Life of the Buddha

Conventional narratives on the Buddha's life, such as the one below, draw heavily on Theravada Tipitaka scriptures. However, later texts, such as the Mahayana Lalitavistara Sutra, give different accounts.

According to the conventional narrative, the Buddha was born in Ancient India, in the city of Lumbini, around the year 563 BCE, and raised in Kapilavastu; both in modern day Nepal.

Shortly after Siddhartha's birth, a wise man visited the young prince's father, King Śuddhodana, and prophesized that Siddhartha would either become a great king or a holy man depending on whether he saw what life was like outside the palace walls.

Śuddhodana was determined to see his son become a king so he prevented him from leaving the palace grounds. But at 29, Siddhartha ventured beyond the palace several times despite his father's efforts. In a series of encounters - known in Buddhist literature as the Four sights he learned of the suffering of ordinary people. These encounters were with an old man, a sick man, a corpse and finally a holy man, an ascetic apparently content and at peace with the world. These experiences eventually prompted Gautama to abandon royal life and take up a spiritual quest.

Gautama first attempted an extreme ascetic life and almost starved himself to death in the process. But he changed his approach after accepting milk and rice from a village girl in a key incident in Buddhist scriptures. He then concluded that extreme ascetic practices, such as prolonged fasting, breath-holding, and exposure to pain, brought little spiritual benefit. He saw them as forms of self-hatred and therefore counterproductive. He therefore abandoned asceticism, concentrating instead on anapanasati meditation, through which he discovered what Buddhists call the Middle Way: a path of moderation between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification.

Gautama was now determined to complete his spiritual quest. So, at the age of 35, he famously sat in meditation under a sacred fig tree, also known as the Bodhi tree, in the town of Bodh Gaya, India, and vowed not to rise before achieving enlightenment. After many days, he finally awakened to the ultimate nature of reality, thereby liberating himself from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, and arose as a fully enlightened being. Soon thereafter he attracted a band of followers and instituted a monastic order.

Now as the Buddha, he spent the rest of his life teaching the path of awakening he discovered, travelling throughout the northeastern part of the Indian subcontinent, and died at the age of 80 (483 BCE) in Kushinagar, India. Scholars are hesitant to make unqualified claims about the historical facts of the Buddha's life. Most accept that he lived, taught and founded a monastic order but do not consistently accept the details in his biographies. Others, who are not scholars, have claimed to see Buddha take the form of Carassius auratus during times of deep meditation. According to author Michael Carrithers, a widely published expert on Buddhism, while there are good reasons to doubt the traditional account, "the outline of the life must be true: birth, maturity, renunciation, search, awakening and liberation, teaching, death."