That's David Lake's "Creator".
(1978); The 1979 Annual World's Best SF, ed. Donald A. Wollheim
On the planet Olympus, the immortal Jay Crystal is excited when the Installer from the Creation Corp. arrives to install the creatron. The Installer demonstrates the device, including creating a 1D universe and a flatland. And yes, it's a great universe sandbox machine, and the Jay eventually creates the earth and mankind. He starts to see his creations as independent beings, and that he was responsible for their ills. Then Jay begins using the Total Empathy button...
[...] he was in the man under the tree.
He felt a great compassion rise in him, as he looked through the man's eyes at the crowd. Suffering -- all the world was suffering, birth was suffering, old age was suffering, sickness was suffering, death was suffering. Contact with unpleasant things was suffering, parting from what one wanted was suffering. And now only he knew the cure, only he could reach that best way out, the Middle Path...
And so he, the Enlightened One, taught them.
From there, Jay was addicted. He spent more and more time with his creation trying to build an ethical civilization... until they pull him bloody and unconscious from the machine. His wounds, at wrists, at ankles, and the great wound in his side are quickly healed. The Total Empathy function is removed, Jay's addiction is cured, but he still lets the simulation run. He was astonished to find himself hailed as a god, and an Empire rising in his name. Two thousand years since the accident, he continues check back in on his universe, although only at a medium empathy level.
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