuinely spiritual traditions.
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My point is, to repeat, that doing something for God’s sake is not a matter of doing it for someone or something at all—which would reduce God to an idol—but purely for the sake of doing what calls out to be done. Thus, to do what one does “for God’s sake” is to do it in a way that makes it stand all alone: a truly holy deed.
Doing something solely for God’s sake is pouring one’s deed out freely and without ever counting the cost, just the same as one might pour an evening’s libation on the ground in a ritual honoring and worshiping divinity, happily and holily wasting the entire cup of wine “to no purpose.”
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The ultimate derivation of the word God is uncertain. The derivation I favor—favoring it because of the truth it opens to us, even if it is not the historically accurate account—is that God comes from the Proto-Indo-European *ghu-to-, which meant “poured,” a one might pour wine from a goblet. That PIE word, in turn, derives from the root *gheu-, “to pour, pour a libation.”
That derivation itself pours out the truth about God as God, rather than as some idol fashioned by human hands or minds to serve selfish, self-interested human (all too human, as Nietzsche is good at reminding us) purposes.
God is what pours out to no utilitarian purpose, serving no practical end, for no reason at all. God is what pours itself out solely to pour itself out, as it were, giving freely of itself even before any request is made, any prayer prayed.
Even before they call, I shall answer here I am.
—Isaiah 65: 24
That is the voice of God, pouring itself out freely, for free.
Let my prayer rise before you like incense, the raising of my hands like an evening oblation.
—Psalm (140)141:2
That is the voice of holy worship, which also pours itself out freely, for free—solely for God’s sake.