Intrduction
Buddhist Fuzz words
Buddhism as game
Essential Buddhism
Gautama’s problem
The meanings of Tathāgata
Understanding no atta
The Tathagata’s ‘No teaching’
The Tathagata’s skilful means
The tathagata function
Nirvana
The 3 Buddhist nirvanas
The Tathagata’s pilgrimage
The Tathagata’s goal
The 2nd Noble Truth
The Tathagata’s rationale
for escaping dukkha = life = death = evil
Blindfolding death
Why the Tathagata became an itinerant beggar
The Tathagata’s pain remover
The Tathagata’s reasoning
1, or 2 or 3 refuges?
The Tathagata abolishes the refuges
Did the Tathagata cheat?
The 2 Bodhisattva vows
The myth of the Middle Way
The anatta enigma
Understanding the notion of
‘self’
Nagarjuna’s game
Buddhist Pilgrimage
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The Tathāgata’s Dharma
 ‘Buddhist’ legend has it that after the intinerant
beggar Gautama, formerly of the Sakya clan, had achieved his goal, namely the samma-sam-bodhi (from
Sanskrit: budh,
meaning: wake up, become aware) of
the deathless, he chose the name Tathāgata. No one now knows
what the name originally meant, though there are lots of guesses.
Since no one knew what the name Tathāgata meant, and which
caused and still causes a lot of confusion, and because it was, and still is,
so unwieldy, bhikkhus of a later age (possibly during
the era of the warlock Ashoka, and when they got competition from Ashoka’s Dhamma Mahamatras) decided on a slick
and easily grasped and understood World Stage Name, namely ‘Buddha’, later juiced up and
seriously mistranslated as ‘The Enlightened One’, ‘The Perfect One’, The
World Conqueror’ and so on. And his dhamma (possibly meaning: teaching, possible
law, possibly ‘thing’) was called ‘Buddhism’.
During his lifetime, the Tathāgata was
referred to as Bhagavat or Bhagavant, and whose meaning is also obscure. It
is usually translated as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lord’, sometimes deliberately
mistranslated by Christian commentators (like Rhys Davids) as ‘The Blessed
One’. He was addressed as ‘Bhante’, and which is translated as ‘Sir’.
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