This is why I now see Rand as the “anti-Buddha.” Throughout much of the book series, Rand struggles with this question of suffering. The means are different but the goal of both is the same, to escape the suffering that comes with the cycle of rebirth. Isamael’s goal is to end the cycle of rebirth and escape suffering through releasing the Dark One from his prison and being annihilated. We suffer, Prothero writes, because of “our tendency to mistake things that are changing as unchanging and then to cling desperately to their supposedly unchanging forms.” The goal of Buddhism is to end the cycle of rebirth and escape suffering by releasing the changeable things we cling to and reaching nirvana. According to both Buddhists and, in the Wheel of Time, the villainous Forsaken Ishamael, “rebirth is undesirable because life is marked with suffering.” The first two insights of the Buddha is that human existence is characterized by suffering, and that this suffering has an origin. In both Buddhism and the Wheel of Time, there is a cycle of life, death and rebirth, called Samsara in Hinduism and Buddhism. The questions characters in WoT ask aren’t ‘how can a good God create evil?’ (because the Creator isn’t necessarily good in their cosmology), they’re more like ‘what’s the point of living and suffering only to be ceaselessly reborn?’ Despite having a singular Creator, which implies a monotheistic world, the spiritual problems of the people of WoT are much closer to the problems addressed by Buddhism because of the shared cycle of reincarnation. Where the major monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam view God as not just good, but the source and very essence of all goodness (as well as love, joy, peace, etc.) not all religions depend on having a central good God. While I stand by my criticism of the Creator for creating evil and my refusal to acknowledge the Creator as good, I was coming at the theology of the world from a very Christian biased perspective. It doesn’t matter what they want, they must do good because there is no evil. This is justified in the books by the following argument: without evil, the people in the universe are mere automatons that must do good. The creation of the Dark One in order for evil to exist is my problem with the Creator. Not much is known about the Creator, other than they created the universe including the Dark One, the embodiment of and source of all evil. My last article is basically a diatribe against the Creator. I also think Rand al’Thor, the hero and prophesied savior of the Wheel of Time, is the anti-Buddha. This has changed how I think about the theological landscape of the WoT universe. In Prothero’s book, different religions don’t have the same endpoint, they have the same beginning, a sense that life is not what it should be.
As per the title, he presents eight major world religions not all as fundamentally the same phenomenon which manifest in different ways, but as eight rival ways of stating a problem and solution to the challenges of the world. I've been reading Stephen Prothero's book God is not One, his world religions class condensed into a single book. Just as the Wheel of Time constantly turns, and what once was is again, I'm reevaluating the theology of the Wheel of Time.
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