He may never have mentioned it to his Sangha, even in the very begging.
After all, he left all that behind long before his enlightenment, wandered far, had successive teachers, went of into the wilderness to practice austerities... even the original group of five may only have known him by a religious title or designation, and talk about ones worldly past was probably not encouraged!
The picture of the Buddhas former, worldly life that always sticks with me is him reminiscing about discovering the first Jhana, under a shady tree, watching his parents harvest the feild, it hardly sounds like the life of a "raja", but it sounds nice.
*I also like the way he tells Ananda that he needs to rest his aching back :) *
Perhaps Gotoma was an early Brahmin supporter after the enlightenment?
Thanks for your comments. Yes I think you are right - he probably let go of his former identity when he went forth, though the story of his return home to see his father is quite moving.
As I recall the story of the first experience of jhana under the Roseapple tree his father was ploughing the field. This first ploughing was a traditional role for the king/leader in many societies as a kind of rite to ensure fertility. Indeed ploughing the furrows is used as a metaphor for sex in some Indian literature. By doing the first ploughing, the king - as the embodiment of the divine - ensures their productivity: he is the divine father impregnating the divine mother (earth).
As the stories have come down to us the Buddha never thought much of the hereditary Brahmins - they are often treated as a source of amusement. The Buddha in fact tried to redefine the word Brahmin to mean someone like himself, liberated from suffering, which when you think about it was a very radical thing to say to a 1000 year old tradition!
I always taught that the name Siddhārtha was just a title, rather than Śākyamuni's proper name. I never read anything critical about that information, so your pointers are welcome! I just had this idea that if Siddhatta is Siddhārtha, therefore meaning "accomplished purpose", then it makes even more sense as a title in the later context of Mahāyāna, where complete Awakening and teaching others towards Awakening is precisely the intent or purpose of a bodhisattva, even for you or me... I'm wondering if you have any new insight about this name ? Thanks, and I hope you had a great Būddha day.
@AlAiN The short answer is that I don't know. I haven't looked beyond the Pāli sources. But there were people in Pāli who's name was Siddhattha, just not our Gotama. Siddharth is a fairly common name in modern Hindi as well (try Googling it!). So there's no reason to assume that when the name was given that it wasn't a name, but a title. If I have time I'll see if I can locate some of the early Sanskrit sources to see whether the use the name.
In fact none of the epithets of the Buddha are likely to have been titles except bhagavan, and even that is more descriptive, meaning 'fortunate'. Words like arahant, buddha, tathāgata, and even bodhisattva are descriptions not titles. Though Śākyamuni is a title - the sage of the Śākyas - and I would be interested to know when it was first used as well. Not in Pāli.
I'm not sure where the idea of giving the Buddha titles comes from - they didn't have many titles in ancient India other than functional ones: rāja, mahārāja, mahāmatta. Titles suggest entirely the wrong kind of attitude to my ear. What use does someone with no delusions have for a title? I wonder whether we are influenced by European aristocratic history, or by the Tibetan practice of adopting the titles of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy?
Oh! great! Thanks for the quick and thoughtful response. As for title i get your drift and i certainly did not use this word as granted by a hierarchy, but even in french i'm at a loss for finding a better word, that would be a name conveying the respectful recognition of someone's qualities or accomplishments, such as those of the Victors. So… -honorific name, metonymic name ? ( !! > even here, respect and honor have dubious connotations.)
Ther may be no need to publish this, as it's getting chatty, but i only knew epithet as a fancy equivalent for adjective and i now realize it's a calque like compassion and sympathy. This idea of metonymic name is making it's way in my mind, so i guess i would settle for metonym. A metonym would then refer to a particular quality of a person, replacing its name, rather than just being added. > I have yet to bother about knowing if Tathāgata is a metaphor or metonymy of Gautama ! (smiling)
Every word in English is a calque - (very roughly speaking) 45% of our vocab is French, 45% is German - the other 10% is Latin, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Chinese etc.
You could say that 'Buddha' is a metonym - but then any descriptive name is to the extent that it focuses on one particular aspect. And is this not what all names do? But most English speaking people, I have found, aren't familiar with this word metonym (which is itself a calque from Latin: it is a) or it's Greek derived synonym 'synechdoche'. For such a common phenomena you might want to choose a word that is better known. Adjective, or description perhaps? Or just 'name'. But recall what Shakespeare said on the subject of names...
There is some confusion early on about what Tathāgata means - I wrote about it in a blog post Feb 2009. The original meaning probably was 'one who is like that', i.e. one who is in the state of nirodha, or nibbāna, or vimutti, etc.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
[Image]In the Pāli texts his followers called him Bhagavan. Other people tended to call him Gotama or 'sāmaṇa' depending on whether they were being polite or impolite. Later is was established that his name was Siddhartha Gautama. In this essay I want to take a brief look at the evidence we have for what the Buddha's name was, or as we shall see, what it probably wasn't.
The name Siddhartha occurs in the Pāli texts, in the form Siddhattha, only in the Jātakas and later commentarial works. It is not used in the Nikāyas or Vinaya as the name of the Buddha, though it is used for other people. The Jātakas are legendary material which we can't take seriously as historical accounts. Siddhartha is used in the Sanskrit Mahāvastu - technically a vinaya text of the Mahāsaṅghika sect but actually an extended and much elaborated biography, really a hagiography of the Buddha. The fact is that the more strictly biographical accounts of the Buddha, such as the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, make no mention of his given name at all! The best we can say is that apart from the name Siddhartha there is no other name mentioned as a contender.
Gautama (P. Gotama) is something of a puzzle because it is a distinctively Brahmin name. There are several well known Brahmin philosophers called Gautama, and even a Brahminical Gautama Sūtra. Gautama is a traditional Brahmin gotra (P. gotta) name. The gotra is like a clan name, and indicates people descended from a particular ancestor. While the Vedic Brahmins did not worship their ancestors, whom they referred to as the pitaraḥ 'the fathers', they did revere them and in earlier versions of rebirth theories the good Brahmin would leave this world and go to the world of his fathers (women were not included in this scheme) for a time before coming back to this world. A hint into the original use of this term is that it also means a cow (go) shed (tra, 'protection') - the image is of the herd of cows enclosed and protected, similar to the relationship of the individual to the clan group. Only a few dozen traditional gotra names are recorded (there are lists in the pre-Buddhist Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad for instance). Monier-Williams' Dictionary suggests there are 49, and gives Gautama as one of his examples in his Sanskrit dictionary.
It is mentioned many times through the Buddhist canon that the Buddha was a kṣatriya - that is of the class (varṇa) [1] which is associated with rulers and secular leadership - sometimes kṣatriya and rāja 'king, ruler' are treated as synonyms. The other three classes were priests (brāhmaṇa) merchants (vaiṣya) and peasants (śudra). Although the Buddha's father was referred to as a 'rāja' at that time the Śākya nation was more like an oligarchy or republic. Rāja cannot really mean king or royalty in this context, and probably just means 'leader' and even then one leader amongst many. In the commentarial traditions we find that the Śākyas did not follow Vedic, but Dravidian marriage customs, suggesting that perhaps they were not Āryans [2] at all (though this is a late tradition it must have had the ring of truth to survive since it contradicts his being a kṣatriya, which is a more convenient appellation in caste conscious India). There are pockets of Dravidian speaking peoples in North India still and it is usually assumed that they were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Ganges plain and were displaced by the encroaching Vedic/Sanskrit speaking peoples. There is some doubt about this theory now, and of course it tends to ignore the other major language group in India - Muṇḍa - traces of which can be found in the Ṛgveda (see my discussion of the Dhp 1 and 2 for an example of a Muṇḍa loan word in Sanskrit and Pāli). In any case politically and it seems socially the Śākyas were distinct from the Brahmins - making the fact of the Buddha's Brahmin surname even more odd.
There is evidence that Brahmins were not above adopting clans into the Āryan class/caste system - sometimes making their priests honorary Brahmins. It has been suggested that perhaps the Śākyans employed a Brahmin purohita (a priest) and adopted his gotra name. If this is true it shows how very powerful the influence of the Brahmins was on the culture of Greater Magadha even at this early stage when it was dominated by the various śramaṇa groups. The Vedic languages were a powerful means of cultural imperialism.
To summarise then: while there is no other contender the name Siddhartha is not associated with the Buddha in the earliest texts, though Gautama is. Gautama however is a distinctive traditional Brahmin name which does not fit the general picture of the Buddha's non-Brahmin, probably non-Āryan background.
Such uncertainty does not sit well with religious sentiments, and so the legends which filled the gaps in our knowledge gained the status of facts: the Buddha's name simply is Siddhartha Gautama and we 'know' many details of his parentage and life. Of course it is possible that the legend is based on a fact not recorded in the suttas, however unlikely this seems. Perhaps the Buddha deliberately obscured aspects of his pre-enlightenment existence. I've noticed that occasionally when people wish to belittle me they will insist on using my birth name instead of my Buddhist name - particularly when denying the validity of my ordination. Perhaps the Buddha wished to create a bit of distance between that old identity and 'the Tathāgata'. Other details of his life are equally vague, and even more elaborately filled in by Buddhists. Indeed the further we get from the actual life the more elaborate the stories become until they leave behind any sense of historicity.
Does it matter? I think not. The Buddha is a symbol of our potential - every human being if they pursue the dhamma can become 'like that' (tathāgata), i.e. we can all have that experience which the Buddha had. The fact is that people have been having that experience ever since the Buddha's first disciples and right down to the present. Buddhists do not rely on the divinity of the Buddha. We have the dhamma - the ways and means of following the Buddha. We have the Saṅgha - each other, but more especially those with experience, with the experience, to support and guide us. The main reason for pointing out the problems with the hagiographic narratives is to prevent us from deifying that version of the Buddha who is more a product of human imagination than of history. Such a figure must remain a symbol and not become an idol if we are to retain the spirit of the Buddha's teaching.
30.7.10 Update:
See also Some Additional Notes which looks again at the issue of the name Gautama.
18.5.2011 Update:
The word śākyamuni is used in the Lalitavisatara and the Mahāvastu, two of the earliest Mahāyāna texts. It also occurs in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā [Sūtra] where several times we find the phrase:
śākyamunirnāma tathāgato 'rhan samyaksaṃbuddho vidyācaraṇasaṃpannaḥ sugato lokavid anuttaraḥ puruṣadamyasārathiḥ śāstā devānāṃ ca manuṣyānāṃ ca buddho bhagavāniti
The tathāgata named Śākyamuni: the worthy, the fully and perfectly awoken, endowed with knowledge and conduct, in a good state, excelled in understanding the world, a trainer of people, a charioteer for gods and humans, awakened, fortunate.
More or less this same phrase is found in the Ajitasenavyākaraṇa which Williams discusses as a Mahāyāna sūtra that originally belonged to a pre-mahāyāna tradition (Mahāyāna Buddhism, p.26). The phrase śākyamuniṃ tathāgataṃ appears to occur only once in both the long and short Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras.
This is a brief and far from comprehensive survey of the Mahāyāna sūtras generally acknowledged to be early, and which can be found online and searched electronically. While not universal, nor always prominent, the name does seem to be established by the time these texts were composed - by perhaps the first century before the common era or a little before, but probably post Aśoka (to take him as a reference point).
Notes
Class' better captures the higher level fourfold division of Indian society. 'Caste' is a translation of jāti 'birth' which is also used this way in Pāli - see e.g. the Pūraḷāsa Sutta in the Suttanipāta. Jāti often referred to one's specific occupation.
'Āryan' as a cultural description is falling out of favour because it is seen as politically incorrect. The people in question probably spoke a range of dialects all related very closely to Vedic or Sanskrit and to Iranian languages of the same period - I've seen it said for instance that Pāli is not descended directly from the Vedic of the Vedas, but from a near relative. Anyway I'm now uncertain how to refer to the people (if they were a people) or this family of languages. Vedic is not quite right, and Sanskrit has only limited applicability.
11 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formThanks for your blog! Great work.
Perhaps his name was simply never known at all!
He may never have mentioned it to his Sangha, even in the very begging.
After all, he left all that behind long before his enlightenment, wandered far, had successive teachers, went of into the wilderness to practice austerities... even the original group of five may only have known him by a religious title or designation, and talk about ones worldly past was probably not encouraged!
The picture of the Buddhas former, worldly life that always sticks with me is him reminiscing about discovering the first Jhana, under a shady tree, watching his parents harvest the feild, it hardly sounds like the life of a "raja", but it sounds nice.
*I also like the way he tells Ananda that he needs to rest his aching back :) *
Perhaps Gotoma was an early Brahmin supporter after the enlightenment?
Friday, November 20, 2009
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for your comments. Yes I think you are right - he probably let go of his former identity when he went forth, though the story of his return home to see his father is quite moving.
As I recall the story of the first experience of jhana under the Roseapple tree his father was ploughing the field. This first ploughing was a traditional role for the king/leader in many societies as a kind of rite to ensure fertility. Indeed ploughing the furrows is used as a metaphor for sex in some Indian literature. By doing the first ploughing, the king - as the embodiment of the divine - ensures their productivity: he is the divine father impregnating the divine mother (earth).
As the stories have come down to us the Buddha never thought much of the hereditary Brahmins - they are often treated as a source of amusement. The Buddha in fact tried to redefine the word Brahmin to mean someone like himself, liberated from suffering, which when you think about it was a very radical thing to say to a 1000 year old tradition!
Thanks again
Jayarava
Friday, November 20, 2009
Yeah... thanks for your blog. You are doing a great work.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Hi Jamie
I appreciate the thumbs up!
Jayarava
Friday, November 20, 2009
I always taught that the name Siddhārtha was just a title, rather than Śākyamuni's proper name. I never read anything critical about that information, so your pointers are welcome! I just had this idea that if Siddhatta is Siddhārtha, therefore meaning "accomplished purpose", then it makes even more sense as a title in the later context of Mahāyāna, where complete Awakening and teaching others towards Awakening is precisely the intent or purpose of a bodhisattva, even for you or me... I'm wondering if you have any new insight about this name ? Thanks, and I hope you had a great Būddha day.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
@AlAiN The short answer is that I don't know. I haven't looked beyond the Pāli sources. But there were people in Pāli who's name was Siddhattha, just not our Gotama. Siddharth is a fairly common name in modern Hindi as well (try Googling it!). So there's no reason to assume that when the name was given that it wasn't a name, but a title. If I have time I'll see if I can locate some of the early Sanskrit sources to see whether the use the name.
In fact none of the epithets of the Buddha are likely to have been titles except bhagavan, and even that is more descriptive, meaning 'fortunate'. Words like arahant, buddha, tathāgata, and even bodhisattva are descriptions not titles. Though Śākyamuni is a title - the sage of the Śākyas - and I would be interested to know when it was first used as well. Not in Pāli.
I'm not sure where the idea of giving the Buddha titles comes from - they didn't have many titles in ancient India other than functional ones: rāja, mahārāja, mahāmatta. Titles suggest entirely the wrong kind of attitude to my ear. What use does someone with no delusions have for a title? I wonder whether we are influenced by European aristocratic history, or by the Tibetan practice of adopting the titles of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy?
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
@AlAiN I've appended a brief survey of some of the easily accessible early Mahāyāna Sūtras and their use of the name Śākyamuni to the end of the post.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Oh! great! Thanks for the quick and thoughtful response. As for title i get your drift and i certainly did not use this word as granted by a hierarchy, but even in french i'm at a loss for finding a better word, that would be a name conveying the respectful recognition of someone's qualities or accomplishments, such as those of the Victors. So… -honorific name, metonymic name ? ( !! > even here, respect and honor have dubious connotations.)
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
@AlAiN. Yes I see what you mean. I tend to opt for epithet "descriptive name for a person or thing".
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Ther may be no need to publish this, as it's getting chatty, but i only knew epithet as a fancy equivalent for adjective and i now realize it's a calque like compassion and sympathy. This idea of metonymic name is making it's way in my mind, so i guess i would settle for metonym. A metonym would then refer to a particular quality of a person, replacing its name, rather than just being added. > I have yet to bother about knowing if Tathāgata is a metaphor or metonymy of Gautama ! (smiling)
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
@AlAiN. Chat is fine as long as it's on topic.
Every word in English is a calque - (very roughly speaking) 45% of our vocab is French, 45% is German - the other 10% is Latin, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Chinese etc.
You could say that 'Buddha' is a metonym - but then any descriptive name is to the extent that it focuses on one particular aspect. And is this not what all names do? But most English speaking people, I have found, aren't familiar with this word metonym (which is itself a calque from Latin: it is a) or it's Greek derived synonym 'synechdoche'. For such a common phenomena you might want to choose a word that is better known. Adjective, or description perhaps? Or just 'name'. But recall what Shakespeare said on the subject of names...
There is some confusion early on about what Tathāgata means - I wrote about it in a blog post Feb 2009. The original meaning probably was 'one who is like that', i.e. one who is in the state of nirodha, or nibbāna, or vimutti, etc.
Thursday, May 19, 2011