Who Was the Buddha?

More than 2,500 years ago, a man named Siddhartha Gautama was born in northern India.

According to tradition, he was born into a noble family. His father was a local ruler who hoped his son would follow in his footsteps. The story goes that he tried to shield him from any encounter with old age, illness, and death, hoping he would live a life of comfort and pleasure.

But reality didn’t stay outside the palace walls.

One day Siddhartha went out beyond the walls and encountered four sights that changed the course of his life.

He saw an old man.

A sick man.

A dead man.

And finally, he met a wandering monk.

The first three encounters stirred deep questions in him about the nature of life and the suffering every human being meets sooner or later. Meeting the monk showed him another possibility — that perhaps there was a way to investigate these questions, rather than simply living alongside them.

At the time, Siddhartha was married to Yasodhara and was father to a son named Rahula.

According to tradition, at the age of twenty-nine he made a dramatic decision. He left the palace, his status, his wife, and his young son, and set out on a spiritual journey in search of answers to the questions that occupied him. It’s a moment that still stirs discussion and criticism today, and even within the Buddhist traditions themselves, the personal cost of that decision isn’t glossed over.

In the years that followed he studied under well-known spiritual teachers of his time, and later joined ascetics who lived in extreme austerity. For years he barely ate, until his body grew very weak.

But this way of life, too, failed to provide the answers he was searching for.

According to tradition, at a certain point he chose to abandon extreme asceticism and adopt what would come to be known as the middle way — a path that steers clear of both a life of pleasure and complete denial of the body’s needs.

After accepting a bowl of rice from a woman named Sujata, he sat down beneath the Bodhi tree and resolved not to rise until he had completed the inquiry he had carried for years.

During the night, tradition tells us, he faced Mara — a figure representing the fears, temptations, and doubts that arise in the mind.

At dawn, according to Buddhist tradition, he reached awakening. From that moment he was called the Buddha.

The word “Buddha” isn’t a proper name.

It means “the one who has awakened.”

He then faced a dilemma: could what he had experienced even be explained to others?

According to tradition, after much deliberation, he decided to try.

He gave his first teaching in the Deer Park at Sarnath. There he laid out what would go on to become the heart of Buddhist practice: the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

Over the roughly 45 years that followed, he wandered across northern India, taught, spoke with kings, monks, farmers, and ordinary people, and built a community of students.

He didn’t ask to be believed in as a god.

He offered a path of practice, inquiry, and observation, and encouraged his students to test things for themselves, through their own experience.

According to tradition, he died at the age of eighty in the city of Kushinagar.

His last words, as preserved in the Pali Canon, were:

“All conditioned things are subject to decay. Strive on with diligence.”