No, interestingly, he wasn’t, but nor was anyone else in India at the time. They just didn’t have writing at the time of the Buddha. They did get writing a bit later on, they had it already by the time of King Ashoka. In India at the time of the Buddha, they had professional memorizers instead.
We are talking about 500 BC here, or thereabouts. So, there was writing in the world by then. The Sumerians had it far earlier than that, gradually evolving from proto writing over 3,000 BC see Cuneiform script. But not yet in northern India.
The Buddha was born thousands of years after the first writing systems were developed. However, writing developed in northern India at a far later date than elsewhere. That is - unless you count the Indus Valley script as a writing system. This is the last major undeciphered script in the world, and also one of the older scripts in the world. This is a typical script:
Indus Script - undeciphered so nobody knows what it says or what it was for - whatever it was - was only used for short inscriptions of a few symbols
Nobody knows if it was a writing system or not. It could be an early form of writing, like early heiroglyphs or early Sumerian. Or a form of Proto-writing. like Nsibidi with thousands of symbols that can be strung together to convey meaning, but not with the flexibility of a true writing system. See also Nsibiri: The Pre-colonial Writing Of The South Eastern People
Or alternatively, it could be a kind of signage a bit like a pub sign, or road crossing symbols or heraldic signs. All the inscriptions are short, just a few symbols each. Analysis suggests that it seems to have many of the characteristics of a writing system, see: A Rosetta Stone for a lost language (TED talk video). Also, How come we can't decipher the Indus script?
At any rate - whether the Indus Valley script is a writing system, or just a system of signs of some kind - all the texts are very short, and undeciphered. Whatever it was, it was ancient history by then, from 1400 years before the time of the Buddha.
The next evidence of writing in India is the Brahmi script. This was used for the Edicts of King Asoka, a great Buddhist King who ruled much of India a century or so after the Buddha:
So, it seems that the Buddha just missed the introduction of writing to India. If he had been born just a century later...
If there were, just a few pages, or fragments of pages from any of the sutras, reliably dated from the time of the Buddha, this could give us many clues about how the texts have changed between the Buddha's time and the present day, if they have.
If only! But they just didn’t have writing at the time. They did however have Brahmins with excellent memories. Because it was so important in their culture, they developed it to the nth degree. The ancient Indian Vedas which are sacred to modern Hindus were memorized word for word for thousands of years in this way.
So, Buddha’s followers would have included people who were trained and expert at memorization. The Guinness Book of Records of 1985 records the feat of a Buddhist monk who was first to memorize the entire Pali Canon in modern times:
The Buddhist Pali canon is vast, with thousands of pages, and millions of words. He was first in modern times to win the titles Tipitakadhara Dhammabhandagarika (Bearer of the Three Pitakas and Keeper of the Dhamma Treasure).
To do this he had to be able to recite any of the sutras, starting anywhere in the sutra - and to do it with understanding, not just reading by rote but reading the words with meaning. And indeed he not only did that but he could also give comparative readings from different texts of each sutra also. Word for word accurate all the way through. It's a stringent 33 day exam, with little margin allowed for errors.
So - it seems at least possible that some of the monks, disciples of the Buddha could have memorized all the teachings in the same way. In some ways this may have preserved the teachings actually more accurately than if they had been written down, copied, the originals lost, the copies copied again etc.
There’s a lot of evidence that suggests we actually have pretty good records of the actual words spoken at the time of the Buddha. Obviously re-arranged to be easier to memorize, probably not exactly as Buddha and his disciples spoke them.
But unusually - they actually started to memorize his teachings, while Buddha himself was alive, in the last few years of his life, at least that’s what the canon says. So they could also ask him questions and after he died they had a large gathering, the first great assembly, where they all checked their memories of the teachings and when they agreed on a version of each sutra, they recited it in unison word for word.
The internal evidence is pretty good, I think. I’m talking about he Pali Canon here, not the later Mahayana sutras that scholars agree were written and composed centuries after the time of the Buddha.
The sutras describe the political geography and technology of the time of the Buddha, in great detail. They don’t mention King Ashoka who is mentioned often in “backdated” sutras of the later Mahayana schools attributed to the Buddha. The experts who advocate this “view of authenticity” of the teachings say that there are a few sutras in the Pali Canon that are clearly later additions but most of them, internal evidence suggests, were written at the time of the Buddha.
This is a matter of much scholarly debate. They certainly could have memorized them by the analogy of the Vedas. But did they?
I think they did myself. Some expert scholars, mainly western academics for some reason, say that they were composed later. However, I find their arguments weak myself.
How do they explain the consistent internal geography, technology etc? That seems the most conclusive argument to me. Of course not actually a mathematical proof but hard to see how they could have got the internal consistency so right about such things and never slipped up and mentioned later technology - which was changing rapidly at the time - or politics from even the next century, or to mention a city or region in South India (their political awareness of distant parts also increased hugely shortly after Buddha died) etc.
It would be hard enough for an expert in Indian history to do it today, to compose a technologically and politically correct collection of texts as if they were all written in historical India at the time of the Buddha, and not even a century later - but back then, they didn’t even have the idea or motivation to do something like that or the understanding of history / archaeology that we have to attempt it, if anyone wanted to do it, and why would they? They didn’t try, not at all, with the Mahayana texts or the later additions to the Pali Canon.
I’ve written a blog post here about those arguments: Origins of the Buddhist Sutras - were they the Teachings of the Buddha?
So anyway - Buddha was indeed illiterate as was everyone else in the India of his day. But they would probably, many of them, especially the Brahmins, have had better memories than we do for words, able to memorize many millions of words, some of them, without errors.
According to the Pali canon he was born as a prince, and would surely have had the best education of his time. But in those days education didn’t include reading or writing, because they didn’t have it.
Note, later sutras mention writing. They were composed much later. The early sutras though, the earliest texts in the Pali canon, the ones that may have been memorized since the time of the Buddha, they don’t apparently.
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