Person · Buddhist teacher

The Buddha

Also known as Siddhartha Gautama, Gautama Buddha, Shakyamuni, Sakyamuni

Date

c. 5th century BCE

Function

Authority & administration

Tradition

Pali Canon; Sanskrit Buddhist texts

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

Almost every place in the Eight Great Places circuit is within four hundred kilometres of the others, so his whole recorded life happened inside one stretch of the middle Ganges. The dates are still argued: the traditional 563–483 BCE is now generally pushed about a century later.

Connections (7)

• Life routeLumbinī

  Lumbinī is the one place in the Buddha's life fixed by a contemporary-ish document rather than by tradition alone: Ashoka's pillar of 249 BCE says he came in person, made offerings because the Buddha was born here, and cut the village's tax to an eighth. The pillar was found again in 1896.

• Life routeKushinagar

  He died at Kushinagar, a small town he chose over the great cities, and the eight claimants who came for the relics nearly fought until a brahmin divided the ashes eight ways. That division is the origin of the stupa as a building type and of the relic as a political object.

• Life routeRājagriha / Rajgir

  Rājagriha was Magadha's capital under Bimbisāra, his first royal patron, and the site of the council held immediately after his death at which five hundred monks recited the teaching into fixed form. The canon exists because a community that had lost its teacher decided to agree on what he had said.

• Life routeVaishālī

  At Vaishālī he agreed to ordain women, after refusing three times and being argued round by Ānanda on behalf of Mahāpajāpatī. The bhikkhunī order that followed is the earliest organised community of women renunciants anywhere, and the conditions attached to it have been argued about ever since. He also announced his own death there three months in advance, and the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta's account of the last journey begins from that announcement.

• Teaching lineageB. R. Ambedkar

  Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma sets aside rebirth, karma and the four noble truths as later monkish additions and reads the teaching as a social ethic against inequality. It is a deliberate reconstruction, rejected by many traditional Buddhists, and it is what several million Indians practise. He had announced in 1935 that he would not die a Hindu and spent twenty-one years choosing which religion to take instead, examining Islam, Christianity and Sikhism before settling on Buddhism.

• Court associationMahāvīra

  Mahāvīra appears in the Pali canon as Nigantha Nātaputta, a rival teacher whose doctrine is reported and rejected — one of very few cases where two Indian religions independently record the same contemporary. Both taught in Magadha, both rejected Vedic sacrifice, and both drew from the same merchant and kshatriya support.

• AnalogueBarlaam and Josaphat

  Josaphat is the Buddha. The name travelled Bodhisattva to Bodisav in Persian, Budhasaf and then by a copyist's slip Yudasaf in Arabic, Iodasaph in Georgian, Ioasaph in Greek and Josaphat in Latin, and the four sights, the renunciation and the hermit came with it. Both Barlaam and Josaphat were canonised; the Buddha has a feast day in the Roman Martyrology.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Gautama Buddha”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Gautama Buddha