Buddha

A prince sat under a fig tree with his back against the trunk and his right hand resting on his knee, and the night around him filled with the sound of an army that was not there. Whirlwinds came, then rains of fire, then mountains of burning coal and a flood of churning mud. The demon Mara threw all of it at the man beneath the branches and none of it reached him. The weapons turned to flowers in the air. When the assault failed, Mara tried the older trick and claimed the seat of awakening for himself, demanding to know who would vouch for this beggar’s right to sit there. The man said nothing. He lowered his hand and touched the ground, and the earth answered for him with a sound like thunder rolling up from underneath. Mara and his daughters and his elephant withdrew, and the prince was left alone to finish what he had come to do.

He was born Siddhartha Gautama, son of a chieftain of the Shakya clan, somewhere in the foothills below the Himalayas around the sixth or fifth century before the common era. The stories of his arrival are extravagant. His mother, Queen Maya, dreamed that a white elephant with six tusks entered her side, and when the child was born in a grove at Lumbini he stepped from her right side already formed, took seven steps, and at each step a lotus opened beneath his foot. Maya died seven days later. A sage examined the infant and gave the father a choice of futures: the boy would become either a great king or a great holy man. Suddhodana wanted the king. He raised his son inside a sequence of pleasure palaces, screened from age, sickness, and death, married him young to Yasodhara, and waited for an heir.

The screen held for nearly thirty years and then it broke in four pieces. Riding out past the walls, Siddhartha saw an old man bent over a stick, then a man wasted by disease, then a corpse being carried to the burning ground. The cool ordered world he had been given suddenly looked like a room with the door painted over. The fourth sight was a wandering ascetic, calm in the middle of all that ruin, and it pointed the way out. That night he looked once at his sleeping wife and newborn son, Rahula, and left. He cut off his hair, traded his fine clothes for a beggar’s cloth, and walked away from everything that had been built to keep him.

For six years he punished his body. He studied with the best meditation masters of the day, exhausted what they could teach, then drove himself into a starvation so severe that, by his own later account, he could touch his spine by pressing on his stomach. It brought him no nearer to release. He took a bowl of milk-rice from a village girl named Sujata, and the five companions who had fasted beside him turned away in disgust, certain he had given up. He had given up only the extremes. Neither the palace nor the bone-deep hunger had worked, so he chose a road between them and sat down beneath a pipal tree at a place now called Bodh Gaya, resolved not to rise until he understood.

Through the watches of that night he passed beyond Mara’s siege into knowledge. He saw his own former lives stretching back without number. He saw beings everywhere falling out of one existence and into another according to what they had done. And he saw, plainly, why suffering arises and how it can be made to stop. By dawn he was awake in a way the word ordinarily does not mean, and from then on people called him the Buddha, the awakened one. He was thirty-five.

What he did with the next forty-five years was walk and talk. Each morning he took a bowl into a village, ate once before noon, and spent the rest of the day teaching whoever came, in the plain language of farmers and merchants rather than the priestly Sanskrit of the schools. His first sermon, given in a deer park near Benares to the five who had abandoned him, laid out the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and is remembered as the turning of the wheel of the law. Around him grew an order of monks and nuns, the Sangha, that admitted outcastes and former killers alongside princes.

The marks tradition lays on his body belong to legend more than to memory. The thirty-two signs of a great man, the bump on the crown that sculptors later rendered as a topknot, the curl of white hair between the brows, the soles printed with wheels, were a theological language for greatness laid over a man whose actual face no one recorded. For roughly five centuries his followers would not depict him at all, marking his presence with an empty seat, a pair of footprints, or a parasol over nothing. No one carved his face while he lived.

The powers attributed to him follow from the awakening rather than decorating it. He was said to recall every life he had ever lived and to see the whole machinery of death and rebirth at work, and the legends grant him quieter feats: a maddened elephant loosed against him by his jealous cousin Devadatta knelt instead of charging, and a great serpent king, Mucalinda, reared up to shield him from a week of storms. His real instrument was none of these. It was a diagnosis of why beings suffer and a method for ending it, offered to anyone willing to walk the path.

His limits were the limits of a body, and he never pretended otherwise. He grew old. He fell ill. Near the town of Kushinagar, after a final meal offered by a smith named Cunda, he was struck by a violent sickness, lay down on his right side between two sal trees, and told the monks gathered around him that all conditioned things pass away and that they should work out their liberation with diligence. Then he died, at around eighty, passing into the final nirvana from which there is no return. He had spent his life insisting he was not a god and could not save anyone by being worshipped. He was a man who had found a door and spent the rest of his time holding it open.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the Buddha?

The Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Shakya clan born in the Himalayan foothills around the sixth or fifth century BCE who renounced his royal life to seek an end to human suffering. After attaining enlightenment, he became the founder of Buddhism and spent forty-five years teaching across northern India. The title “Buddha” is not a name but a description meaning “the awakened one.”

What does the word “Buddha” mean?

“Buddha” means “the awakened one” or “the enlightened one,” from a root meaning to wake up or understand. It was the title Siddhartha Gautama earned after his enlightenment, not the name he was born with. In Buddhist tradition it can apply to any being who reaches the same complete awakening, though it most often refers to Siddhartha himself.

How did the Buddha reach enlightenment?

The Buddha reached enlightenment by sitting in meditation beneath a fig tree, the Bodhi tree, at Bodh Gaya and refusing to rise until he understood the cause of suffering. He first resisted the demon Mara, who attacked him with armies and temptations and challenged his right to the seat, which the Buddha settled by touching the earth to call it as his witness. Through the night he gained knowledge of his past lives and the workings of rebirth, and by dawn he had awakened at the age of thirty-five.

Was the Buddha a god?

No, the Buddha was not a god and explicitly rejected worship as one. He presented himself as a human being who had awakened to the truth about suffering, and he taught that any person could achieve the same liberation by following the path he described. Later devotion elevated him in art and ritual, but his own teaching placed him as a guide and example rather than a deity to be saved by.

How did the Buddha die?

The Buddha died around the age of eighty near the town of Kushinagar, after eating a final meal offered by a smith named Cunda and falling gravely ill. He lay down between two sal trees, gave his last instruction that all conditioned things are impermanent and that his followers should strive diligently, and passed into final nirvana. This death, called the parinirvana, marked his complete release from the cycle of rebirth.

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