Tathāgata Substituted for Self? Part I

The Buddha is portrayed in the Pali Canon as eschewing metaphysical discussions. One such metaphysical question the Buddha refused to answer was the question on the state of a tathāgata after death. The following stock phrase or pericope is used in many suttas:

Does the Tathāgata exist after death?
Does the Tathāgata not exist after death?
Does the Tathāgata both exist and not exist after death?
Does the Tathāgata a neither exist nor not exist after death?

The word tathāgata is an epithet for the Buddha. Its most common usage is by the Buddha who uses the word to refer to himself in third person. Its exact meaning has been debated by scholars, but there is general agreement that the word is used to designate an enlightened or awakened being.

Curiously, there is no evidence to suggest that the word tathāgata was wildly used by non-Buddhist groups during the Buddha’s time. The word tathāgata is hardly found at all in the non-Buddhist Indian literature, and in the few places in the Jain sutras where it is used to explicitly refer to an enlightened being, the Prakrit word tahāgaya is used instead which may not even originate from the same etymological root.

Another interesting fact is that none of the speculative views concerning the tathāgata after death is mentioning among the 62 wrong views in the Brahmajāla Sutta. These 62 wrong views are portrayed in the sutta as being an exhaustive categorization of all speculative views during the Buddha’s time.

To be fair, there is one instance of the tathāgata after death pericope in the Brahmajāla Sutta, but the usage is not tallied as one of the 62 wrong views but instead is used in an off-hand way to illustrative how the eel-wigglers respond to such metaphysical questions. In the Chinese version of the Brahmajāla Sutta the pericope is not present at all.

While there is no doubt that the Brahmajāla Sutta has been formulized and obtained various accretions, the antiquity of the sutta is well attested by the fact of it being mentioned in the first Buddhist council and being separately translated into Chinese prior to the creation of the Chinese Dirgha Agama. It being placed first in the Pali Canon is further testament to its high reputation among the early Buddhists (Pande 81).

While the Brahmajāla Sutta does not mention as one of its wrong views the tathāgata’s state after death, it does, however, enumerate a total of 24 different views on the subject of life after death (16 for some sort of continuation after death with 8 views denying any continuation). This high number (around a quarter) of views in regards to the question of life after death indicates that this was an important and often discussed religious issue in the Buddha’s time.

This is not really surprising given that all the religious traditions in the world have at some point debated such questions and India was no exception in this regard.

But if the issue of life after death was such a hot issue of debate during the Buddha’s day, why do we find the stock passage of what happens to an enlightened being after death instead of what happens to an individual (regardless of spiritual attainment) after death like the views expressed in the Brahmajāla Sutta?

It just seems incredulous that all the religious seekers of the day were only concerned about a subset of a select few beings (enlightened ones) rather than the general set of human beings.

One possible solution to these difficulties is that the suttas originally did contain passages on life after death of a being in general but was systematically changed later to an enlightened being.

At first glance this may seem a rather remote and dubious proposition, but I will show in following essays that there is strong evidence that this indeed occur.

References

Pande, Govind Chandra. Fourth Revised Edition, 1995. Studies in the Origins of Buddhism. (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass : 2006).