Siddhärtha Gautama, known universally as the Buddha, was born in a small village in modern-day Nepal in roughly the fifth or sixth century BC. According to legend, his father was a powerful local king, and the young Siddhärtha grew up amidst great wealth and privilege in the Himalayan foothills.
However, the young prince found material wealth unfulfilling and was profoundly troubled by the sight of suffering outside the walls of his palace. What was the cause of human misery, he wondered, and how could it be overcome?
Hoping to answer these questions, Siddhärtha fled from his father’s kingdom while in his late twenties to embrace a religious life of asceticism, self-denial, and meditation. But he soon found that a lifestyle of extreme deprivation and self-inflicted suffering brought him no closer to the truth than wealth had.
Finally, at age thirty-five, Siddhärtha experienced the seminal event of his life and the foundation of the Buddhist religion, a revelation known to Buddhists as the Great Enlightenment. According to tradition, after meditating for forty-nine days under a fig tree, he achieved nirvana, a state of total enlightenment in which the secrets of existence were revealed to him. Thenceforth, Siddhärtha would be known as the Buddha—the Enlightenment.
Human suffering, the Buddha preached, was caused by want and could be cured only by freeing oneself of desire, abandoning the notion of the self, and following the “noble eightfold path” of moral living, an ethical code that would become the foundation of much of East Asian culture.
After the Great Enlightenment, the Buddha traveled across a region of northern India and Nepal known as the Gangetic Plain, delivering sermons and converting new followers. He eventually returned to his father’s kingdom and converted many of his relatives to Buddhism.
Buddhism grew quickly during the Buddha’s lifetime, and as the sect’s leader, the Buddha survived several assassination attempts. He died at age eighty, having established several monasteries and firmly planted Buddhism as the region’s major religion.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- As a young prince, Siddhärtha was so sheltered from reality that the sight of elderly peasants perplexed him. According to legend, one of his servants had to explain to him that all humans aged.
- The Buddha was cremated after his death, but a tooth believed to have been retrieved from the ashes is venerated at a Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka.
- Siddhärtha was married at age sixteen and had one son, named Rahula. The Buddha is said to have fled from the palace on the same day Rahula was born.
