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Tathagata
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Tathagata (Devanagari: ?????; pronounced taht-ahgatah) in Pali and Sanskrit (Chin., Jpn.: ??; Kor.:??; Vietnamese: Nhu Lai) means, confusingly perhaps, both one who has thus gone (Tatha-gata) and one who has thus come (Tatha-agata). Others assert that the name means one who has found the truth. It is the name the historical Buddha uses when referring to himself.
Using this word as his preferred personal appellation, the Buddha of the scriptures is always reported as saying, "The Tathagata such and such ...," instead of ever using the pronouns me, I or myself. This serves to emphasize by implication that the words are uttered by one who has transcended the human condition, and is beyond the otherwise endless cycle of rebirth, beyond all death and dying, beyond all suffering.
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Encyclopedia
Tathagata (Devanagari: ?????; pronounced taht-ahgatah) in Pali and Sanskrit (Chin., Jpn.: ??; Kor.:??; Vietnamese: Nhu Lai) means, confusingly perhaps, both one who has thus gone (Tatha-gata) and one who has thus come (Tatha-agata). Others assert that the name means one who has found the truth. It is the name the historical Buddha uses when referring to himself.
Using this word as his preferred personal appellation, the Buddha of the scriptures is always reported as saying, "The Tathagata such and such ...," instead of ever using the pronouns me, I or myself. This serves to emphasize by implication that the words are uttered by one who has transcended the human condition, and is beyond the otherwise endless cycle of rebirth, beyond all death and dying, beyond all suffering. The Tathagata, in other words, is beyond all coming and going.
The word is also used as a synonym for arahant. It refers to someone who has attained the highest goal of the religious life: "a tathagata, a superman (uttama-puriso)". In Buddhist thought, such an individual is no longer human.
Etymology & interpretation
Sanskrit grammar offers two possibilities for breaking up the compound: either Tatha and agata or Tatha and gata. Tatha means thus in Sanskrit and Pali, and Buddhist thought takes this to refer to what is called reality as-it-is (Yatha-bhuta). This reality is also referred to as thusness or suchness (tathata) indicating simply that it (reality) is what it is. A Buddha or Arhat is defined as someone who 'knows and sees reality as-it-is' (yatha bhuta ñana dassana). Gata is the past passive participle of the verbal root gam (going, traveling). Agata adds the verbal prefix A which gives the meaning “come, arrival, gone-unto”. Thus in this interpretation Tathagata means literally either, “The one who has gone to suchness” or, "The one who has arrived at suchness".
Beyond range
A number of passages affirm that a tathagata, or arahant, is "immeasurable", "inscrutable", "hard to fathom", and "not apprehended". A tathagata has abandoned that clinging to the personality factors that render the mind a bounded, measurable entity, and is instead "freed from being reckoned by" all or any of them, even in life. The skandhas have been seen to be a burden, and an enlightened individual is one with "burden dropped". The Buddha explains that "that for which a monk has a latent tendency, by that is he reckoned, what he does not have a latent tendency for, by that is he not reckoned. These tendencies are ways in which the mind becomes involved in and clings to conditioned phenomena. Without them, an enlightened person cannot be "reckoned" or "named"; he or she is beyond the range of other beings, and cannot be "found" by them, even by gods, or Mara. In one passage, Sariputta states that the mind of the Buddha cannot be "encompassed" even by him.
The Buddha and Sariputta, in similar passages, when confronted with speculation as to the status of an arahant after death bring their interlocutors to admit that they cannot even apprehend an arahant that is alive. As Sariputta puts it, his questioner Yamaka "can't pin down the Tathagata as a truth or reality even in the present life." These passages imply that condition of the arahant, both before and after parinirvana, lies beyond the domain where the descriptive powers of ordinary language are at home; that is, the world of the skandhas and the greed, hatred, and delusion that are "blown out" with nirvana.
In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, an ascetic named Vaccha questions the Buddha on a variety of metaphysical issues. When Vaccha asks about the status of an arahant after death, the Buddha asks him in which direction a fire goes when it has gone out. Vaccha replies that the question "does not fit the case ... For the fire that depended on fuel ... when that fuel has all gone, and it can get no other, being thus without nutriment, it is said to be extinct." The Buddha then explains: "In exactly the same way ..., all form by which one could predicate the existence of the saint, all that form has been abandoned, uprooted, pulled out of the ground like a palmyra-tree, and become non-existent and not liable to spring up again in the future. The saint ... who has been released from what is styled form is deep, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the mighty ocean." The same is then said of the other aggregates. A similar response citing immeasurability occurs in another sutta, when the Buddha is asked to pick between two alternatives regarding the arahant after death: annihilation or eternal freedom from illness. The Buddha responds: "There is no measure of [or no means of knowing] him who had achieved the goal. That by which one could define him, that is not for him. When all phenomena (dhamma) are removed, then all means of description are also removed."
Nagarjuna expressed this understanding in the nirvana chapter of his Mulamadhyamakakarika: "It is not assumed that the Blessed One exists after death. Neither is it assumed that he does not exist, or both, or neither. It is not assumed that even a living Blessed One exists. Neither is it assumed that he does not exist, or both, or neither."
In the Dhammapada, the actions of an arahant are described as without trace (ananuvejja) or 'trackless (apada), like the birds in the sky' (akase'va sakuntanam gati tesam durannaya ).
See also
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