The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Read Online Free PDF Page A

beginning of things?” “Sir, you have not.” “Or, have you ever said to me I will become your pupil for you will reveal to me the beginning of things?” “Sir, I have not.” His only object, the Buddha reminded his disciple, was “the thorough destruction of ill for the doer thereof.” “If then,” the Buddha went on, “it matters not to that object whether the beginning of things be revealed … what use would it be to have the beginning of things revealed?”
    This hardheaded approach may surprise us in the West, where we commonly think of Buddhism as a mystic way of thought. But a wholesome reticence entered the mainstream of Buddhism, and came to be called the Silence of the Buddha. Confucius, too, had his own list of things “about which the master never spoke”—“weird things, physical exploits, disorders, and spirits.” Inquiry for its own sake, merely to know more, philosophy on the Greek model, had no place either in the Buddhist tradition. Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know.
    The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading. Not only did theBuddha remain silent when asked about the first creation. He despised “speculations about the creation of the land or sea” as “low conversation,” which was like tales of kings, of robbers, of ministers of state, talk about women and about heroes, gossip at street corners, and ghost stories. He urged disciples to follow his example and not fritter away their energy on such trifles.
    He offered an original, if slightly malicious, explanation of how the idea of a single Creator had ever got started. He said it began as only a rumor, invented by the conceit of a well-known figure inherited from the prolific Hindu mythology. The culprit was none other than Brahma, of wondrous and various genealogy. Originally associated with the primeval Prajapati, whom we have met, Brahma was said to have been born from a golden egg. Some credited him with creating the earth, others said that he had sprung from a lotus that issued from the protector-god Vishnu’s navel. In the Buddha’s lifetime Hindus still worshiped Brahma as a creator god.
    The Lord Buddha explained how, at one stage in the endless cycles of the universe, this character had cast himself in the role of Creator:
    Now there comes a time when this world begins to evolve, and then the World of Brahma appears, but it is empty. And some being, whether because his allotted span is past or because his merit is exhausted, quits his body in the world of Radiance and is born in the empty World of Brahma, where he dwells for a long, long time. Now, because he has been so long alone he begins to feel dissatisfaction and longing, and wishes that other beings might come and live with him. And indeed soon other beings quit their bodies in the World of Radiance and come to keep him company in the World of Brahma.
    Then the being who was first born there thinks: “I am Brahma, the mighty Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-seeing, the Lord, the Maker, the Creator, the Supreme Chief, the Disposer, the Controller, the Father of all that is or is to be. I have created all these beings, for I merely wished that they might be and they have come here!” And the other beings … think the same, because he was born first and they later. And the being who was born first lived longer and was more handsome and powerful than the others.…
    That is how your traditional doctrine comes about that the beginning of things was the work of the god Brahma.
    Following the Buddha, the