Words of Wisdom for November 22, 2024

( . . . ) the word the Buddha used to refer to himself (is) “Tathagata.” The Buddha coined this word, and it’s made up of two different parts. The first part, “tatha,” means “such” or “thus”; and the second part, “agata,” means “come.” Meanwhile the word “gata” means “gone.” So a long debate has been going on: Is it “Tath-agata” or “Tatha-gata”? Is the Buddha “thus come” or “thus gone?” Is he totally here or is he totally gone? Is he utterly immanent or utterly transcendent? Scholars have been bashing each other over the heads with this issue for millennia.
The Buddha loved wordplay and irony. He used double entendre many times, so my feeling is that he deliberately used an ambiguous term. It means both “completely gone” and “completely here.” The “gone” aspect is that of transcendent wisdom: gone, empty, no thing, utterly transparent. “Thus come,” “come to thusness,” “come to suchness,” are the aspects of being utterly here, completely immanent, utterly attuned to all things, utterly attentive to and embodied in all things. The compassion element is what represents the “thus come” meaning, where everything is self. In the wisdom element, nothing is self.
In the Sutta Nipata, the Buddha says, “The wise do not take anything in the world as belonging to them, nor do they take anything in the world as not belonging to them either.” (SAMYUTTA NIK?YA858) This is a wonderful illustration of what it means to hold that duality.

– Ajahn Amaro, Small Boat, Great Mountain, 82 – 84.