Buddha and Prince Siddhartha Buddha

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 6 pages

The distinction is between a title and a person. Buddha means the Enlightened, and stands for the highest degree of knowledge; the file sets out five conditions for becoming one — to break through the bondage of sense and personality; to acquire a complete perception of the real Self and learn not to separate it from all other selves; to learn by experience the utter unreality of all phenomena of the visible Kosmos; to reach complete detachment from all that is evanescent and finite; and to live while yet on earth in the immortal and everlasting alone, in a supreme state of holiness.

Buddha Siddhartha is the name given to Gautama, Prince of Kapilavastu, at birth — an abbreviation of Sarvarthasiddha, meaning the realisation of all desires. The etymologies follow: Gautama, on earth the most victorious, was the sacerdotal name of the Shakya family to which his father King Suddhodhana belonged; in the title Shakyamuni, muni is rendered as one mighty in charity, isolation and silence. Blavatsky's complaint is that every orientalist knows the story by heart while none suspects the esoteric meaning beneath the prenatal biography — the Lalitavistara telling the tale without hinting at the truth, and the five thousand Jatakas of former births taken literally instead of esoterically.

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