Buddha worshiped by the gods
The 31 worlds are stacked like plates in a cupboard. The world we know is fifth from the bottom, the four below are the hell-worlds, and the 26 above are the heavens.
The Buddhist cosmos: our world is the one where the two cones meet, heavens above, hells below. From Huntington archives.
There is, of course, no God in this cosmos, because it has no beginning and no end, and is not even real, being the product of mind and misapprehension. There are however, gods in the heavens, and one of them is surprisingly like the Christian (Jewish, Muslim) God (Yahweh, Allah). His name is Baka Brahma, (any resemblance to the name of the current President of the US is purely coincidental, I swear), and you can learn about him in the Brahma-nimantanika Sutta, one of the holy texts of Buddhism (look for a copy in your nearest monastery library).
This divine being – his name means “Crane Brahma”, and I have no idea why – is an object lesson in the sad effects of pride. He began as a human, a hermit named Kesava, and through his many good deeds was reborn as a deva (a higher god) in one of the highest heavens. Now the hubris kicks in: his confidence in his goodness led to pride, and thanks to his pride he began to sink downwards through the heavens, from one reincarnation to the next (because reincarnation applies to gods as much as to humans), until he arrived in the middle heavens where he was no more than a common or garden brahma (intermediate-level god).
Buddha reveals Baka’s previous lives, which he had forgotten – here Baka, as the hermit Kesava, saves some people from an an angry naga. In this life the Buddha had been Kessava’s student. From Amida-ji Retreat Temple Romania (there’s a Buddhist retreat in Romania?)
Gods, as you know, live very long lives, and the Crane God had lived so long that he now forgot that he had ever had any previous lives. He was, in fact, convinced that he was immortal, and had existed from the beginning of the universe. In fact he became convinced that he was the only god (God, Yahweh, Allah) and that he had created the Universe. It’s the sort of mistake any divinity in his position might make.
The Buddha, who knew better, went to visit this lonely god in his heaven in order to remove his illusions (“I believe in One God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and it’s me…”) The god, who wasn’t a bad sort at heart, welcomed the Buddha and couldn’t help bragging about himself (“I am the One God, etc etc”). The Buddha informed him that his heaven was only one of many, and he himself one of many brahma-gods.
Baka couldn’t believe this, and challenged the Buddha to a vanishing contest – each would disappear from the sight of the other, and sure enough, Baka was unable to escape from the sight of the Buddha, while the Buddha easily escaped from Baka. (It’s a little difficult to explain why the Enlightened One and the god chose this peculiar form of contest, but it has to do with the doctrine of Dependent Origination, which means that the apparent reality of the world originates from our ignorance of its non-reality – or at least I think that’s what it means. Baka is ignorant of his limitations, the Buddha has complete knowledge, so the Buddha has access to worlds where Baka does not exist, while Baka is confined to the one world that he thinks he created and rules).
History Of Buddhism
The Buddha disappears from the sight of Baka Brahma – from Daily Enlightenment.com
This is about as close as Buddhism comes to critiquing the Western concept of a single omnipotent creator-god. That concept is based on a complex of what are ultimately metaphysical positions – the apparent world (world of the senses) is real, and the senses therefore reliable (basic to Western scientific thought); time moves in a line, from past to future (Buddhist and Hindu time moves in cycles, forever returning to the starting point); the world, therefore, has a beginning and that beginning has a cause which exists outside it, which is God. I can’t see many points where Buddhism and Christianity could agree on fundamentals.
Philip J Coggan 