ABSTRACT
Muslims have rejected the terms Muhammadism/Muhammadans as labels for their religion and its adherents, and these Western categories have now fallen into disuse. Contemporary Buddhists have made less fuss about the terms, Buddhism/Buddhists, even though similar objections could be made about them, and they do not neatly correspond with any Asian Buddhist category. The BuddhaDharma is one term for Buddhism or Buddhist doctrine, which has universal currency in Buddhist countries (albeit often translated into local languages). Here, as in the Tibetan word for a Buddhist practitioner, which could be translated as a ‘Dharma-ist’, one who follows the Dharma, the emphasis is on the teaching, doctrine, or path, to which the word Buddha may be added as an adjective to clarify whose Dharma is at issue. Yet the fact that Buddhists have not objected violently to the newly invented terms indicates that the figure of the Buddha – the first of the Three Jewels – has a central place in Buddhists’ understanding of their religious tradition.
