Buddhist

Buddhism has a great many divine beings and no god at the top, and its most distinctive structural claim is a denial. Brahma, in an early text, believes himself to be the creator and the tradition treats this as a mistake, produced by his having arrived first in a world-system that was reassembling itself anyway. There is no creator. That single position separates this pantheon from almost every other in the atlas.

The devas are real and they are not the point. They live long, pleasant, powerful lives and they remain within the round of rebirth, subject to death and to the consequences of action, and so they are in a worse position than a human being who can practise. Worship of them secures worldly benefit and not liberation.

What is venerated instead is a state and those who reached it. Buddhas, and in the Mahayana the bodhisattvas who postpone their own liberation, occupy the position other traditions give to gods, and they arrived there by practice. The door is open to anyone. This is not apotheosis granted from above but attainment, and it is why the atlas records the route into this pantheon under its own heading.

Vajrayana adds a further layer, arranging buddhas in families and generating an immense iconography of figures understood as aspects rather than as separate persons.

Wherever Buddhism travelled it absorbed local gods as protectors of the teaching rather than displacing them.

There is no single Buddhist canon. There are several, in different languages, preserved by traditions that separated early, and the differences between them are the main evidence for how the pantheon developed.

The Pali Canon of the Theravada is the most complete early collection surviving in an Indic language, committed to writing in Sri Lanka after centuries of oral transmission by reciters trained in specific portions. Its formulaic, repetitive style is a feature of that transmission rather than a stylistic failing.

The Chinese canon preserves translations of texts whose Indian originals are lost, including versions of the early collections belonging to schools other than the Theravada, so a comparison between the Pali and the Chinese can show what one school added or dropped. The Tibetan canon does the same for the later Indian material, and preserves the tantric literature most fully.

The Mahayana sutras present the sharpest question of all. They appear centuries after the Buddha, describe vast assemblies of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and claim the authority of his word. How that claim was understood and defended within the tradition is itself a substantial subject.

Alongside the texts, inscriptions, monastic architecture and image-making supply a record of what was actually venerated and when, which does not always match what the texts prescribe. The earliest Buddhist art avoids depicting the Buddha's body at all.