Who are the deities explained in Buddism?
Well, I don’t have a strong working theory on that. But to answer this we will have to go back in time again. So as I explained in my previous comment there was a need for religions to control the masses. So Buddhism is one of those late developed religions that has borrowed so many concepts from other religions that existed around that time. One of them is the concept of ‘deities’ (if not called gods).
So the method of crowd controlling that Buddism use is sins and virtues. The concept goes in simple terms as if you are avoiding sins and leans toward virtues you are going to heaven and become a deity. So as early leaders did a couple of thousand years back, Buddha also had to give people something to believe in. Remember these are the same people who didn’t believe Buddha is enlightened before he has shown ‘pelahara’. So he needed something, a backstory to keep people believing in this new (I’d say rather modified) value system.
People back in those days might have seen optical illusions the same as people these days do. So my best guess is Buddha has capitalised on them to this “deities’ story.
Well, I don’t say Buddha did all this in a bad way. But still, there are many deceptive measures abundant in Buddhism. Some are even justified in modern teachings.
In the end, Buddhism has also served as a mass controlling method, mostly. I’m not saying there is nothing to get from it. I see there are good concepts like causality (හේතුඵලවාදය) and four noble truths (චතුරාර්ය සත්ය). There’s a lot to learn in there. But as a religion, it’s also the same as any other religion. You don’t have to take it as it is preached. Well, I don’t. I don’t follow Buddhism anymore. In fact, I don’t follow any religion. It feels so free not to be attached to any value system.