Gautama Buddha

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A grove at Lumbini, a stone pillar, and a line of Brahmi script: King Piyadasi, beloved of the gods, came here in person and worshipped, because here the Buddha was born. Ashoka set that pillar up in the third century BCE, some two centuries after the man it commemorates, and it remains the oldest hard attestation of a place the tradition had already fixed in memory — a king making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of someone he never met. Everything earlier is testimony rather than monument: chants carried in the mouths of monks, the recollected sayings of a teacher who wrote nothing down. The figure at the center of it had a clan name, Gautama, and a personal name the texts give as Siddhartha — “he whose aim is accomplished” — though by the time the stories were set in order he was almost never called either. He was called the Buddha, the awakened one, the title eclipsing the name.

This is the man, not the principle. The awakened state itself — what it is to be a buddha, and the long cosmology of buddhas before and after him — is its own subject. Here the subject is the person the tradition remembers: a renunciant of the Ganges plain who founded an order, taught for some four decades, and died on a couch between two trees.

The going forth

He was born into the Shakyas, a small republican people on the Himalayan foothills whose territory centered on Kapilavastu — an archaeological location still disputed between Tilaurakot in Nepal and Piprahwa across the modern Indian border. His father, Śuddhodana, the texts make a king; the social reality was likely a leading family in an oligarchic clan that governed by council rather than crown. His mother, Maya, died days after the birth at Lumbini, and the boy was raised by her sister. He married, in the traditional account, a woman named Yaśodharā, and fathered a son, Rāhula — a name that later commentators read as “fetter,” the tie that the father would shortly cut.

The dates here demand care, because they are the single most unsettled fact about him. The chronology long printed in handbooks — birth in 563, death in 483 BCE — rests on a “long chronology” preserved in the Sri Lankan monastic chronicles, which reckon the death at exactly 218 years before the consecration of Ashoka. A competing “short chronology,” drawn from the Indian and Northern sources, set the figure only a century before Ashoka. Neither survives close scrutiny intact. When Heinz Bechert convened a symposium at Göttingen in 1988 to reopen the whole question, the majority of the assembled specialists placed the death within twenty years on either side of 400 BCE. Reviewing the proceedings, L. S. Cousins concluded that reasonable probability favored a median date for the parinirvāṇa around 400 BCE, the round number chosen to signal that the margins were loose. The Buddha is, by this reckoning, among the worst-dated of the world’s founders and among the best-attested in everything but the calendar: the teaching is preserved in enormous detail; the years of the teacher are not. A careful account holds both registers at once — the tradition’s confident 563–483, and the field’s drift toward the fifth or fourth century.

What sent him out of the household is told as a sequence of encounters the texts call the four sights. Sheltered, the story runs, from every ugliness, the young man rode out from the palace and met in turn an old man bent with age, a man wasted by sickness, and a corpse borne to its cremation — the three faces of a suffering he had never been shown. Then a fourth figure: a wandering renunciant, calm amid it all, who had left the world to seek a way past it. The sequence is plainly a teaching device, a compression of the First Noble Truth into four roadside meetings, and the tradition tells it as such without embarrassment. Its force is undimmed by its artifice. The man went home, looked at his sleeping wife and child, and at night crossed the river and cut his hair — the act the sources name the Great Going Forth, the renunciation that turns a prince into a homeless seeker.

Austerity and the Middle Way

What followed was six years of failure pursued to its limit. He studied under two meditation masters of the day, reached the formless attainments they taught, and found they did not end suffering. He turned then to the harder discipline of the forest ascetics, and in the company of five fellow seekers drove the body to the edge of death. The texts let him describe it in the first person: his spine stood out like a corded rope, his ribs like the rafters of a ruined shed, his eyes sank in their sockets like water in a deep well, and when he laid his hand on his belly he could feel his backbone. Reduced almost to a skeleton, he found awakening no nearer than before.

Siddhartha fasting — a replica of the famous Lahore Museum image, Gandhara, 2nd–3rd century CE. — Photograph by Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0, public domain).

The turn came as a memory. He recalled sitting as a child in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree while his father worked, and slipping into a quiet, untroubled absorption — a happiness that owed nothing to either indulgence or mortification. Why, he asked, was he afraid of that ease? He accepted a bowl of milk-rice, and his five companions, disgusted at what looked like backsliding, abandoned him. This is the hinge the tradition names the Middle Way: the refusal of both extremes, the sensual life he had left and the punishing asceticism he now set down. The path to the ending of suffering ran between them.

Restored, he sat beneath a pipal tree — Ficus religiosa, the species ever after called the Bodhi tree — at the place now known as Bodh Gaya, and resolved not to rise until he was free. Through the night, the accounts say, he was assailed by Mara, the embodiment of death and desire, with armies and daughters and the simple challenge: “By what right do you claim this?” He answered by touching the earth, calling the ground itself to witness the lifetimes of discipline behind him, and the earth, the texts say, roared its assent. By dawn he had seen his former lives, seen the rising and passing of beings according to their deeds, and understood the chain by which suffering arises and the way it comes undone. He was, from that night, awake.

What he taught

He hesitated, the tradition holds, before teaching at all — what he had seen ran against the grain of the world, and few would follow it. Persuaded, he went to find his five former companions in the Deer Park at Isipatana, near the city of Benares, the place now called Sarnath on the edge of Varanasi. The discourse he gave them is preserved as the Dhammacakkappavattana — the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Law — and it opens, in the translation hosted in this collection’s Buddhist Suttas, by naming the two extremes a seeker must avoid and the middle path between them. Then come the Four Noble Truths, the frame on which the whole teaching hangs.

The first is the truth of suffering, dukkha — that birth, age, sickness, death, separation from what one loves and union with what one does not, the failure to get what one wants, are all forms of an unease woven through ordinary existence. The second names its origin: craving, the thirst that reaches for pleasure, for being, for non-being, and binds a being to the round of rebirth. The third is the most quietly radical — that this thirst can cease, that there is an end. The fourth is the way to that end: the Noble Eightfold Path. Its eight limbs — right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration — gather into three trainings: ethical conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom. The path is prescriptive, not doctrinal; it is a course of practice rather than a creed to affirm.

The first sermon — the Buddha’s hands form the dharmachakra-mudra, the wheel-turning gesture; Gupta period, c. 5th century CE, Sarnath Museum. — Photograph by Tevaprapas Makklay, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Beneath the Four Truths lies the analysis he had seen on the night of awakening: dependent origination, paṭiccasamuppāda, the principle that nothing arises on its own. Every condition leans on a prior one in a chain that runs from ignorance through craving and clinging to birth, age, and death — and because each link is conditioned, removing the conditions unmakes the suffering they produce. From this the tradition draws the three marks of all conditioned existence: impermanence, anicca, that nothing stays; suffering, dukkha, that nothing unstable can fully satisfy; and non-self, anatta — the teaching that nowhere in the bundle of body, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness is there a permanent, owning self to be found. The self one defends is a process mistaken for a thing. To see this clearly is to loosen the grip of craving, and the loosening, carried to its end, is nirvana: the going out of the fire, the cessation of the thirst that drives the round of samsara and the deeds, the karma, that fuel it.

Around this teaching he built an order. Men and, after some recorded reluctance, women left the household to follow him, and the community of monks and nuns — the sangha — became the vessel that carried the teaching forward, governed by the code of discipline called the Vinaya. For some forty-five years he walked the towns and river-towns of the Ganges plain, from Rajagaha to Savatthi, teaching kings and courtesans, Brahmins and outcastes, accepting his day’s food in a bowl and resolving the order’s disputes. The collected sayings fill the volumes the tradition calls the Nikāyas; their most condensed and best-loved distillation, the Dhammapada, opens with the line that all we are is the result of what we have thought.

The end is told with the same plainness as the beginning. Aged and ailing, he took a last meal — the texts name it sūkara-maddava, a dish whose very meaning is disputed — fell sick, and lay down on his right side between two sal trees at Kushinagar. His last recorded words, in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta preserved in the hosted Buddhist Suttas, turn from consolation to instruction: “all compounded things decay; work out your liberation with diligence.” Then he passed through the stages of meditation and was gone — the parinirvāṇa, the final unbinding, the death of one who would not be reborn.

Relics, empire, and afterlives

What remained was ash, and the ash was fought over. The account in the same sutta has the surrounding peoples — the Mallas of Kushinagar, the Shakyas, the Licchavis, the king of Magadha, and others — nearly come to arms over the cremated remains, until a Brahmin named Drona divided them into eight equal portions to keep the peace. Over those portions, and over the urn and the embers, rose the first stupas: domed mounds that turned a relic into a place, and a place into a destination. The grammar of Buddhist devotion was set early — not an image at first but a reliquary, the absent teacher present in his bones.

Two centuries on, that grammar acquired an empire. The Mauryan emperor Ashoka, after a war that left him sickened by its slaughter, became the tradition’s great royal patron. He is remembered — in the Buddhist sources, which idealize him — for redistributing the relics into a legendary eighty-four thousand stupas, for the pillars he raised at the holy places with their polished lion capitals, and for dispatching missions that carried the teaching beyond India, south to Sri Lanka and out toward the Hellenistic west. The pilgrimage circuit of the four great sites — birth at Lumbini, awakening at Bodh Gaya, first sermon at Sarnath, death at Kushinagar — took the shape it has held ever since.

The Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, raised over the site of the first sermon. — Photograph by Maskaravivek, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

As the teaching spread, the teacher grew. The traditions came to speak of buddhas of past ages, of which Gautama was only the latest, and to elaborate his single human awakening into a cosmology. The Mahayana schools developed the doctrine of the buddha’s bodies — the historical man as the visible, constructed form of an awakening that was also a vast, timeless reality — so that the figure at Bodh Gaya became one appearance of something without beginning or end. The Pure Land traditions, and the teachers who carried them east, looked less to the man of the Ganges plain than to celestial buddhas presiding over other worlds; the Japanese reformer Shinran would stake everything on the vow of one such buddha rather than on the historical Gautama’s hard path of effort. The Vajrayana of Tibet wove him into a still denser fabric of awakened forms. Each portrait is internally coherent; each is a different answer to the question of who, exactly, woke under the tree. The Theravada of southern Asia held closest to the human teacher of the early discourses — the man who got sick from a bad meal and died between the sal trees.

The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, raised on the site of the awakening, with a descendant of the Bodhi tree behind. — Photograph by Bpilgrim, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).

The historical teacher returned as a project of the nineteenth century. As European scholars learned Pali and Sanskrit and began editing the canon, a “quest for the historical Buddha” took shape alongside the parallel quest for the historical Jesus — an effort to peel the legendary cosmology back from a recoverable man, and an effort that ran, as the dating debate shows, into the limits of the evidence. The popular reception ran ahead of the scholarship. In 1879 the English journalist Edwin Arnold published The Light of Asia, an eight-book narrative poem that told the Buddha’s life in blank verse from the imagined vantage of an Indian devotee. It was a sensation. Newspapers and dining rooms filled with talk of the prince who gave up a kingdom; the authorized English edition ran through some thirty printings within a few years, and across all editions sales are reckoned in the hundreds of thousands to a million. Arnold’s Buddha was a Victorian one — filtered through the era’s sensibility, familiar enough not to frighten and exotic enough to enthrall — and much of what the English-speaking West first felt about the man it learned from his lines rather than from a sutta.

The figure has proved unusually portable. To one tradition he is the human exemplar who found the path by his own effort and left a map; to another he is the temporary appearance of a boundless awakening; to the modern reader he is by turns a philosopher of mind, a critic of metaphysics, a teacher of equanimity. The biography survives because the order he founded chose to carry it, word by remembered word, down twenty-five centuries — and the man who told his followers that all compounded things decay became, against the drift of his own teaching, one of the least decayed memories the species keeps.

→ In the library: Rhys Davids — Buddhist Suttas (SBE XI, 1881) · Müller — The Dhammapada (SBE X, 1881) · Arnold — The Light of Asia (1879)

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