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The meanings of the name ‘Tathagata’
Legend has it
that when Gautama, recently fully awakened (i.e. by attaining
samma-sambuddho), arrived at Sarnath he asked that he no longer be addressed
as ‘friend’. For, as he proclaimed, he was now a tathāgata. In the past
two centuries, as the tathāgata’s dhamma was being recovered and
translated, well meaning Christian amateur translators with Sanskrit
backgrounds tried, in vain, to resolve the mystery surrounding the meaning of
that name. The Sanskrit variant
of the term tathâgata was rendered in English as: ‘faring or behaving thus’,
‘so conditioned’, ‘such’. The Pali variant, spelt tathāgata, was
interpreted to mean: ‘thus gone’, ‘thus come’, the good missus of Rhys Davids
translating it (no doubt to suit her and hubby’s Anglican need) as: ‘He who
has won through to the truth’, and which is sheer awful nonsense. By all
accounts, the Tathāgata was a very intelligent man. So, being smart, he
expressed the essence of his expedient means in his name (and which is why
makers of shoes tended to be called Shoemaker, or Schumacher), as he would do
later on with his robe (Pali: civara). The Tathāgata did not call
himself Buddha; nor did he call his dhamma Buddhism. It is
generally agreed, even by non-buddhists, that tatha (possibly an adverb)
means: ‘that’, possibly ‘thus’. In Pali, gata means gone. So, if the two are
put together it means ‘that or thus gone’. Obviously,
what the name meant when the Tathāgata first used it was obvious to
everyone. The Tathāgata didn’t define its meaning; nor did anyone every
question its meaning. 19th century etymological reconstruction of
the name led to an impasse, namely the question, ‘Gone where?’ There has,
however, never been uncertainty about the meaning of Tathāgata for those
who have truly understood the dhamma. Tathāgata did not mean ‘thus or
that gone’ but ‘gone thus or that’. In other words, ‘thus or that is gone,
become extinct, ceased, annihilated.’ In short, the name Tathāgata expresses Gautama’s essential
insight, achieved during ‘awakening’, and which would serve as modus
operandi of his expedient means, namely that the
notion (and reality) of ‘thus’ or ‘that’ had been eliminated (that is
to say, because ‘thus’ or ‘that’, and which included ‘this’, were an’atta). In other
words, Tathāgata means: gone (extinct, ceased) is ‘thus’ or ‘that’ (to
wit, ‘thus’ or that’ are ‘neti, neti’). When Gautama
took the name Tathāgata he became the Zero Man, i.e. of ‘no fixed
abode’, never again expressing a fixed position (or opinion) on any ‘thing’. Topics Index
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