The analysis of the philosophy in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is fascinating and groundbreaking.
I’m starting to think that it’s possible that ‘Gotama’ was a gotra inherited from the Buddha’s original teachers, and not his birth. The connections between the Buddha’s ideas and terminology is too strong with the Yājñavalkyan ideas in the Kāṇva Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (incl. the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad) as I dig deeper into this thesis. It’s really cool to understand these ideas in the earlier forms (in the actual Brāhmaṇas) and understand what the Upaniṣad is actually saying more.
As the author discusses, Gotama is associated with the eastern Vedic tradition and even the SB specifically—and comes from the Aṅgīrasas. Considering that a lot of the Buddha’s ideas about becoming a true brāhmaṇa and vedagū via insight into reality, the dispelling of ignorance, and the purification of cognition, etc. come from what Yājñavalkya was teaching already, and that in the Eastern Vedic groups the castes were not fixed (let alone in the larger society, as we already discussed with Sakya and surrounding kingdoms not following the caste system), I assume that people could become brahmans ritually (which is specifically mentioned) and adopt the gotra of their teacher or a figure in the lineage. ‘Gotama’ specifically being associated with light dispelling darkness is almost too perfect for these types of Vedic muni groups; they aim to purify the inner light of pure awareness and knowledge and dispel the darkness of ignorance. I would imagine that they would be fond of a name like this already associated with their tradition.
If the Buddha was initiated in some kind of muni-based Yājñavalkyan meditative tradition where they focused solely on the internalization of the agnihotra and other rituals to purify cognition and know the ātman/attain the unconditioned, then he very well could have been given the name ‘Gotama.’ After all, he was said to have reached the same level as Āḷāra Kālāma, becoming a teacher on the same level, and he even surpassed the ability of Uddaka Rāmaputta. It would onlt make sense that he be given a Brāhmaṇa name if he was considered to have become a true brāhmaṇa in these traditions. I’ve also heard a Vedic scholar speak on how patrilineality in terms of the Vedas and early India was not strictly biological and often teacher-student represented father-son (we see this with Uddaka Rāmaputta even, who may have been a student of Rāma rather than his literal son).
Why he would keep this name and continue using it, I’m not sure. It’s just a possibility. He did claim to be a brāhmaṇa, and he respected his former teachers. On the other hand, his family just being of mixed descent with Aryans who came into the East is very possible as well. We may never know.
Tangentially, learning about all of these connections and digging deeper into the ideology is interesting and really helpful for contextualizing the Buddhist terms (but also a deep rabbit hole of ideas to learn about that is probably best not to get caught in). The Buddha’s original practices were seemingly so much more than just “attain the dimension of nothingness and you’re enlightened” as we Buddhists tend to imagine it nowadays. There is a whole theoretical and textual ideology surrounding these practices—which the Buddha himself is recorded as having learned and mastered beforehand—and this is likely where a lot of his re-purposing of Vedic terminology comes from.
Mettā