What reference to other powers are there in Buddhism? Does Buddhism, other than Amidism, describe or explain entities like Amida, or any other &quot;other power,&quot; or intra-psychic, in yer mind, other.
I did not mean to consider whether Buddhism is theistic or not.
Pigeonholing Buddhism into theistic or atheistic category betrays ignorance of the relationship between reality and its description.
Theistic concepts such as gods, souls, afterlife, other realms etc. are all descriptions referring to certain phenomena observable in the real life.
Most of these phenomena are of such nature that speaking about them in other terms is hard or impossible. So over the centuries humanity developed a kind of partially metaphorical / partially exaggerated / partially simplified vocabulary that we now know as &quot;the supernatural&quot; and &quot;the metaphysical&quot;.
Then, on top of that useful if a little inaccurate vocabulary, a hundred generations of people overlaid their fairy tales and anecdotes. Then on top of this folklore came systematizers who wrote down the canons and catechisms. The mixture of these three layers is what we know as a religion.
When we talk about Buddhism, the conversation would get a lot more clear if we were to drop the two later layers and focus on the original set of ideas used to describe phenomena that don't have adequate representation in materialistic let alone scientific vocabularies.
I claim that ideas such as gods, spirits, other worlds, and other seemingly fictional elements are simplified descriptions or real things going on in the real world you and I live in. There's no room in this answer for going in details but at least I have made the claim.
If we suspend our judgment and assume (hypothetically) that my claim is grounded in reality, then we will have to say that the difference between theistic and non theistic Buddhism is moot. In fact we would have to say that what we know as traditional Buddhism is probably more complete while secular Buddhism artificially restricts itself to a subset of reality that is included in the modern materialistic description while leaving the other important phenomena out just because we are not aware of them and don't understand them enough to describe in our own words.