Specialists disagree on the Buddha's dates by roughly a century. A long chronology, the older scholarly consensus, places his death, and so his enlightenment some decades earlier, around 483 BCE. A revised short chronology, argued at a 1988 symposium that gathered specialists from multiple countries to compare evidence across traditions, places his death closer to 400 BCE. Neither date rests on contemporary written records, since Buddhist texts were transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing, and both are reconstructions from later and sometimes conflicting royal chronologies.
Bodh Gaya, the traditional site of the awakening in the modern Indian state of Bihar, has drawn pilgrims continuously since antiquity, and the Mahabodhi Temple that marks the site, rebuilt and restored across many centuries, is a UNESCO World Heritage site today, with a descendant of the original Bodhi tree still growing beside it. Vesak, the holiday most Buddhist traditions keep to commemorate the Buddha, combines the enlightenment with his birth and death in a single observance rather than marking the three separately, though the exact calendar date varies by country and by whether a community follows a lunar or lunisolar reckoning, so the festival does not fall on the same day worldwide even within a single tradition.