Buddhism began in northern India about 2500 years ago. It was founded by an Indian prince called Siddhartha Gautama, who had become upset by the suffering of the world. After travelling and meditating for three years, he adopted the name Buddha, which means “Enlightened One”. Buddhists, like Hindus, believe in reincarnation and karma. The ultimate aim of all Buddhists is to achieve Nirvana — a state of absolute peace.
The evidence of the early texts suggests that he was born as Siddhartha Gautama in Lumbini and grew up in Kapilavasthu, a town in the plains region of the modern Nepal–India border, and that he spent his life in what is now modern Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Some hagiographic legends state that his father was a king named Suddhodana, his mother was Queen Maya, and he was born in Lumbini gardens. However, scholars such as Richard Gombrich consider this a dubious claim because a combination of evidence suggests he was born in the Shakyas community – one that later gave him the title Shakyamuni, and the Shakya community was governed by a small oligarchy or republic-like council where there were no ranks but where seniority mattered instead. Some of the stories about Buddha, his life, his teachings, and claims about the society he grew up in may have been invented and interpolated at a later time into the Buddhist texts.
According to the Buddhist sutras, Gautama was moved by the innate suffering of humanity and its endless repetition due to rebirth. He set out on a quest to end this repeated suffering. Early Buddhist canonical texts and early biographies of Gautama state that Gautama first studied under Vedic teachers, namely Alara Kalama (Sanskrit: Arada Kalama) and Uddaka Ramaputta (Sanskrit: Udraka Ramaputra), learning meditation and ancient philosophies, particularly the concept of “nothingness, emptiness” from the former, and “what is neither seen nor unseen” from the latter.
Finding these teachings to be insufficient to attain his goal, he turned to the practice of asceticism. This too fell short of attaining his goal, and then he turned to the practice of dhyana, meditation. He famously sat in meditation under a Ficus religiosa tree now called the Bodhi Tree in the town of Bodh Gaya in the Gangetic plains region of South Asia. He gained insight into the workings of karma and his former lives, and attained enlightenment, certainty about the Middle way (Skt. madhyam?-pratipad) as the right path of spiritual practice to end suffering (dukkha) from rebirths in Samsara. As a fully enlightened Buddha (Skt. samyaksa?buddha), he attracted followers and founded a Sangha (monastic order). Now, as the Buddha, he spent the rest of his life teaching the Dharma he had discovered, and died at the age of 80 in Kushinagar, India.
Buddha’s teachings were propagated by his followers, which in the last centuries of the 1st millennium BCE became over 18 Buddhist sub-schools of thought, each with its own basket of texts containing different interpretations and authentic teachings of the Buddha; these over time evolved into many traditions of which the more well-known and widespread in the modern era are Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism.
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