Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha)

About this figure

The Buddha, born Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th or 6th century BC in what is now the border region of India and Nepal, was a prince who left his family and position around the age of twenty-nine to seek an end to suffering. After years studying under ascetic teachers and practicing extreme self-denial, he concluded that neither luxury nor deprivation led anywhere, and reached enlightenment through what he called a middle way. He then taught for roughly forty-five years across northern India, gathering a community of monks and lay followers before his death around the age of eighty.

He wrote nothing down. For several centuries his teaching was preserved orally by his followers, chanted and memorized in structured verse and repeated formulas designed to survive that process intact, before being committed to writing in Pali and other languages. What survives under his name is therefore several steps removed from anything he personally set to paper: it is the substance of his teaching as his monastic community carried it forward, shaped by the mnemonic requirements of oral transmission and, in places, by centuries of communal elaboration before it reached a fixed text.

Three works in that tradition are drawn on here. The Dhammapada is a short collection of verses on ethical conduct and the nature of the mind, among the most widely read Buddhist texts in any language. The Sutta Nipata is an older collection of discourses, including some of the material scholars regard as closest to the earliest layer of the tradition. The Majjhima Nikaya, the "middle-length discourses," records longer conversations and teachings attributed to him in dialogue with named individuals. Central across all three are the Four Noble Truths - that life involves suffering, that suffering arises from craving, that it can cease, and that a specific path leads to that cessation - and the doctrine of impermanence, that all conditioned things arise and pass away. The substance is his; the exact wording is the tradition's.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.