Brahma the Creator

In the first chaos, before there was sky, before there was earth, before there was time, a golden egg appeared in the vast primordial waters. A year passed in perfect silence. Then the egg broke open. Its upper half became the sky, and its lower half became the earth. And out of it stepped Brahma, the god who made the whole world we live in.

This is one of the oldest Hindu creation myths.

The world of Hindu myth is a universe that is endlessly being created, protected and renewed. Three great gods govern those three roles. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, and Shiva destroys. Three in one, they are called the Trimurti. And Brahma opens that circle, as the one who begins everything.

But Brahma does not appear in just one story. There is another legend, just as beautiful.

In this one, the god Vishnu lies resting on the back of the cosmic serpent Shesha, also called Ananta, in the middle of the primordial ocean. From Vishnu's navel a lotus grows, its stem rising high above the water. And on that lotus, Brahma appears. That is why Brahma also bears the title Nabhija, meaning born from the navel, and Abjaja, meaning born from the lotus. It is a lovely image. A god of creation, seated on a lotus, springs from the sleep of the god who preserves.

As for how this creator looks, Brahma has reddish-pink skin. It stands for rajas, which in Hindu philosophy is the dynamic, creative force. He has four faces looking in four directions, a sign of knowledge that takes in the whole universe. His four hands hold the Vedas, a lotus, a staff and a pot of sacred water. And he sits on the back of Hamsa, the sacred swan, a symbol of wisdom and knowledge.

Yet Brahma has only four faces, even though at first he had five.

Hindu legend tells this story in more than one way. In one version, Shiva, the god who destroys and renews the universe, took away Brahma's fifth head to teach him a lesson. Since then Brahma has had only four faces, each turned toward one quarter of the sky.

The god of creation is also the one who set the laws of time.

A day of Brahma, also called a kalpa, is not 24 hours like our day. Four great ages, from Krita, the golden age, to Kali, the age of conflict and decline, together make one Maha Yuga. One Maha Yuga equals 4,320,000 human years. A single day of Brahma lasts 1,000 Maha Yugas. Hindus believe that we are living in the age of Kali, the last age of the present cycle. When Brahma wakes, the universe is created. When Brahma goes into his night's sleep, the universe dissolves. So it repeats again and again, without beginning and without end.

And the one who thought up that vast frame of time is also the author of the fifth scripture.

In one hand, Brahma holds the four Vedas. But legend says that Brahma also composed the Natya Veda, a fifth scripture on theater, dance and music. It was drawn from the essence of the four original Vedas. It was given to humankind as a gift, so that people could understand the universe through art. Brahma asked Vishvakarma, the divine craftsman, to build a theater in the heaven of Indra. Later, the Tandava, the dance of the god Shiva, also became part of that art. In the Hindu world, art is not a luxury. Art is the way people touch the secret of the universe.

And yet, in practice, Brahma is the least worshipped of the three great gods.

Over time, Vishnu and Shiva came to be worshipped more and more widely, while Brahma's standing slowly declined. There were many reasons, among them mythic conflicts over which god was supreme. Today, the best-known temple to Brahma, and one of very few in India dedicated to him alone, is the Jagat Pita Shri Brahma temple in Pushkar, in the region of Rajasthan. It was built in the 14th century. This is the great puzzle of Brahma. The one who created the universe, who set out time and who gave the world its art, is the one who is worshipped least.

But in Southeast Asia, the traces of Brahma can still be clearly seen.

In Yogyakarta, on the Indonesian island of Java, the Prambanan temple complex rises from a lush green plain. It is one of the largest Hindu temple complexes in Southeast Asia, with towers reaching up to 47 meters. Within the complex, three central towers are dedicated to the three gods of the Trimurti, and Brahma is one of them.

Closer still, in Vietnam itself, the Cham left traces that are hard to forget. The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa.

At Mỹ Sơn, the holy land of the Cham, a stone relief was found carved with the scene known as the Birth of Brahma. At the Dương Long Towers in Gia Lai, archaeologists found a sculpture of Brahma with three heads and six secondary arms. It dates from the 11th to the 13th century. Other objects linked to Brahma come from the Mẫm Tower, also in Gia Lai. They are now kept at the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang.

So there was a time when, along the central strip of Vietnam, the Cham raised tall towers. They carved the image of the god of creation into stone. And they looked up at his four faces as if they were looking into the four directions of the universe.

At the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang, you can stand today before stones a thousand years old and see what the Cham wanted to tell us. Before heaven and earth took shape, there was already a seed. Before time began to count, someone was already sitting on a lotus, looking in four directions, and beginning to create the world.

Those stone faces are still looking. Since the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, through all the changes of earth and sky, Brahma has remained, his four faces turned to the four quarters, as if he had never stopped creating.