'God of Gods': An Iranian Buddhist Epithet and Its Traces in Early Chinese Buddhist Translations

Abstract

The Iranian flavour of the Chinese epithet of the Buddha, tianzhong tian (chinese text) 'god among gods,' and its relationship with the Indo-Aryan parallel devātideva-, 'foremost god of gods,' have been repeatedly addressed. Past studies of the origin of the expressions sought to establish an ultimate connection to the Achaemenid royal title 'king of kings' (Old Persian (Greek text)), assuming that the divine epithet was coined based on the royal one. However, the comparative Indo-Iranian evidence speaks for the considerable antiquity of the divine epithet '(foremost) god of gods' - Proto-Indo-Iranian (Greek text)-, replaced by (Greek text) in Old Iranian - and against its secondary character in relation to 'king of kings'. The Middle Iranian corpora show a particularly broad usage of 'god of gods'-like epithets to refer to supreme figures worthy of veneration; the epithet therefore may be considered part of a pan-Iranian religious vocabulary during the first millennium CE. We further make the case that the Buddhist usage of the expression in Middle Iranian languages as well as the appearance of its equivalents in Chinese and Indo-Aryan sources is specifically due to the super-regional influence of a Bactrian prototype, (Greek text).