Tathagata · Pāli/Skt: tathāgata

Tathāgata is the standard title for a Buddha in the discourses. Its literal sense is read in more than one way. Access to Insight’s Pali glossary reads the compound two ways, as “one who has truly gone (tatha-gata)” or “one who has become authentic”, from tatha-agata, and describes it as “an epithet used in ancient India for a person who has attained the highest spiritual goal”, which in Buddhism “usually denotes the Buddha, although occasionally it also denotes any of his arahant disciples”.

The canon itself offers several explanations rather than one. In the Itivuttaka (Iti 112) the title is glossed by what a Buddha does: whatever in the world “is seen, heard, sensed, cognized” has been fully awakened to by him, “Thus he is called the Tathagata”; whatever he “has said, spoken, explained is just so (tatha) and not otherwise. Thus he is called the Tathagata”; and he “is one who does in line with (tatha) what he teaches, one who teaches in line with what he does”.

The discourses also decline to turn the word into a metaphysical account of what a Buddha is. In the Anurādha Sutta (SN 22.86) the Buddha leads Anurādha through the aggregates and concludes that “when you can’t pin down the Tathagata as a truth or reality even in the present life”, the four positions about his existence after death do not apply. What he claims is narrower and more useful: “Both formerly & now, it is only stress that I describe, and the cessation of stress.” See who the Buddha was.