Siddhattha Gotama - was it his name?

A)Why is this important? I can understand this sort of question is relevant to Christianity. If Jesus did not exist the whole Christianity fall apart.
b)Who is going to benefit from having an answer to this question?

For Buddhist, it is not relevant whether Buddha exists or not. What we have is Dhamma. Dhamma is not the monopoly of the Buddha (whoever he/she is). He discovered it.
What really matters to a Buddhist is whether we can attain the goal with existing Dhamma.

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You can ask @alaber. He had an EBT related question and this is the answer. @sujato mentioned that Siddhattha is mentioned 100 times in the canon, and I merely provide a specification.

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Whenever I read of some ‘scholar’ that takes a position that runs counter to what is generally accepted in the field, or takes exception to a position held by more learned and prominent scholars, I am interested in that person’s background and bias. In other words, are they just “poking bears” in order to raise their own profile, sell a book, or to otherwise make a name for themsleves in a crowded field of scholarship?

David Drews has made available this paper https://www.academia.edu/24039898/The_Idea_of_the_Historical_Buddha_Updated_2017_ , which is updated through 2017. I found it curious that with Vens. Sujato and Brahmali’s Authenticity project and paper available, he did not reference this work, which, to me, provides the research and forensics that establishes to a reasonable (high) degree of certainty the historicity of the Buddha. Others like Prof. Gombrich, a man of integrity and lengthy scholarship in the field, accept the historicity of the Buddha.

Prof. Drews cites as points of authority in his paper 19th and 20th century scholars, many of whom have positions eclipsed by better and more authoritative research. Perhaps that is Drews’ defense: that he bases his opinions only as relative to the credibility of poor sources. He seems not to seek out and evaluate credible and scholarly resources, given that his paper is current as of 2017.

His own students like his class. No doubt he is charming and persuasive. Yet, some reviews note that his grading largely depends on whether the student agrees with his positions: “Only downside to Drewes is that he isn’t always open to other opinions in his field–as long as you write his opinions on tests you’ll do great!” “The lectures can be very boring, and it is hard to pay attention. For tests and assignments, it is important to argue his opinion rather than yours.”

Drews may just be another young academic trying to make a name for himself.

I’d be interested to see if Drews ever has the cojones one day to take on The Autheticity of the Early Budhhist Texts. My guess is that he’ll never touch it. As some of his students suggest, he’s happiest when he’s listening to his own voice.

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If I ever heard my students say that, I would be horrified. Luckily, we don’t do grades!

When I see these denialist papers, it seems to me like a fever dream has gripped the academy. It reminds me of Julian Jaynes’ critique of behaviorism in The Origin of Consciousness:

… behaviorism charged out into the intellectual arena with the snorting assertion that consciousness is nothing at all. What a startling doctrine! But the really surprising thing is that, starting off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a movement that occupied center stage in psychology from about 1920 to 1960. … From the outside, this revolt against consciousness seemed to storm the ancient citadels of human thought and set its arrogant banners up in one university after another. But having once been a part of its major school, I confess it was not really what it seemed. Off the printed page, behaviorism was only a refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody really believed he was not conscious. And there was a very real hypocrisy abroad, as those interested in its problems were forcibly excluded from academic psychology, as text after text tried to smother the unwanted problem from student view. … the paper theories of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the material we are talking about.

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Although there’s a little (if we don’t want to say nothing) biographical information found in the EBTs, there’s a recent archeological evidence found can be a historical prove of the Buddha:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/buddha-birth-date-nepal_n_4340089.html

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See also:

The earliest Buddhist shrine: excavating the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal)

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It is interesting to contrast Buddhism with Jainism in this discussion. It appears name Siddhattha is common in those days as the names such as David and John are common in now day

https://dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Buddhism_and_Jainism

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Yes, naming is the first point in discrimination. (Mana)
By naming we apart from the rest of the world. Oneness of the world disappears.
Naming is the first weapon invented by men to control the mass.
Then they invented the date of birth to control the mass.
Now they use the finger prints and tax file numbers to control the mass.
By naming we first time lost our independence and privacy.

According to systems theory - and one could interpret the paticcasam. in a similar way - language invented men :slight_smile:

It’s interesting to get some idea to the person behind the criticism, but we shouldn’t overestimate it. I could say about almost everyone I dislike “s/he likes people who agree with her/him”. Students are not the peak of objectivity either. I also doubt that Wittgenstein or Lacan would have gotten ‘good ratings’ from all of their students. And maybe Ananda would have given Mahakassapa an A- too :wink:

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Well, Ananda was always known as a tough reviewer. :smile:

You’re right, Gabriel, and I was mostly put off by the Drews article in its entirety, the foundations for his opinions and the opinions themselves. I chose to go after him via his student reviews, which is, admittedly, “low hanging fruit.” It’s just troubling when there is good and current scholarship available on the historicity of the Buddha, that a professor would expose his students to such a limited and poorly founded view. I feel that educators have a duty to be more diligent than this, and to make an effort to present competing scholarly viewpoints, and give students some latitude to disagree, even allowing one to earn that “A” with an exam essay that disagrees with the professor’s views.

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@Gabriel how could someone interpret the paticcasamup. in a way that controls the mass?

With metta

Wow, that would be an interesting plot twist for Buddhism! What I meant of course is that one could interpret the paticcasamupada as telling us that language invented men since nama-rupa (and hence the ‘nama’-aspect) comes before what constitutes us as human beings (i.e. emotions and other mental faculties)

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“In the beginning was a verb” John 1:1

I think this is something for another thread.

Post-modern criticisms are only just that. In the ‘real world’, and not in the world of academia, millions are benefiting from the Buddha’s words. Not one of them need to know his real name.

With metta

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Hello all. I would like to propose a different direction to this discussion, the topic of which is actually extremely important and interesting. Can we agree that the name ‘Siddhattha’ is not found in early Buddhist texts, but rather is the name given to the Buddha later on, a name that actually means ‘He who has achieved his aim’, and which is therefore more of an epithet than a name? And can we agree that ‘Gotama’ is a gotta/gōtra name, not a personal name?

Now, in a very interesting passage in M18, when the newly-awakened Buddha first talks to his former companions, they address him by name and as ‘friend’. But he says to them, ‘do not address me by name and as ‘friend’.’ He refers to himself only as ‘Tathāgata’, and as ‘Buddha’. Is the implication not that the Buddha himself dissuaded his followers from using his personal name? As we know from the early Buddhist discourses, it is generally only non-Buddhists who refer to the Buddha as ‘Mr Gotama’; otherwise he is known by a range of epithets referring to his spiritual status.

In which case, it appears that we simply do not know the Buddha’s personal name – what his father and friends would have called him as a child. Nobody remembered it.

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Good point, it seems likely that the use of a personal name was actively discouraged, and clearly the matter was of little interest to the early disciples. But the whole situation is really a storm in a tea cup.

Regarding your other points, the argument about the name being an epithet, which of course is a common one, doesn’t really hold. The problem is that countless names in Pali straddle the line between what we would consider a proper name and an epithet/nickname, and it is clearly a characteristic of the culture to use names in this way. Moreover, there is little reason to think that a prominent family shouldn’t give an auspicious name to their favorite son.

Again, the argument about gotta names is just a distraction. Anyone familiar with Pali knows that it is a gotta name and that others are referred to by the same name. Gotama is commonly used for the Buddha in a way similar to how we would use a “surname”. The fact that it is not a personal name for him alone is no more meaningful than the fact that my surname is shared with others: it’s still my name.

That there is some uncertainty about the Buddha’s personal name is established by its absence from the early strata of texts. The rest doesn’t add anything; it’s just FUD.

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Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, talk radio, politics, religious organizations, and propaganda.
FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt - Wikipedia

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This is the first time I heard this acronym.
It sounds like the word for fart in Sinhalese.
:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Language is a wonderful thing!

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