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Where does this come from?
ScottPen
Maryland Veteran
I've read that nowhere in the Pali Canon does the Buddha identify himself by name. Is this correct? If so, where did people get the idea that it was Siddhartha Gautama?
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The Buddha does not identify himself by name. But before he was the Buddha, he was Siddhartha Gautama...
Siddhartha is a title, meaning "one that has accomplished the goal".
You can read it in Pāli texts as Siddhattha.
The first text to treat "Siddhartha Gautama" as a proper name for the Buddha is Aśvaghoṣasyabuddhacarita (which can be read here) from approx 150CE, but it is not a sūtra, but rather, a medieval Buddhist historical epic of the time.
Thanks! I've never seen this actually referenced. I'm going to give it a read.
OK hold on, is it not in the Buddhavamsa as well?
Well, nowhere in the first four nikayas is the name Siddhattha mentioned (although Gotama is, e.g., MN 57, DN 3, etc.); but from what I understand, it is found in some of the later additions to the Pali Canon (i.e., the Apadana, Buddhavamsa, etc.). There's some debate as to whether it was his given name or something he was called afterwards, more as a epithet. Interestingly enough, Siddhartha was the name of Mahavira's father, a contemporary of the Buddha's, who was also a king. It may be that this was a common name in that time and region. Or, as S. Dhammika suspects, "When in later centuries a full biography of the Buddha was needed, much of the details were ‘lifted’ from the biography of Mahavira." Who knows?
Thanks @Jason!
Our 'Font of all Knowledge', is our @Jason.
Well-read doesn't cover it....
It is also in the Therāpadāna abundantly, and in the late Medieval prose-sections of the Pāli Jākata Tales, to the extent where they says "Prince Siddhattha", but these are very late additions to the Pāli Canon, the prose expansions of the Jākata Tales being later by far than the Therāpadāna.
This is the kind of appearance "Siddhattha" makes in the Pāli Canon:
(Khuddakanikāye-therāpadāna CXCVII)
Notice the sequence: "lokanāyakaṃ, siddhatthaṃ, tibhavantaguṃ".
This is a list of titles, some of them could be names, it is similar to: "arahaṃ, sammāsambuddho, bhagavā", or "the praise-worthy, the perfectly-enlightened, the lord".
Sorry, my English is off here.
"perfecter" should be "perfector": one that perfects.
Thanks again, @Vimalajāti, I thought there had to be more to it than I was finding.
Also something sort of interesting that not a lot of people talk about.
In the Chinese āgamasūtrāṇi (texts with content parallel to the Pāli scriptures), Gautama is treated as a personal name for the Buddha throughout, in the form of 瞿曇 (Qú Tán, historical pronunciation being like Gyo Dama). These are very old scriptures, old as the Pāli material, but in the Pāli texts, as far as I know, they do not do this as often, have people call the Buddha "Gautama" directly, as a name.