The Buddha

Their life

Siddhartha Gautama, the prince who left a palace to face suffering directly and awakened beneath the Bodhi tree. His teaching — the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path — traces suffering to craving and offers a practical way beyond it through ethics, meditation, and clear seeing. From it grew one of the world’s great contemplative traditions.

Known for

• The Four Noble Truths
• The Eightfold Path
• Founding the Buddhist monastic Sangha
• The doctrine of the Middle Way
• Teaching of non-self (anatta)
• Dependent origination

The road they walked

Siddhartha Gautama was born into the Shakya clan near Lumbini, on the border of present-day Nepal and India, the son of a chieftain rather than the god-king of later legend — the Shakyas were governed as an oligarchic republic, and his father's rank was closer to elected elder than sovereign. He married Yasodhara and had a son, Rahula, living the settled life expected of his class until, in his late twenties, he left it — not in a single dramatic flight but as the culmination of a restlessness historians agree is genuine even if the palace-and-four-sights story around it has been embellished over centuries of retelling.

He renounced into a specific and crowded moment: sixth-century-BC northern India, where cities were rising along the Ganges, old Vedic orthodoxies were being questioned by wandering ascetics called shramanas, and a near-contemporary, Mahavira, was founding what became Jainism. Gautama studied under two meditation teachers, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, then tried extreme fasting and self-mortification for years before concluding that both indulgence and starvation missed the point. At around thirty-five, seated beneath a pipal tree at Bodh Gaya, he arrived at what he called the Middle Way — and spent the rest of that night, tradition holds, working through the causes of suffering to their end.

For the next forty-five years he walked the Ganges plain teaching kings, merchants, and outcastes alike, founding a monastic order — the Sangha — open in principle across caste lines, an unusual stance in his social world. His words were preserved orally by his monks for generations before being written down as the Pali Canon centuries later, and it was the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC that helped carry the teaching beyond India's borders. From that root grew Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism — different in emphasis and language, but tracing back to the same wandering teacher of the Ganges valley.

How their story ended

He died around 483 BC in Kushinagar at about eighty years old, after eating a meal — traditionally called sukaramaddava, meaning either a pork dish or a delicacy involving mushrooms or truffles, a point scholars still dispute — that brought on his final illness. He is said to have spent his last hours teaching, reassuring his grieving attendant Ananda, and reminding his followers that all conditioned things pass away. His body was cremated, and his relics were divided among several clans and kingdoms, who raised stupas over them — structures that remain sites of pilgrimage today. Scholars also continue to debate the precise dates of his life, with a revised chronology placing his death closer to 400 BC.