Buddha

The title Buddha means awakened, and it is conferred on a person who discovers the path to nirvana and teaches that discovery to others. The historical Buddha is also called Gotama Buddha and Siddhartha Gautama.

What can be known of the teaching rests on texts set down centuries after his death, composed in languages he probably did not speak, and they disagree among themselves. He wrote none of his teachings, which were carried orally for at least three centuries. A large collection of Buddhist texts may have been committed to writing for the first time in Sri Lanka during the first century BCE.

The chronology is equally unsettled. Earlier scholarship placed him at approximately 560 to 480 BCE, while many scholars now hold a death around 405 BCE. The Theravada school preserves its own reckoning of 623 to 543 BCE, and the prevailing current view places him in around the fifth century BCE. No date can be conclusively established.

The first complete biography of the Buddha in Pali is the Nidanakatha, an introduction to the Jataka verses of the fifth Nikaya.

The figure known as the Buddha belonged to the Shakya clan. His father was Suddhodana, and in later life he married Yasodhara and had a son named Rahula. In the traditional account of the conception a white elephant circled Maya three times and entered her womb from her right side. Because the Shakya political system was an oligarchy rather than a monarchy, Suddhodana was most likely a high-caste elected official rather than a king.

Siddhartha's father, fearing the boy would become a spiritual leader, shielded him from anything unpleasant for the first 29 years of his life. According to the legend Siddhartha lived among the luxuries of the palace, married, had a son and lacked nothing as his father's heir until the encounter with the four signs.

The historical Buddha, also called Gotama Buddha and Siddhartha Gautama, was born at Lumbini in the Nepalese Terai near the Indian border. Siddhartha is described as born into the royal family of Kapilavastu, a small kingdom in the Himalayan foothills.

The encounter with an aged man, a sick man, a dead man and a religious ascetic gave Siddhartha the four signs that turned his life toward renunciation. From them he drew the conclusion that he too would grow old, sicken and die.

He first took up the practice of yogic meditation under Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, and later departed from these teachers. The popular story tells of the milkmaid Sujata offering him rice milk in the woods.

Beneath the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya he vowed to attain enlightenment there or to die in the attempt, and in a flash of illumination he understood the Four Noble Truths.

The site marks the moment Prince Siddhartha became the Buddha, an event of central importance in Buddhist history. The Mahabodhi Temple Complex preserves this memory through its 50 m high temple, the Vajrasana, the sacred Bodhi Tree and six other sacred sites.

Emperor Ashoka built the first temple at Bodh Gaya in 260 BCE when he came to worship the Bodhi Tree. The complex received World Heritage listing in 2002.

After his awakening the Buddha devoted the remaining 45 years of his life to teaching the insights and practices that had led him there. The teaching centers on the four noble truths: dukkha, its origin, its cessation and the path to its cessation. The first truth defines dukkha as birth, aging, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair, and also as separation from the loved and not getting what is wanted. Asked what the noble truth of dukkha is, the text replies that it is the six internal sense media, and it lists the five clinging-aggregates — form, feeling, perception, fabrications and consciousness — as stressful. A canonical passage holds that it is through not realizing and not penetrating these four truths that the long course of birth and death has been undergone.

The origin of dukkha is the craving that makes for further becoming, accompanied by passion and delight. The third truth is the remainderless fading and cessation of that craving, with its renunciation, relinquishment, release and letting go. The goal is described as peace, the stilling of all fabrications, the relinquishment of all acquisitions, the ending of craving and dispassion.

The fourth truth is the Noble Eightfold Path — right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration — the way to the cessation of dukkha. An analysis attributed to the nun Dhammadinna places the path under the three aggregates of virtue, concentration and discernment. Virtue, or sila, is the cornerstone, defined by right speech, right action and right livelihood.

This path is the middle way, avoiding both sensual indulgence and self-affliction, and leading to calm, direct knowledge, self-awakening and liberation. A simile likens it to an ancient path travelled by earlier self-awakened ones, and the teaching concludes that if monks dwell rightly the world will not be empty of arahants.

Sariputta compared the four noble truths to an elephant's footprint, which encompasses all other footprints. Modern scholarship, however, argues from grammatical anomalies in the Pali that the expression noble truth is a later addition. It likewise treats the twelve-link chain of dependent origination as a later compilation, since the texts preserve differing formulations of the list.

Rebirth is governed by karma, understood as a kind of cosmic justice in which fortunate births reward good deeds and unhappy births follow evil ones.

Those who take the Five Precepts commit themselves to refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and drunkenness. Observing them is said to produce rebirth as a human being and to prevent rebirth in one of the lower realms of suffering, and the amount of good or bad karma an action generates is said to depend strongly on the motivation behind it. Lay people observe the Five Precepts, lay people undertaking intensive meditation observe the Eight Precepts, and novice monks and nuns observe the Ten Precepts.

The Buddha opposed animal sacrifice without qualification, holding that it produces bad karma rather than religious merit.

When the question turns to the condition of an arhat after death the Buddha is offered four positions — that the arhat exists, that the arhat does not exist, that the arhat both exists and does not exist, and that the arhat neither exists nor does not exist — and he declines every one of them. To make the point he draws a simile: a man struck by an arrow insists on learning who shot it before he will accept treatment.

The first sermon was addressed to the group of five monks at the Deer Park at Isipatana near Varanasi, and while it was being given Kondanna attained the dustless, stainless eye of the Dhamma: whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. The middle way is precisely the Noble Eightfold Path, from right view and right resolve through right mindfulness and right concentration. The Buddha concludes that his release is unprovoked, that this is his last birth and that there is now no further becoming.

The Buddha attained mahaparinirvana at Kushinagar, a Buddhist pilgrimage centre. He told his disciples that after his death they should have no leader and that he did not wish to be venerated. The Buddha asked that his remains be placed in a stupa at a crossroads, but his disciples divided them among eight or ten stupas marking important sites in his life. At the Second Council in 383 BCE a dispute over monastic discipline produced the first schism, between the Sthaviravada and the majority Mahasanghika school. The schism eventually produced three major schools of thought: Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism.

Lumbini is a village, archaeological site and place of pilgrimage in Nepal's Rupandehi District, honoured as the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama. Tradition holds that he was born there while his mother was travelling to her parents' home.

The conserved area includes the Shakya Tank, the brick remains of the Maya Devi Temple and the sandstone Ashoka pillar with its Pali inscription in Brahmi script. The inscription on the 22-foot pillar, in Brahmi and Pali script, records that King Piyadasi came in person to do homage because the Buddha was born there. UNESCO's statement of Outstanding Universal Value places the birth at Lumbini in the Terai plains of southern Nepal in 623 BC. Excavations have uncovered Buddhist monasteries from the third century BC to the fifth century AD and stupas from the third century BC to the fifteenth century AD.

In the earliest Buddhist art of India the Buddha was not shown in human form; his presence was indicated by signs such as footprints or an empty seat. In the first century AD the human image came to dominate Buddhist art, and one of the earliest sites of this imagery lay on India's north-western frontier.

Ashoka, third king of the Mauryan Empire, reigned from 268 to 232 BCE and is best known for renouncing war and promoting Buddhism. His turning came with the Kalinga campaign of about 260 BCE and the conversion that followed it. He had edicts engraved in stone throughout his empire and disinterred and reinterred the relics in 84,000 stupas. He also sent Buddhist missionaries to Sri Lanka, China, Thailand and Greece, establishing Buddhism as a major world religion.

The Tipitaka, whose name means three baskets, is the Pali canon, the collection of primary texts that form the doctrinal foundation of Theravada Buddhism. It comprises the Vinaya, Sutta and Abhidhamma Pitaka. The Vinaya Pitaka sets out the rules of conduct for the monastic community, while the suttas are divided among five nikayas: the long, middle-length, grouped, further-factored and little-text collections.

• c. 563 BCE
  Birth
  Traditional chronology places the Buddha's birth in this period.
• c. 483 BCE
  Death at Kushinagar
  The Buddha dies at Kushinagar according to traditional dating.
• 268 to 232 BCE
  Reign of Ashoka
  The Mauryan king Ashoka rules during this span.
• about 260 BCE
  Kalinga campaign
  Ashoka's Kalinga campaign falls in this period.
• 1896
  Ashoka pillar discovered
  The Ashoka pillar is discovered.
• 1997
  Lumbini World Heritage listing
  Lumbini is inscribed as a World Heritage site.
• 2002
  Bodh Gaya World Heritage listing
  Bodh Gaya is inscribed as a World Heritage site.