ABSTRACT
Indra, our first divine character, is truly shared between Brahmanical Hindu, Jain and Buddhist narratives, retaining many of his Vedic characteristics and associations but also being moulded to new contexts and needs, or else being pushed into the shadows. In our second shared god, Brahmā, we again see some of the ways in which a shared character exhibits both stability and flexibility, but in this case there are some more direct challenges between traditions, and a clearer contrast between the creator deity of Brahmanical Hinduism, and Jain and Buddhist responses to him. As in the case of Indra, the Jain and Buddhist approaches to Brahmā are also rather different to one another: Buddhists included multiple named Brahmās in some of their earliest stories about the Buddha, while also including Brahmā heavens in their cosmology. Jains, on the other hand, while also preserving the notion of Brahmā realms and Brahmā gods, showed little interest in Brahmā as an individual. They did, however, transfer his major association – with creativity – onto their own founding father, the first jina of the time cycle, Ṛṣabha, thereby reclaiming the cosmic past for Jainism and rendering Brahmā both unnecessary and uninteresting.
