Buddha (563 BC-483 BC), also known as Gautama Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni, was the founder of Buddhism. He was born in Nepal to Queen Maya of Sakya. Buddha lived mostly in northeastern India, and his religion spread to the rest of Asia after his death. A nontheistic religion, Buddhism shunned both ignorance and desire, and focused on the spiritual world. Buddha is the man from whom the tenets of Buddhism originate, and there is no deity in the religion.
Biography[]
The statue of "Laughing Buddha" in Taiwan.
Buddha was the son of Suddhodana and Queen Maya of Sakya, the king and queen of the Shakya clan of Lumbini in present-day Nepal. Suddhodana wished for his son to become a great king, so he refused to give him religious teachings and avoided his discovery of human suffering, giving him a perfect view of the world. He married his cousin Yasodhara, and he became a prince.
When he was 29, however, Buddha's ideas of life were shattered when he wandered around the palace and saw an old man. He found out that people grew old and died, found out that people could grow sick, and he also encountered a decaying corpse as well as an ascetic. Buddha decided to overcome aging, sickness, and suffering by becoming an ascetic as well, focusing on a spiritual life. He left his palace and became a beggar, and he met the hermit Alara Kalama, learning his teachings. Kalama asked him to succeed him, but Buddha instead decided to do yoga with Uddaka Ramaputta, a meditator.
He was again unsatisfied and moved on, and he decided to eat either one leaf or one nut per day, starving himself nearly to death. Buddha almost drowned when he passed out in a river due to his starvation, but he was rescued by a villager, and he decided to meditate. He realized that meditation was the right path to awakening, but not self-mortification; he gained the idea of the "Middle Way", which was the gray area in between the two. He then became enlightened after much work, and his name "Buddha" means "enlightened one" due to his liberation.
Buddha believed that mastering the Four Noble Truths (that all conditional experiences are ultimately unsatisfying; clinging to what is pleasurable would lead to dissatisfaction, rebirth, and redeath; putting an end to craving would mean that dissatisfaction could no longer arise; and that by following the Noble Eightfold Path of behaving decently, having discipline, and practicing mindfulness and meditation, an end could be put to craving, clinging, dissatisfaction, rebirth, and redeath) would allow the person to achieve Nirvana, where no rebirth would take place.
He later formed the "sangha", the Buddhist community, after preaching to five companions in Varanasi, India. Buddhism became a major religion that flourished in India, rivalling Hinduism, as the religion declared that the vedas did not hold any authority. The religion would spread to the rest of Asia in the centuries after his death, and King Ashoka of the Mauryan Empire would adopt Buddhism as the state religion of his nation. Buddha died in Kushinagar in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India.