Tathagata
Tathāgata ( Sanskrit , Pali तथागत, The Gone So Gone, the Gone So Gone, or: The One Who Came From The Suchness, Gone Into The Suchness, Or: The Perfected ; Chinese 如 來 / 如 来 , Pinyin rúlái , W.-G. ju-lai , Jyutping jyu 4 loi 4 ; kor. 여래 , RR yeorae ; jap. 如 来 / 如 來 , kana に ょ ら い , Rōmaji Nyorai ; Tib. དེ་ བཞིན་ གཤེགས་ པ་, Wylie de bzhin gshegs pa ) denotes one on the path of truth to Supreme enlightenment Samyak-Sambodhi attained and is one of the ten titles of the Buddha Shakyamuni , which he used himself when speaking of himself or other Buddhas.
In Mahayana the Tathagata represents the Buddha in his three aspects Trikaya . He is both the perfect human being, who can assume all forms and is endowed with the ten powers of a Buddha Dashabala , as well as the cosmic principle, the essence of the universe, the not -Conditional, unborn. He is the mediator between the essential and the phenomenal world. In many cases, Tathagata as the absolute is equated with Prajna and Shunyata .
The term also denotes the five transcendent Buddhas ( Adibuddhas ) of the Buddha families (Buddhakula).
- The five Tathagatas in Shalu Monastery (Tibet)
Four of the five Tathagatas
Akshobhya
Vairocana
Amitabha
Amoghasiddhi
Ratnasambhava
Explanation in Shalu
In Vajrayana it is a widely applied ordering principle of iconography and symbolism ( trikaya ).
The Diamond Sutra says that the Tathagata has both the organic eye and the divine eye, the eye of wisdom, the eye of the Dharma and the Buddha eye.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Diamond Sutra or "Vajra Severing" (PDF; 257 kB) pp. 14, 15