Who is the Buddha? Is it right to consider the Buddha a God?

The Buddha is not a god, and it is not a name. “Buddha” (buddha) means “awakened one” and is more like a title, a mark of high attainment - roughly like the modern title “world champion” in some sport. A buddha is someone who worked out by his own effort how suffering is built and how it ceases, and managed to teach that to others.

The historical Buddha was called Siddhattha Gotama (Pali, with the stress in Gotama on the first syllable; in Sanskrit - Siddhartha Gautama), also known as Shakyamuni, “the sage of the Sakya clan”. He lived in northern India; the exact dates are disputed, and modern scholars tend to place his passing around 400 BCE. He speaks of his teaching as an ancient path found anew: a traveller stumbles on an overgrown road in the forest and follows it to a forgotten city (SN 12.65). Before Gotama’s time many awakened ones of the past had walked this road, but it gradually faded from human memory. To put it very briefly: by walking this forgotten path again, Siddhartha rediscovered the so-called “Four Noble Truths”. The fourth of them is the Noble Eightfold Path - that very road, overgrown with time. Gotama himself (the Buddha), his teaching (Dhamma, Dhamma) and the community of practitioners (Sangha, Saṅgha) are called the Three Jewels in Buddhism. On entering Buddhism, a person takes “refuge” in them.

There is no almighty creator in the early canon, but there are plenty of deities of varying power (none of them, however, all-powerful, eternal, omniscient or omnipotent). In DN 1 Brahma, having appeared in his world first, takes himself for the creator of the beings who arose there after him - and is wrong. In MN 49 the Buddha tells Baka the Brahma that out of ignorance he holds as eternal what is impermanent: his world and his standing in it. There are many devas (devā) in the texts; they live unimaginably long, but remain mortal inhabitants of samsara.

The Buddha did not place himself in any category of beings either. The brahmin Dona asked who he was: a deva, a gandhabba, a yakkha (yakkha) or a human. The Buddha answered that no category fits, because he had destroyed the causes for being born as any of them (by reaching awakening), and added: “Remember me as a buddha” (AN 4.36). Even though the Buddha is honoured in earnest in the suttas, he does not hand out or grant liberation by his own will: in MN 107 the Tathagata (“thus gone”, another synonym for “buddha”) is called “one who points out the path”. Walking that path is something each person has to do for themselves. The Buddha was turned into a deity outside Buddhism: in the Vaishnava Puranas (Vishnu Purana 3.17-18, Bhagavata Purana 1.3.24; datings and recensions are disputed, the tradition took shape roughly between the 4th and 8th centuries CE) the figure of the Buddha appears in the lists of Vishnu’s avatars. This is not part of what the Pali canon teaches.

By the canon, Gotama is not the only buddha in history. The suttas list many buddhas of the past (DN 14). In the general sense, a buddha is someone who discovered the Dhamma on his own, without a teacher, and then became a teacher for others. The buddha Siddhartha Gotama is simply the one best known to us. For convenience, when texts write “Buddha” with a capital letter, they mean the buddha Siddhartha Gotama. Written with a lowercase letter, it can refer to other buddhas of the past as well as to Siddhartha (depending on context).

Where to read: MN 26 (how Gotama searched for and found awakening), MN 49 (the argument with a Brahma who takes himself to be eternal), AN 4.36 (the direct answer to the question “who are you?”).