The Buddha
Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist legends, he was born in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, to royal parents of the Shakya clan, but renounced his home life to live as a wandering ascetic. After leading a life of mendicancy, asceticism, and meditation, he attained nirvana at Bodh Gaya in what is now Bihar, India. The Buddha then wandered through the lower Indo-Gangetic Plain, teaching and building a monastic order. Buddhist tradition holds he died in Kushinagar and reached parinirvana.
According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha taught a Middle Way between sensual indulgence and severe asceticism, leading to freedom from ignorance, craving, rebirth, and suffering. His core teachings are summarised in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, a training of the mind that includes ethical training and kindness toward others, and meditative practices such as sense restraint, mindfulness, dhyana. Another key element of his teachings are the concepts of the five skandhas and dependent origination, describing how all dharmas come into being, and cease to be, depending on other dharmas, lacking an existence on their own.
While in the Nikayas, he frequently refers to himself as the Tathāgata; the earliest attestation of the title Buddha is from the 3rd century BCE, meaning 'Awakened One' or 'Enlightened One'. His teachings were compiled by the Buddhist community into the Vinaya Piṭaka, containing codes for monastic discipline, and the Sūtra Piṭaka, a collection of discourses attributed to him. These were passed down in Middle Indo-Aryan dialects through an oral tradition. Later generations composed additional texts, such as systematic treatises known as Abhidharma, biographies of the Buddha, collections of stories about his past lives known as Jataka tales, and additional discourses, i.e., the Mahāyāna sūtras.
Buddhism evolved into a variety of traditions and practices, represented by Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, and spread beyond the Indian subcontinent. While Buddhism declined in India, and mostly disappeared after the 8th century CE due to a lack of popular and economic support, Buddhism has grown more prominent in Southeast and East Asia.
Etymology, names and titles
Siddhārtha Gautama and Buddha Shakyamuni
According to Donald Lopez Jr. "he tended to be known as either Buddha or Sakyamuni in China, Korea, Japan, and Tibet, and as either Gotama Buddha or Samana Gotama in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia."Buddha, "Awakened One" or "Enlightened One", is the masculine form of budh, "to wake, be awake, observe, heed, attend, learn, become aware of, to know, be conscious again", "to awaken" to open up' ", "one who has awakened from the deep sleep of ignorance and opened his consciousness to encompass all objects of knowledge". It is not a personal name, but a title for those who have attained bodhi. Buddhi, the power to "form and retain concepts, reason, discern, judge, comprehend, understand", is the faculty which discerns truth from falsehood.
The name of his clan was Gautama. His given name, "Siddhārtha" ; the Pali rendering is "Siddhattha"; in Tibetan it is "Dhondup"; in Chinese "Xidaduo"; in Japanese "Shiddatta/Shittatta"; in Korean "Siltalta" means "He Who Achieves His Goal". The clan name of Gautama means "descendant of Gotama", "Gotama" meaning "one who has the most light", or "one who has most cows" and comes from the fact that Kshatriya clans adopted the names of their house priests.
While the term Buddha is used in the Agamas and the Pali Canon, the oldest surviving written records of the term Buddha is from the middle of the 3rd century BCE, when several Edicts of Ashoka mention the Buddha and Buddhism. Ashoka's Lumbini pillar inscription commemorates the Emperor's pilgrimage to Lumbini as the Buddha's birthplace, calling him the Buddha Shakyamuni.
Śākyamuni, Sakyamuni, or Shakyamuni means "Sage of the Shakyas".
Tathāgata
Tathāgata is a term the Buddha commonly used when referring to himself or other Buddhas in the Pāli Canon. The exact meaning of the term is unknown, but it is often thought to mean either "one who has thus gone", "one who has thus come", or sometimes "one who has thus not gone". This is interpreted as signifying that the Tathāgata is beyond all coming and going—beyond all transitory phenomena. A tathāgata is "immeasurable", "inscrutable", "hard to fathom", and "not apprehended".Other epithets
A list of other epithets is commonly seen together in canonical texts and depicts some of his perfected qualities:- Bhagavato – The Blessed one, one of the most used epithets, together with tathāgata
- Sammasambuddho – Perfectly self-awakened
- Vijja-carana-sampano – Endowed with higher knowledge and ideal conduct.
- Sugata – Well-gone or well-spoken.
- Lokavidu – Knower of the many worlds.
- Anuttaro Purisa-damma-sarathi – Unexcelled trainer of untrained people.
- Satthadeva-Manussanam – Teacher of gods and humans.
- Araham – Worthy of homage. An Arahant is "one with taints destroyed, who has lived the holy life, done what had to be done, laid down the burden, reached the true goal, destroyed the fetters of being, and is completely liberated through final knowledge".
- Jina – Conqueror. Although the term is more commonly used to name an individual who has attained liberation in the religion Jainism, it is also an alternative title for the Buddha.
Historical sources
Pali suttas
On the basis of philological evidence, Indologist and Pāli expert Oskar von Hinüber says that some of the Pāli suttas have retained very archaic place-names, syntax, and historical data from close to the Buddha's lifetime, including the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta which contains a detailed account of the Buddha's final days. Hinüber proposes a composition date of no later than 350–320 BCE for this text, which would allow for a "true historical memory" of the events approximately 60 years prior if the Short Chronology for the Buddha's lifetime is accepted.John S. Strong sees certain biographical fragments in the canonical texts preserved in Pāli, as well as Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit as the earliest material. These include texts such as the "Discourse on the Noble Quest" and its parallels in other languages.
Pillar and rock inscriptions
No written records about Gautama were found from his lifetime or from the one or two centuries thereafter. But from the middle of the 3rd century BCE, several Edicts of Ashoka mention the Buddha and Buddhism. Particularly, Ashoka's Lumbini pillar inscription commemorates the Emperor's pilgrimage to Lumbini as the Buddha's birthplace, calling him the Buddha Shakyamuni. Another one of his edicts mentions the titles of several Dhamma texts, establishing the existence of a written Buddhist tradition at least by the time of the Maurya era. These texts may be the precursor of the Pāli Canon."Sakamuni" is also mentioned in a relief of Bharhut, dated to, in relation with his illumination and the Bodhi tree, with the inscription Bhagavato Sakamunino Bodho.
Oldest surviving manuscripts
The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, found in Gandhara and written in Gāndhārī, they date from the first century BCE to the third century CE.Biographical sources
Early canonical sources include the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, the Mahāsaccaka-sutta, the Mahapadana Sutta, and the Achariyabhuta Sutta, which include selective accounts that may be older, but are not full biographies. The Jātaka tales retell previous lives of Gautama as a bodhisattva, and the first collection of these can be dated among the earliest Buddhist texts. The Mahāpadāna Sutta and Achariyabhuta Sutta both recount miraculous events surrounding Gautama's birth, such as the bodhisattva's descent from the Tuṣita Heaven into his mother's womb.The sources which present a complete picture of the life of Siddhārtha Gautama are a variety of different, and sometimes conflicting, traditional biographies from a later date. These include the Buddhacarita, Lalitavistara Sūtra, Mahāvastu, and the Nidānakathā. Of these, the Buddhacarita is the earliest full biography, an epic poem written by the poet Aśvaghoṣa in the first century CE. The Lalitavistara Sūtra is the next oldest biography, a Mahāyāna/Sarvāstivāda biography dating to the 3rd century CE.
The Mahāvastu from the Mahāsāṃghika Lokottaravāda tradition is another major biography, composed incrementally until perhaps the 4th century CE. The Dharmaguptaka biography of the Buddha is the most exhaustive, and is entitled the Abhiniṣkramaṇa Sūtra, and various Chinese translations of this date between the 3rd and 6th century CE. The Nidānakathā is from the Theravada tradition in Sri Lanka and was composed in the 5th century by Buddhaghoṣa.