Buddha · Pāli/Skt: buddha

Buddha is a title, not a personal name. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it plainly: “The title ‘Buddha’, which literally means ‘awakened’, is conferred on an individual who discovers the path to nirvana.”

The Doṇa Sutta (AN 4.36) shows how carefully the early texts handle the word. A brahman named Doṇa asks in turn whether he is a deva, a gandhabba, a yakkha, a human being, and each time the answer is no. What the Buddha offers instead is an image: like a lotus “born in the water, grown in the water, rising up above the water” that “stands unsmeared by the water”, he is “born in the world, grown in the world, having overcome the world” and lives “unsmeared by the world”. Then the plain instruction: “Remember me, brahman, as ‘awakened.’” (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu).

He is not held to be the only one. “According to Buddhist teachings, there have been other buddhas in the past, and there will be yet more in the future”, and the Cakkavatti Sutta (DN 26) looks ahead to a Buddha still to come, Metteyya, known in Sanskrit as Maitreya. On the historical man, the same encyclopedia records that his dates “were thought to be approximately 560–480 BCE, but many scholars now hold that he must have died around 405 BCE”.

What the title is for differs by tradition. “Most Theravāda practitioners aspire to become Saints (Skt. Arhat)”, while “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”, so in Mahayana Buddhahood is the goal of practice itself.