The Buddha
No written record of Siddhartha Gautama survives from his lifetime, nor from the century or two that followed. Yet from the middle of the 3rd century BCE, the Edicts of Ashoka name a man called the Buddha. One of those edicts, carved on a pillar at Lumbini, marks the spot the emperor believed to be the Buddha's birthplace. It calls him Buddha Shakyamuni, sage of the Shakyas. The word Buddha is not a personal name. It is a title, drawn from the root budh, meaning to wake, to become aware, to open up as a flower opens. It describes one who has awakened from the deep sleep of ignorance. A wandering ascetic and teacher lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic plains in the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded a tradition that would outlast every kingdom around it. How do we know he existed at all when no one wrote his name down for generations? Why did a man born to royal parents abandon a spoilt and comfortable life for the open road? And how did a teaching passed only by mouth, in dialects spoken in villages of rice farmers, survive long enough to be carved in stone?
Donald Lopez Jr. observed that this single figure was known by different names across the Buddhist world. In China, Korea, Japan and Tibet, he tended to be called Buddha or Sakyamuni. In Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, he was Gotama Buddha or Samana Gotama, the ascetic Gotama. His given name carried a promise. Siddhartha in Sanskrit, Siddhattha in Pali, becomes Dhondup in Tibetan and Siltalta in Korean. The name means He Who Achieves His Goal. The clan name Gautama means descendant of Gotama. Gotama itself can mean one who has the most light, or one who has the most cows, a name borrowed from house priests by Kshatriya clans. In the Pali Canon he most often called himself the Tathagata, a word whose meaning remains uncertain. It may mean one who has thus gone, one who has thus come, or even one who has thus not gone, a being beyond all coming and going, beyond transitory things. The canon piles other titles upon him. Bhagavan, the Blessed One. Lokavidu, knower of the many worlds. Satthadeva-Manussanam, teacher of gods and humans. He is called the Caravan leader, the Dispeller of darkness, the Kinsman of the Sun, the Torchbearer of mankind, and Jina, the Conqueror, a title more often given to teachers in Jainism. Across South and Southeast Asian inscriptions he appears as Maha sramana, the great ascetic.
Two archaeological sites have been tied to the time of the Buddha around the 5th century BCE. At Vaishali in Bihar stands the earliest archaeologically known stupa, a brick monument built around a clay core that was enlarged again and again. Excavators found that the final brick layer matched a nearby Mauryan column from the 3rd century BCE, which means the clay core inside it is older still. The relics once held within had been removed at a later date, fitting the tradition that Ashoka redistributed the Buddha's relics in the 3rd century BCE. At Lumbini, a small wooden structure excavated around 2015 held traces of tree roots, and carbon dating placed both the structure and the roots in possibly the 6th century BCE. Beyond stone, the philologist Oskar von Hinuber argued that some Pali suttas preserve very archaic place-names and historical data from close to the Buddha's lifetime. Among them is the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, an account of his final days that Hinuber dated to no later than 350 to 320 BCE. There is also philological evidence that two of his meditation teachers, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, were real people. Most scholars accept that the Buddha lived, taught and founded a monastic order during the reign of Bimbisara of Magadha, and died during the reign of Bimbisara's successor Ajatashatru, making him a contemporary of Mahavira.
The dates of Gautama's birth and death are uncertain, and the disagreement spans centuries. Within the Eastern Buddhist tradition of China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan, the traditional date for the Buddha's death was 949 BCE. The Ka-tan system of the Kalachakra tradition placed it about 833 BCE. Two rival chronologies from Buddhist texts narrow the field, both granting him a lifespan of 80 years. The long chronology, drawn from Sri Lankan chronicles, holds that he died 218 years before Ashoka's coronation. Read against a coronation date of 326 BCE, that gives a lifespan of 624 to 544 BCE, the dates still accepted in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Scholars who instead date the coronation around 268 BCE, on Greek evidence, shift his life to 566 to 486 BCE. The short chronology, from Indian sources and their Chinese and Tibetan translations, places his death only 100 years before the coronation, pushing his life later to 448 to 368 BCE. Most historians of the early 20th century settled on 563 to 483 BCE. More recent efforts split the difference, putting his death around 410 BCE. At a symposium held in 1988, most who presented gave dates within 20 years either side of 400 BCE for his death. The ancient Indians, as the texts show, were generally unconcerned with chronology, more focused on philosophy than on calendars.
The Shakyas lived on the periphery of the eastern Indian subcontinent in the 5th century BCE, both geographically and culturally. Theirs was a small republic, probably an oligarchy, with the Buddha's father as elected chieftain rather than hereditary king. Brahminic texts widely considered the Shakyas non-Vedic and impure. Their religion ran along its own channels. They venerated trees and sacred groves, worshipped tree spirits called yakshas and serpent beings called nagas, and built burial mounds. These practices persist inside Buddhism, where tree veneration survives today in the honouring of Bodhi trees. The historian Johannes Bronkhorst named this wider culture, growing alongside Brahminical Aryavarta without being shaped by it, Greater Magadha. The Buddha's lifetime coincided with a flowering of sramana schools of thought, among them Ajivika, Carvaka, Jainism and Ajnana. The Brahmajala Sutta records sixty-two such schools. A sramana is one who labours or exerts himself for a higher purpose. This was the age of thinkers like Pakudha Kaccayana and Sanjaya Belatthaputta the sceptic, whose two foremost disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, would later become the Buddha's chief disciples. All of this unfolded during the Second Urbanisation, as the Ganges basin was settled and cities rose. According to the historian Romila Thapar, the Buddha's teaching was also a response to the emergence of the state and the growth of urban centres. The egalitarianism of Jains and Buddhists let them trade more easily than Brahmans bound by caste prohibitions.
I lived a spoilt, a very spoilt life, monks, the Buddha says in the early texts of his years in his parents' home. He had a wife, Yasodhara, and a son named Rahula. The earliest sources keep the story plain. Disillusioned with lay life, Gautama left to become a sramana, driven by the thought that his life was subject to old age, disease and death, and that there might be something better. The household life, he reasoned, is narrow and impure, while the life of the samana is the free open air. The later biographies turn this into high drama. In the Nidanakatha, composed in the 5th century CE, his father shields him from all knowledge of suffering, hoping he will become a great king. Riding out, the young prince meets an old man, then a diseased man, then a decaying corpse, then a serene ascetic. These are the four sights, a story adapted from an earlier account in the Digha Nikaya about a previous Buddha named Vipassi. One night he sees his servants asleep in corpse-like poses, and the sight shakes him. He leaves the palace in the dark, against his father's will, riding his horse Kanthaka with his charioteer Chandaka. At the river Anomiya he cuts off his hair and changes into a monk's robes. When he later begged for alms at Rajagaha, King Bimbisara of Magadha offered him a share of his kingdom. Gautama refused, but promised to return once he had attained enlightenment.
The sphere of nothingness was the first summit Gautama reached. He learned it from Arada Kalama, who was so impressed that he offered to make the newcomer an equal leader of their community. Gautama declined, because the attainment did not lead to dispassion, to cessation, to calm, to awakening. He moved on to Udraka Ramaputra and reached a state called the Sphere of Neither Perception nor Non-Perception, was again invited to lead, and again left unsatisfied. He then turned to extreme asceticism, eating so little that his bones showed through his skin. One story tells of a village girl named Sujata who gave him milk and rice pudding. When he abandoned this self-mortification, his five companions left him, certain he had grown undisciplined. Alone, he remembered a moment of meditation from childhood, sitting under a tree while his father worked, and understood that this was the path. According to the Mahasaccaka-sutta, he passed through the four dhyanas and the three higher knowledges to full insight into the Four Noble Truths. In tradition this happened under a pipal tree, the Bodhi tree, at Bodh Gaya in Bihar. The Pali Canon says he then sat for seven days feeling the bliss of deliverance. The legendary biographies add Mara, ruler of the desire realm, who sent his daughters to seduce him and his armies of monsters to assault him. Unmoved, the Buddha touched the ground, calling the earth itself to witness.
Subtle, deep and hard to grasp. That was the Buddha's worry about his own discovery, and according to MN 26 he hesitated to teach it at all, fearing that humans overpowered by ignorance, greed and hatred could never recognise the path. The god Brahma Sahampati persuaded him that at least some with little dust in their eyes would understand. He went to the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, and gave his first sermon to his five former companions, the Benares sermon on the noble eightfold path as the middle way between sensual indulgence and self-mortification. The ascetic Kaundinya became the first arhat and the first Buddhist monk. After a second discourse on not-self, the four others reached the status of arahant. For the remaining 40 or 45 years of his life, the Buddha travelled the Gangetic Plain, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and southern Nepal. According to Hans Wolfgang Schumann, his range covered an area of roughly 600 by 300 kilometres. He taught nobles and servants, ascetics and householders, even a murderer named Angulimala and a cannibal named Alavaka. His sangha drew patronage from the kings of Kosala and Magadha, and he spent much time in their capitals, Savatthi and Rajagaha. The wealthy merchant Anathapindika is said to have bought Jeta's grove for the sangha at the cost of thousands of gold coins. His step-mother, Mahaprajapati Gautami, sought to found an order of nuns. Turned down at first, she shaved her hair, donned robes and followed him until Ananda convinced him to relent. The one argument Ananda used in every version of the story was that women have the same ability to reach all stages of awakening.
All sankharas decay. Strive for the goal with diligence. These are reported as the Buddha's final words, spoken at Kushinagar in a grove of Sala trees. His last years, as told in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, were a time of war, opening with Ajatashatru's plan to attack the Vajjika League. The Buddha turned the question into a lesson, saying the sangha would prosper as long as it held regular assemblies, met in harmony, did not change the rules of training and honoured its elders. When Ananda asked him to name a successor, he refused. I have taught the Dhamma, making no distinction of inner and outer, he said. The Tathagata has no teacher's fist in which certain truths are held back. He was, by his own account, turning eighty, his body kept going like an old cart held together with straps. He told his monks to live as islands unto themselves, with the Dhamma as their refuge and no other. His last meal came as an offering from a blacksmith named Cunda. The Theravada tradition holds it was some kind of pork, the Mahayana tradition some kind of truffle or mushroom, but no source blames the meal for his death. The monks Bhikkhu Mettanando and Oskar von Hinuber argued that he died of mesenteric infarction, a symptom of old age. He ordained one last novice, named Subhadda, then passed through the four dhyanas and the immaterial attainments into parinirvana. The Mallians of Kushinagar honoured his body with flowers, music and scents, waiting for the elder Mahakassapa to arrive before cremation. His bones were kept as relics and divided among kingdoms like Magadha, Shakya and Koliya, sealed in stupas that Ashoka would one day reopen to spread across his realm.
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Common questions
Who was the Buddha and what did he found?
The Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama, a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic plains in the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. The word Buddha is not a personal name but a title meaning Awakened One or Enlightened One, drawn from the root budh, to wake.
When did the Buddha live and why are his dates uncertain?
The dates of the Buddha's birth and death are uncertain because Buddhist texts preserve two rival chronologies, both giving him a lifespan of 80 years. The long chronology yields dates such as 624 to 544 BCE or 566 to 486 BCE, while the short chronology places his life as late as 448 to 368 BCE. At a 1988 symposium, most scholars gave dates within 20 years either side of 400 BCE for his death.
Where was the Buddha born and where did he die?
According to Buddhist tradition the Buddha was born at Lumbini, in modern-day Nepal, and raised at Kapilavastu. He attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in Bihar and died at Kushinagar, in modern Uttar Pradesh, in a grove of Sala trees.
How do we know the Buddha existed if no records survive from his lifetime?
No written records of Gautama survive from his lifetime or the one or two centuries after, but from the middle of the 3rd century BCE the Edicts of Ashoka name the Buddha and Buddhism. Archaeological sites at Vaishali and Lumbini have been linked to his time, and a wooden structure excavated at Lumbini around 2015 was carbon dated to possibly the 6th century BCE. Most scholars accept that he lived, taught and founded a monastic order during the reign of Bimbisara of Magadha.
Why did the Buddha leave his home and royal life?
Siddhartha Gautama renounced his home after concluding that his life was subject to old age, disease and death, and that there might be something better. He had a wife named Yasodhara and a son named Rahula, and described his earlier life as very spoilt, but left the palace to live as a wandering ascetic.
What were the Buddha's final words and how did he die?
The Buddha's final words are reported as All sankharas decay, strive for the goal with diligence, spoken at Kushinagar. After eating a last meal offered by a blacksmith named Cunda, he fell ill and died, entering parinirvana. The scholars Bhikkhu Mettanando and Oskar von Hinuber argued he died of mesenteric infarction, a symptom of old age, and no source attributes his death to the meal itself.