ethics

This is one of a series of articles where I’ve been mythbusting things people “know” about the Buddha. These myths include the supposed facts that he was a prince, that he was born a Hindu, and that he left home after seeing “four sights.”

Such factoids are present in almost every book book about the Buddha and Buddhism. Yet if we look with a little historical awareness at our earliest sources — the scriptures — we see that none of these things is true.

In this article I want to mythbust something else that everyone thinks they know, which is the Buddha’s personal name having been “Siddhartha” (Siddhattha in Pāli). The evidence we have indicates that it wasn’t.

The short story is that the name Siddhartha isn’t found in the early scriptures, and is a name given to the Buddha after his death. If you’re interested in the long story, continue reading…

Siddhartha was an epithet, not a name

Siddhartha (Siddhattha in Pali) means “one who has accomplished (siddha) his aims (attha).”

In none of the scriptural discourses — the suttas — is the Buddha referred to as Siddhartha. This name is only found in a few very late texts, such as the Apadāna, the Buddhavaṁsa, and the Milindapañha, which post-date the Buddha’s death.

Rather than being a personal name, Siddhattha is an epithet, which is “an adjective or phrase expressing a quality or attribute regarded as characteristic of the person or thing mentioned.”

People applied many epithets to the Buddha, including Sugata (the one well come), Tathāgatha (the one thus gone), and of course Buddha itself (the one who is awakened). The Buddha most often referred to himself as Tathāgatha.

He’s sometimes, but rarely, referred to in the scriptures as Sakyamunī, “the sage of the Sakyans.” This is another epithet, and probably a late one. (The later Mahāyāna often refers to Gotama as Śākyamuni Buddha in order to distinguish him from other, mythic, Buddhas.)

First name, last name? It’s not so simple

We tend to read our contemporary assumptions about names back into ancient times. So we assume that people have to have a first name (or personal name) and a last name (or family name). Perhaps they have one or more middle names as well. We assume that the family name is shared by everyone in their father’s direct lineage. So my dad’s last name is Stephen, my dad’s dad had that name, I inherited it, and you’d expect my children to inherit it in turn. You’d expect someone to have only one family name. You wouldn’t expect the Stephen family to also be called something else, like “MacTavish,” for example.

But not everyone in the world shares these naming conventions. There are places where people only have one name. In Ethiopia, the tradition is that your last name is your father’s first name. My daughter’s first passport — an Ethiopian one — had her last name as Bodhipaksa, which is my first name.

In Iceland, your last name is your father’s first name with the added suffix -son or -dottir, depending on your gender. In Iceland I’d be Bodhipaksa Iansson, and my sister would have been Fiona Iansdottir. Although my sister and I were members of the same family, we would have different last names.

The  “first name followed by a family name” model is not universal in modern times, and we certainly can’t apply it to ancient India. We have to let-go of some assumptions before we consider the Buddha’s names.

The Buddha’s last names

That the Buddha was called Gotama (Gautama in Sanskrit) is not problematic. The scriptures bear witness to the fact that he was called Gotama, because people often call him that. They refer to him as “the ascetic Gotama” (samaṇa gotama) for example.

Gotama wasn’t exactly a family name in the way we understand it, though. It was a tribal, or gotra name.

Now, the Buddhist scholar Alexander Wynne tries to make a case for Gotama being the Buddha’s personal name rather than a gotra (tribal) name. Gotama was a Vedic family name, and the Buddha’s tribe were not followers of the Vedas, and so, he reckons, the Buddha’s family could not have been called Gotama.

But then in the scriptures you have things like this, where the Buddha is teaching the Sakyans of Kapilavatthu, his home town:

The Buddha spent much of the night educating, encouraging, firing up, and inspiring the Sakyans with a Dhamma talk. Then he dismissed them, saying, “The night is getting late, Gotamas. Please go at your convenience.”

The Buddha refers to his fellow Sakyans as “Gotamas,” which means that Gotama is not being used as a personal name. It’s a gotra (clan) name. The Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, is also referred to as Gotama. And his aunt and foster mother is known as Gotami, the feminine form of the name.

And at one point the Buddha says outright, “Gotama is my clan.”

What’s in a (clan) name?

A clan name is not necessarily what we would think of as a family name. You’ll notice that the Buddha, in the quote above, calls the Sakyans “Gotamas.” Sakya was a country. Under mainstream European naming conventions it’s not possible for even a small nation’s citizens to all have the same family name. It may be that different families in Sakya had different family-identifying names, but I’m not aware of any evidence for that in the scriptures, and I doubt that was the case. They were all Gotamas.

As for Wynne’s argument that Gotama is a Vedic name — the name of a sage — I’ve addressed that elsewhere. Sakka became a subject state of the kingdom of Kosala. It’s likely that as part of having their rulers legitimized, the Sakyans went through some kind of ceremony where they were aligned with the legendary Rishi Gautama. This Gautama would have been akin to a “patron saint.” The Sakyans didn’t otherwise follow Vedic traditions, but non-Vedic peoples taking on clan names based on Vedic figures was not uncommon.

Children of the Sun

The Sakyans weren’t just Gotamas. They had multiple, overlapping names.

Before his enlightenment the Buddha met King Bimbisāra of Maghada, who was curious about his origins. The Buddha-to-be explained,

Their clan [gotta] is named for the Sun [Ādicca],
they are Sakyans by birth.
I have gone forth from that family

So the Gotamas, or Sakyans, also went by the name Ādicca. This was another epithet.

Sometimes the Buddha referred to himself as “Ādiccabandhu.”  It means “kinsman of the sun” or  “of the Solar race.” Given the quote above, it’s likely that all Sakyans were called Ādiccabandhu.

So his family seems to have been both Ādicca(bandhu) and Gotama. Perhaps Ādicca, or Ādiccabandhu, was their original name and Gotama the one they were given as part of their legitimization by the Kosalans. Maybe Sakya was their original name, with Gotama being assigned by a king and Ādicca being an epithet. We just don’t know.

Rays of Light

It gets worse! The Gotama clan was also known as “Aṅgīrasa.” This name literally means “Rays of Light From the Limbs” but it refers to the spiritual descendants of the mythical Rishi (sage) Aṅgīras.

Some people have suggested Aṅgīrasa as the first name of the Buddha. It certainly sounds like it when you read a sutta like this:

I’m the son of the Buddha, the incomparable Aṅgīrasa, the unaffected,
the bearer of the unbearable.
You, Sakya, are my father’s father;
Gotama, you are my grandfather in the Dhamma.

A note in the Access to Insight translation of this discourse refers to an ancient commentarial suggestion that Aṅgīrasa was one of the Buddha’s personal names. But Aṅgīrasa is the name for a branch of the Gotama clan lineage. So it’s another “last name.”

We’re not used to the idea of having multiple last names. It’s not unknown, though. I said earlier that you wouldn’t expect a Stephen to also be a MacTavish, but in the Scottish clan system the Stephens are MacTavishes. While my relatives wouldn’t sign “MacTavish” on the dotted line, if you asked one of them what clan they belonged to the correct answer would be “MacTavish.” Maybe that’s similar to how the Sakyan clan system worked. I don’t think anyone knows.

Anyway, we have lots of overlapping clan names (or “last names”) for the Buddha, but no clear first name.

No names please, we’re enlightened

The Buddha in fact discouraged even the use of his gotra name, Gotama, at least if you were one of his followers and addressing him personally.

When, shortly after his awakening, he sought out his five former companions, they came to him and addressed him as “friend (āvuso) Gotama.” His response was:

Don’t address the Tathāgata  by name and as “friend.” The Tathāgata, friends, is a worthy one, rightly self-awakened.

“Tathāgata” was how the Buddha generally referred to himself. It’s another epithet, although seemingly a self-chosen one.

Presumably this restriction on the use of “Gotama” only applied to the Buddha’s followers, since respectful Brahmins tended to call him “worthy Gotama” (bho Gotama) or “master Gotama” (bhavaṁ Gotama). He didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

Sakyan exceptionalism

When it comes to names, the Sakyans, as in so many other areas, had different customs from the Brahmanical cultures to their south.

The Brahmins that came to talk to the Buddha seem to have referred to themselves by their clan names. But the Sakyans referred to themselves and each other primarily by what seem to be personal names.  Suddhodana, Ananda, Nanda, Suppabuddha, Anuruddha, and Devadatta: these are all relatives of the Buddha, and these appear to be their personal names.

So it’s significant that we don’t know the Buddha’s own personal name. It may be that referring to the enlightened one by a personal name might have been a taboo.

It might be similar to how images of the Buddha were not made during his lifetime, or for a long time thereafter.

After a few hundred years of cultural change, people (the Greeks, first of all) started creating Buddha images. Similarly, after a period of time people started to give the Buddha a first name: but they didn’t know what it originally was, so they tended use epithets to fill in the blank.

What’s in a name, anyway?

Our bureaucratic culture, where births and deaths are officially registered, insists that people must have one official name. In practice, though, “Alexander MacTavish” might use his full name, or be referred to as “Alex,” “Lex,” “Al,” “Big Al,” “Sandy,” “Xander,” etc. Of course, if you asked him what his first name “really” was, he’d answer that it was “Alexander” — his legally registered name. But they didn’t have such things in ancient India. In the system where there’s no such thing as an official first names, does the question “What’s the Buddha’s real first name?” actually mean anything?

Consider the Buddha’s wife. Most people who’ve studied Buddhism will confidently say she was called Yasodharā, but in doing that they’re making a choice to disregard the other names that she might have used or been known by. Rāhulamātā (Rāhula’s mother) is the most common name by which she’s known in the scriptures. Bhaddakaccānā is also found a couple of times in the scriptures. Gopi is most consistently used in other early sources. The editor of the Dictionary of Pali Proper Names posited that her name might have been “Bimbā.” Yasodharā only appears after her death.

During her life Yasodharā, to call her that for now, might have been known to different people at different times by some, all, or none of those names. The Buddha too might have had multiple names. He might have had one personal name as a child, and then another name as an adult. He might have had different personal names in different contexts — with his wife, parents, friends, and so on. He might have had a secret, ritual name. We just don’t know. His personal name, or names, has been lost.

A sacred silence

We need to learn to be comfortable with not knowing what the Buddha was called. Our minds tend to want to fill in the gaps, but in this case we don’t even have a sound basis for guessing. Our minds want to fit the Buddha’s names into our modern, bureaucratically influenced naming conventions, but we would be wise to resist that impulse.

If it helps, perhaps we could consider that if it wasn’t important for early Buddhists to record the Buddha’s name, it shouldn’t be important to us either. In the mental space where his personal name would go, we could perhaps let a sacred silence take root.

When people first started carving or painting scenes from the Buddha’s life, they left a space where the Buddha would be. For example, you’d see the tree where he was meditating, but not him. You’d see his footprint, but not his foot.

Scholars call this “the aniconic Buddha.” The absence of the Buddha was a sacred space of awe and reverence. The place where the Buddha’s name should be could be like that, too.

An ethical issue

Ethically, we should not state something to be the case unless we are certain it was. We certainly shouldn’t say that the Buddha’s first name was Siddhattha or Siddhartha. We can honestly tell people he he was called Gotama. People did call him that. We can say that Gotama was something like a last name.

We can still call the Buddha “Siddhārtha” or “Siddhattha,” of course, but we should also explain that this is something akin to a title, and not a first name as we understand that term today.

By acknowledging this, we communicate to people: It’s okay not to know things. We don’t have to make things up. We don’t need to create the illusion of knowing. When there is reason to be uncertain, we should refrain from false certainties.

When something is unknown, it’s honest to say that it’s unknown. And the Buddha’s personal name is unknown.

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