Siddhartha Gautama

That the Buddha existed is not seriously disputed. When he lived is, and the disagreement is large enough to matter for anything built on it.

Two chronologies compete. The long chronology, preserved in the Sri Lankan Pali sources, dates his death to 544 or 486 BCE depending on how the regnal reckoning is handled, and puts his life roughly at 563-483 BCE. That is the figure in most older textbooks. The short chronology, derived from Indian and Chinese sources, places the death around 368 BCE. Since the 1980s a scholarly reassessment, associated particularly with Heinz Bechert, has pushed the majority view toward a date of death somewhere between about 410 and 370 BCE, that is, roughly a century later than the traditional figure.

This is not a technicality. The dating is anchored to the reign of Ashoka, which is fixed independently through his inscriptions naming Hellenistic kings, and the two chronologies place different intervals between the Buddha and Ashoka. Moving the Buddha a century later compresses the time available for the early schisms and for the development of the canon.

Nothing he said was written down in his lifetime. The Pali canon was transmitted orally and, by its own tradition, committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Oral transmission in this culture was formal, communal and heavily mnemonic rather than casual, and the texts show the marks of it in their repetition and formulae, which is evidence of care in transmission, not a guarantee of the words.

Archaeology at Lumbini has produced a timber structure under the later shrine, radiocarbon dated to the sixth century BCE, which its excavators read as supporting the earlier chronology. Others dispute what the structure was.

The biography everyone knows, the prince kept from all knowledge of suffering, the four sights of an old man, a sick man, a corpse and an ascetic, the flight from the palace, is not in the earliest strata of the canon in that form. The oldest accounts are fragmentary and first-person, describing a young man of good family who saw that he was himself subject to ageing, sickness and death, and left. The full palace narrative is assembled in later biographical texts, reaching its most influential literary form in Ashvaghosha's Buddhacarita in perhaps the second century CE. The father who imprisons his son in pleasure, the departure at night, the charioteer: these are the tradition's own storytelling, and they are excellent, and they are not the earliest layer.

What is early and consistent is the shape of the teaching. He tried extreme asceticism, nearly starved, concluded that self-mortification does not work any better than indulgence, and formulated a middle way. The four noble truths state a problem, a cause, a cessation and a path, in the form of a medical diagnosis.

The most distinctive thing in the early material is what he declines to discuss. Asked whether the world is eternal, whether the soul is identical with the body, and what becomes of a liberated person after death, he sets the questions aside as not conducing to liberation, the undetermined questions. The parable of the man shot with an arrow, who refuses treatment until he knows who fired it and of what caste, is the canon's own account of why.

He was a teacher, not a god, and Buddhist traditions differ sharply on how far that remains true.

The teaching the early texts present as the Buddha's own is compact and can be stated without metaphysics, though it points at something hard.

It begins with the four noble truths, cast as a physician's diagnosis: that ordinary existence is pervaded by dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, unease, suffering; that its cause is tanha, craving or thirst; that there is a cessation; and that a path leads to it. The path is the eightfold one, grouped under conduct, meditation and wisdom, and it is the practical content of the middle way between indulgence and mortification.

Under this sit two ideas that give Buddhism its distinctive edge. The first is impermanence (anicca): nothing that arises is stable, and grasping at what must change is where suffering enters. The second, more radical, is anatta, non-self, the analysis that there is no permanent, unchanging self to be found among the shifting physical and mental processes that make up a person, a direct denial of the atman that the surrounding Indian traditions affirmed. Rebirth and karma are kept from that shared world but reframed: what continues is a causal process, not a soul.

Holding these together is dependent origination (paticca-samuppada), the principle that things arise in dependence on conditions and cease when those conditions cease. How literally to read the twelve-linked chain in which it is usually expressed has been debated within Buddhism for two millennia. What is not in doubt is that the Buddha presented liberation, nirvana, the blowing out of the fires of craving, as something to be realised, not merely believed.

What happened to the Buddha's teaching after him is a story of division, vast geographic spread, and eventual near-disappearance from the land of its origin.

The tradition records councils convened to fix the teaching, and within a few centuries the community had divided into schools. The surviving fault line runs between Theravada, the way of the elders, which preserves the Pali canon and predominates in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, and the Mahayana, the great vehicle, which developed new scriptures and the ideal of the bodhisattva and spread through China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. A later Vajrayana or tantric stream became central in Tibet and Mongolia. Buddhism travelled the trade routes as far as it did partly because it carried no requirement of ethnic or territorial belonging.

In India itself it declined from roughly the end of the first millennium and had largely disappeared by about 1200, under a combination of pressures still debated by historians. Hinduism, meanwhile, absorbed the founder in a characteristic way: several Puranas list the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, commonly the ninth, but frame the descent polemically, as Vishnu taking form to lead the unworthy away from the Vedas, honouring the Buddha and neutralising him in one move.

The Indian story has a modern coda. In 1956 the jurist B. R. Ambedkar, principal architect of the Indian constitution and a leader of the Dalits, converted to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of followers, founding a socially engaged Navayana movement and returning a Buddhist presence to the country the Buddha had lived in.