Siddhartha Gautama | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

(c. 566 BCE–486 BCE), founder of Buddhism. Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, was also titled Sakyasinha and later Sakyamuni, or Sage of the Sakyas. He was born into a princely Kshatriya-caste family in Kapilavastu, on the border between India and Nepal, in a garden identified by archaeologists in the twentieth century. His mother, Maya, died giving birth to him. His father, Suddhodhana, was of the Gautama family. At the age of sixteen the Siddhartha married Yasodhara, and they lived in his father's luxurious palace for the next thirteen years.

Then, when only twenty-nine years old, he renounced that life, leaving his wife and newborn son behind as he went out into the world to seek enlightenment. His search began with a year of studying Indian philosophy. He then sought salvation by practicing severe austerities for five years. It was on a day when he was sitting meditating under the famous Bo tree at what would later be called Bodh Gaya that enlightenment came to him, and he was thenceforth known as the Buddha, or Enlightened One.

Beginning now a lifetime of teaching, he preached his first sermon in the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, where five disciples joined him. For the next forty-five years he wandered the region now comprising the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, preaching the truth as he saw it, and converting both prince and peasant to his view, regardless of their caste. He organized his disciples into the great Buddhist sangha, the oldest religious order that is still in existence. According to one tradition he passed from this world in 486 BCE at Kusinagara, at the age of eighty.

The Buddha left behind a collection of traditions and teachings, written down in Pali by his disciples, that became the Tripitaka. Later translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan, the Tripitika became the basic texts for hundreds of millions of Asian Buddhists.

The Buddha, whose historicity is definitely established, never made claims of divinity for himself. He only claimed to have attained a certain knowledge that others could also attain. He was the first religious figure to found a brotherhood of monks (the sangha), through which he promoted an organized, widespread, and peaceful evangelization of the peasant masses.

Paul Hockings

Thomas, Edward J. (1949) The Life of Buddha as Legend and History. 3d rev. ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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