The Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama, known to history as the Buddha, was born in northern India during a span scholars place between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE, with a death around 400 BCE often cited as one estimate. His father Shuddhodana led a small Shakya republic near present-day Lumbini in Nepal, and his mother Queen Maya died shortly after his birth; he was raised by his aunt Mahapajapati. According to early biographies he lived in luxury, married Yashodhara and had a son Rahula. Encounters with old age, sickness, death and a wandering ascetic prompted him to leave home at twenty-nine in what tradition calls the Great Departure. He studied advanced meditation under two leading teachers, then practiced severe austerities with five companions for six years, but neither path satisfied him. Accepting milk-rice from a village woman named Sujata, he abandoned self-mortification, sat under a pipal tree near Bodh Gaya, and is said to have reached full awakening around thirty-five. What he taught afterward is the Middle Way between indulgence and self-torture, the Four Noble Truths on suffering and its cessation, the Noble Eightfold Path, dependent origination, and the rejection of any permanent self. For forty-five years he walked the Ganges plain teaching kings, merchants, brahmins and outcastes, and eventually accepted women into a formal monastic order at his aunt's request—debated for its limits but striking for its time. His community, the Sangha, organized by conduct rather than hereditary caste, and its sermons survive most fully in the Pali Canon. He faced the schism led by his cousin Devadatta, saw the Shakya homeland destroyed in war, and died at around eighty in Kushinagar according to early texts, telling his disciples to "be lamps unto yourselves." No contemporaneous record exists; surviving accounts are several centuries later, so the line between historical Siddhartha and the figure of devotion remains a matter for careful scholarship.