That’s very much alike the gnostic theology! With the Demiurge claiming to be omnipotent and such but being delusional. That sounds like a fine solution to the “why there are so many creator gods” problem.
My dear brother and sister Buddhists
May the memory of the Lord Buddha (Siddartha Gautama) be blessed!
I was reading with keen interest a portion from the
Brahmajala Sutta on the last thread (which was given as a link by Rossum) when she/he was asked by another poster whether Buddhists had any teachings on the God whom Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Hindus and other believers in a Supreme Divinity worship.
There is this depiction of the deluded Brahma who - because he was the first being to arise in the universe in its expansion from a prior contracted blissful state - in a kind of heavenly abode, considered Himself to be the Supreme Reality, the Creator God and when other beings “fell” from that blissful state he believed that he had created them in thought because he had felt lonely and desired other beings before their appearence. In other words the Lord Buddha is suggesting that the God of Theistic religions is actually not the Creator of the Universe but a deluded demiurge-like figure who could not remember his previous birth in that contracted state of being. The other beings who “fell” afterwards with him into reality, into this present expanded universe, saw him as being older by far and more beautiful than they and so came to regard him truly as their Creator, the One true God. They too had forgotten about their previous births and none of them were aware that, in the Buddha’s eyes, the Universe goes through a permanent and unending cycle of contraction and expansion, meaning that in each cycle there is probably some deluded divine being who is the first to “fall” into the new expanded universe and who erroneously considers Himself to be the “Creator” and “Father of all”.
I was struck by the almost verbatim similarity between this fascinating Brahma figure and the “Authority” of Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials children’s fantasy trilogy, based (as he says), upon his knowledge of the Gnostic Christian Demiurge - whom as you will probably know some of the ancient, heretical Gnostics identified as Yahweh the God of the Old Testament (Tanakh) whom Jesus had come to liberate mankind from so that they could be freed from matter and return to the Undifferentiated, Impersonal Absolute from which the Demiurge, who was not actually the Creator but thought himself to be so, originally came from.
The Supreme Being of certain of these diverse Christian Gnostics was known as the
Monad, the One, the Bythos (Depth or Profundity), the Proarche (Before the Beginning), the He Arche (The Beginning) and The Ineffable Parent. The One was considered to be the high source of the pleroma, the region of light. The various emanations of The One are called aeons and they dwelt in the region of Light. The Demiurge was the first emanation that “fell” down from the
Monad into the
Pleroma (Region of Light) where he was alone until other aeons emanated and fell down with him.
The discussion of Gnosticism seems to confirm my initial thoughts.
Read this description of Pullman’s Gnostic-influenced fantasy “Creator”:
"…His Dark Materials is steeped and forged in the philosophy of Gnosticism, to the point where it would be impossible to separate almost any of the story’s primary strands and themes from some underlying Gnostic source.
The most obvious manner in which His Dark Materials mirror a Gnostic portrayal of the world is its god/creator character, The Authority. The Authority—and, by extension, his regent Metatron—is the surrogate for the being known in Gnosticism as The Demiurge: a deeply flawed, extremely jealous, bitter and vindictive being who has entrapped all of humanity in a prison—our shared reality—and presented himself as God the Creator rather than a lesser being. These characters all represent the god of western religions. Here is how Pullman describes The Authority in a passage from The Amber Spyglass:
- **“The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself… The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie…” ***
One myst see the striking parity between this Gnostic-influenced-Pullman “Authority”-Demiurge-God and the Brahma described by the Buddha in that aforementioned sutta?
I have often read and heard it said that early Christian Gnosticism and Buddhism shared some kind of common affinity in places but I have generally overlooked it until now (Ie I generally thought of it only in terms of liberation from matter, extinction/illusion of the individual self etc.).
Nevertheless there are important differences between the Gnostic and Buddhist models and I actually think that Pullman, accidentally, has presented in the book not a Gnostic conception of God but a Buddhist one - although he doesn’t credit Buddhism for his literary masterpiece.
Gnosticism presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable God and the demiurgic “creator” of the material universe, which the Demiurge Creator to “smite” the Unknowable, Impersonal Supreme Being.
However in His Dark Materials the Authority did not actually
create the material reality - he simply
thought that he had and so did the other angels. This was delusion not malice - although sister Notself recalls a Sutra where he seems to “realize” that he isn’t the Creator but still wishes to be worshipped by other being regardless, which could indicate malicious intent.
This is thus closer to the Buddhist description of Brahma rather than the Gnostic Demiurge, although there is an overarching similarity and connection I think between all three presentations and a common thread of tacit criticism of traditional theism.
Now here is what my thoughts are:
Naturally I do not and cannot accept the Gnostic understanding of the Creator God as a deluded angelic being who emanated from the
Monad and neither do I accept its disturbing abhorrence for the material world and the flesh.
Nevertheless all of this has made me think that the Buddha’s conception of “Brahma” is not the God that we Christians call “The Holy Trinity” (who is the same God as the Tanakh) but rather is closer in general to our understanding of Satan. In other words, I think that his description of “Brahma” more easily fits our figure of Satan or the Adversary (devil) than the One, Infinite, Ineffable, Inexpressible, Impassable, Omnipresent First Cause who expresses himself as Father, who eternally speaks himself forth as the Son and who are both united as One by their common outpouring bond of love which is the Holy Spirit - a perfect divine family that eternally expands out into the Three Persons and contracts into the Abyss of the Godhead, the Essence, the Ground in one simultaenous expansion-contraction like a great cosmic heartbeat (to use the language of Meister Eckhart and Dom Cyprian Smith).
This God became incarnated as a human being, in the Person of the Son, in the womb of the Blessed Virgin and I do not consider him to be the “Brahma” whom the Buddha gained knowledge of through his experience of enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree.
I think that it is possible (from a Christian perspective) that the expanding-contracting reality which he perceived to be the basis of reality or the Universe was actually the Holy Trinity, or is akin to the Holy Trinity. Perhaps this has interesting implications for the Mahayana doctrine of the
Trikaya which has some superficial similarities to the Christian Trinity, much in the same way as the Hindu
Trimurti does.
One of the reasons why I posit that
Brahma shares more commonalities with the Christian
Satan is that God in Catholicism is
impassible whereas Brahma is clearly
passible shifting (much like a conditioned human being) from one fleeting emotional state to another, experiencing loneliness in one second but not the other and actin as if from within “time” whereas God for Christians is beyond time and place.
I reckon that he seems more like Satan, whom Christ interestingly saw “fall from heaven” in a similar way to how the Buddha saw “Brahma” fall down into heaven from that previous contracted state of the Universe:
***Luke 10: 18 And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like a star ***
