Hinduism's creator god has almost no worshippers and very few temples
Brahma is the Creator in Hinduism's great trinity, alongside Vishnu and Shiva, yet today he has no significant sect and only a handful of temples in India, the best known at Pushkar in Rajasthan. By the seventh century his cult had faded, and myths offer colourful explanations for his demotion.
He is usually shown as a bearded man with a red or golden complexion, four heads and four hands, seated on a lotus and riding a swan-like bird called a hamsa. The four heads face the cardinal directions and stand for the four Vedas. His children, according to scripture, were born from his mind. His wife Sarasvati is said to bring the quality of balance and goodness, known as sattva, to complement his restless energy, rajas.
His name is easily confused with related words. The neuter brahman names the genderless ultimate reality, while the masculine form, Brahma, is the personal god, and some scholars think the god emerged as a visible icon of that abstract principle. The Maitrayaniya Upanishad, probably from the late first millennium BCE, contains one of the earliest mentions of Brahma alongside Vishnu and Shiva, linking him to rajas, but it does not yet present the three as a division of labour.
Between roughly the second and sixth centuries CE, Brahma had his own sect. Texts such as the Brahmanda Purana describe an endless ocean from which a golden egg, the Hiranyagarbha, appeared; Brahma, having created himself inside it, broke out and made the world. Yet in most Puranas he is only a secondary creator, shaping forms within a universe produced by a higher deity. Vishnu-centred texts have him born from a lotus growing from Vishnu's navel, while Shiva-centred ones reverse the hierarchy. Like other gods he is mortal, dissolving at the end of each cosmic cycle and reborn in the next, and one day and night of his life equals a vast cosmic period.
Historians link his decline to the rise of Shaivism and Vaishnavism. Mythology prefers a moral tale: in the Shiva Purana, Brahma and Vishnu search for the ends of an infinite pillar of fire, and Brahma falsely claims success with a ketaki flower as his witness, so Shiva strips him of popular worship and one of his five heads. Outside India, the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok is hugely popular with Thai Buddhists.
Source: Brahma
