Buddha - The Historical Facts Documentary

It is the fifth century BC in northern India, a land of many kingdoms at the time. A religious preacher enters a small village in the region where a large crowd has gathered to hear his teachings, which are quickly becoming the stuff of legend. However, when he begins to speak, a young man shouts angrily at him, telling him he is a charlatan.

The crowd angrily turns on the heckler, but the preacher is surprisingly calm. Instead, he cautions the young man, that if someone refuses to accept the anger directed at them, then he himself will be the recipient of his own anger and will become unhappy due to his own rage. The young man bows to the preacher, accepting his sage council and the story becomes one of many teachings that form the basis of one of the world’s oldest and greatest religions, centred around a man who is synonymous with tolerance and wisdom. His name? Buddha - The Enlightened One.

The man known to history as the Buddha was born in Lumbini in the Sakya state in what is now southern Nepal. Despite being one of the most influential religious leaders in the history of mankind, traditional accounts of the Buddha’s life are shrouded in myth and legend, and few historical details can be established beyond reasonable doubt. The name Buddha, meaning “Enlightened One,” is an honorific title dating to the 3rd century BC. The Buddha’s birth name is usually given as Siddhartha Gautama, although the scholar Alexander Wynne notes that the name Siddhartha, which means “one who has achieved his objective,” is absent from the earliest sources. During his lifetime, the Buddha was known by his family name of Gautama, or Sakyamuni, the Sage of the Sakya.

There is also considerable uncertainty regarding the dates of the Buddha’s life, which are usually determined in relation to the reign of Emperor Ashoka, a powerful Indian ruler whose conversion to Buddhism had a major impact on the spread of Buddhism. According to the traditional Sri Lankan chronology, the Buddha was born in around 566 BC and died around 486 BC. This remained the prevailing scholarly view until the late 20th century, with most historians now preferring to place the Buddha’s birth at around 484 BC and his death in 404 BC.

The uncertainties about the Buddha’s life have led some scholars to conclude that it is impossible to know almost anything about the Buddha as an historical figure, and that his ideas and teachings are far more important than anything he did during his life. Nevertheless, there have been attempts by both scholars and practising Buddhists to write biographies. By far the most important sources for the Buddha’s life are the Pali scriptures, known as the Tipitaka. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha’s sayings or discourses were memorised by his disciple and cousin Ananda and recited to the First Buddhist Council after the Buddha’s death, while another leading disciple named Upali did the same for the monastic code of conduct. These were transmitted orally for several centuries until being first written down some four centuries later.

While the Pali Canon offers the oldest and most comprehensive account of the Buddha’s life, it was written and compiled by monks promoting the Buddha’s teaching. The account of the Buddha’s life and teachings in the Pali Canon may be compared to the accounts of Jesus’ life in the four New Testament Gospels. Unlike the gospels, which were written by different people for different audiences, the Pali Canon offers a more coherent narrative, though there are still significant issues in establishing a sequence of events. In his 2011 biography, the Buddhist teacher Vishvapani Blomfield draws heavily on the Pali scriptures while scrutinizing some popular stories associated with Gautama. Recognising that the quest for historical objectivity is unrealistic, Vishvapani instead seeks to place Gautama within his historical context and present a credible narrative of an extraordinary human being whose teachings continue to offer spiritual guidance to hundreds of millions of people in the world.

Gautama’s father Suddhodana was a chieftain of the Sakya tribe who lived in the foothills of the Himalayas at the northeastern periphery of the Indian world. Some sources refer to Suddhodana as a raja, a term that may be translated as ‘king’ but is more appropriately understood as ‘lord’ in the context of Sakya’s political organisation. Some sources indicate that Suddhodana was the chief raja and remained in office for over three decades. In this capacity, he was responsible for public administration, dispensation of justice, and organising the construction of public works such as roads and dams.

Sakya nobles frequently intermarried with the Koliya people who lived across the River Rohini. Accordingly, Suddhodana married a Koliyan noblewoman named Maya. It was custom for Koliyan women to return to their family home to give birth, and when Maya became pregnant she duly made her journey to the Koliyan capital of Devadhada. She stopped on the way at a garden in Lumbini, where she went into labour and gave birth to Gautama, the future Buddha. The canonical account of Gautama’s birth is associated with many miracles, such as the baby emerging from his mother’s womb completely clean, without either blood or water. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha lived many previous lives before his reincarnation as Gautama, and it was after achieving Enlightenment that Gautama was able to break the cycle of reincarnation and attain Palinirvana, or Final Nirvana. The words attributed to the newborn Gautama in the scriptures thus foreshadow his destiny as the final incarnation of the Buddha.

After giving birth to Gautama, Maya returned to her husband’s capital of Kapilavastu, where she died seven days later. The scriptures do not consider Maya’s death as an occasion of grief but rather celebration, as she had passed into the heavenly abode known as Tushita. As Vishvapani observes, the death of Gautama’s mother in childbirth was an uncomfortable fact that had to be reconciled with the miraculous events that accompanied Gautama’s birth, and the knowledge that he owed his existence to his mother’s suffering would have had a psychological impact on Gautama. Following Maya’s death, Suddhodana took her younger sister Prajapati as his second wife. Gautama grew up in Kapilavastu under the care of his aunt and stepmother, who brought him up as if he were her own child.

One of the most popular narratives around Gautama’s childhood and upbringing describes Suddhodana confining his son to the royal palace for almost three decades, where he was completely oblivious to the sickness and suffering in the world around him. It was only when Gautama stepped foot outside of the palace in his late twenties that he encountered an old man, then a sick man, and a corpse, a shocking discovery that encouraged him to abandon his lifestyle and seek the truth of the world around him. In the earliest Pali texts, this powerful tale known as the Great Renunciation is associated not with Gautama, but with the mythical Buddha Vipassin, and it was only in later sources that the story was inserted into Gautama’s biography.

The historical and archaeological record shows that the Sakya community was not organised as a monarchy. Chieftains were elected to office by a noble assembly who met in a pillared hall in the centre of town. Accordingly, the Sakya polity was effectively an aristocratic republic controlled by a small group of noble families who were related to each other by marriage. While Gautama’s birthplace of Lumbini in Nepal is a major Buddhist pilgrimage site, the location of the Sakya capital of Kapilavastu is disputed. The most reliable accounts of the city’s location are from two Chinese monks visiting the region several centuries later: Faxian in the 4th century AD and Xuanzang in the 6th century AD. Based on their accounts, the archaeological sites of Tilaurakot in Nepal and Piprahwa in India are considered leading candidates. While the two locations are only 16 kilometres apart from one another, the fact that they straddle the Indian-Nepalese border means that the debate is also influenced by nationalist sentiments. The late German diplomat and Buddhist scholar Hans Wolfgang Schumann conjectured that Kapilavastu was originally located at the site of Tilaurakot, but after Sakya was defeated by Kosala in the west, the city was refounded at Piprahwa.

Describing the site of Tilaurakot, Xuanzang observed that the buildings within the royal precinct were being built entirely of brick, and that the foundation walls around the precinct were still in existence. While Xuanzang’s estimate of the size of the city suggests a population of 8,000 people, the Sakya economy was dominated by agriculture, with farmers in the surrounding fields tending to their crops year-round, their lives and livelihoods determined by the seasons and the climate. In addition to his leadership duties, Gautama’s father was also engaged in farming activity, and his name literally means “he who grows pure rice.” Though Sakya was a predominantly agrarian society on the periphery of the Indian world, Kapilavastu was situated on a trade route that ran east from Shravasti, the capital of the kingdom of Kosala, which had vassalized Sakya in the 6th century BC. From Kapilavastu, the road continued to run east before turning south towards the Ganges, whose regular floods made the region one of the most fertile in the whole world.

While Alexander Wynne argues that Kapilavastu would not have had any particularly grand palaces at the time, Vishvapani does not discount the idea that Gautama grew up in relative luxury. Rather than toiling in the fields, the young Gautama lived among colourful gardens with lotus ponds, and the family was able to move between three parts of the palace over the year to accommodate the hot season, cold season, and rainy seasons. During the rainy season Gautama stayed within the palace and did not go down into the town, and this may have inspired the later tale of him growing up in seclusion. He dressed in fine clothes and played games with a close circle of childhood companions, many of whom were also relatives. Three cousins from his father’s side named Mahanama, Anuruddha and Ananda would become devoted followers. Gautama had a half-brother named Nanda and a half-sister Sundari Nanda. On his mother’s side of the family, Gautama had a cousin named Devadatta, whose sister he would later marry in keeping with family tradition. Despite his pampered lifestyle, from the age of seven Gautama began receiving military training, which would have involved wrestling, sword fighting, archery, and possibly also chariot-riding and handling war elephants. While Gautama would often employ military analogies to describe inner spiritual battles, he himself was not a particularly accomplished warrior, and he certainly preferred diplomacy to warfare later in life.

Although the Pali Canon does not provide much detail about Gautama’s life before he left Kapilavastu, it includes an account of an important event in his childhood. The boy was sitting cross-legged under a rose-apple tree while his father was working in the fields, when he found himself entering a state of inner peace and tranquillity that he later recalled with great joy. The experience taught Gautama that he could attain such joy and happiness without interacting with the physical world, but by distancing himself from the world.

When he was 16 or 17 years old, Gautama married his maternal cousin. The earliest sources only refer to her as Rahulamata, a name that literally means ‘mother of Rahula,’ referencing the couple’s son. While she is known by a number of other names in later Buddhist texts, Gautama’s wife is best known as Yashodhara, a name that means “bearer of glory.” Vishvapani speculates that these different names might indicate that Gautama had multiple wives, and during the rainy season Gautama stayed in the palace entertained by female musicians who may have been part of a harem. As a young man, Gautama may have assisted his father with both agricultural and political work, and Gautama’s effectiveness as a diplomat later in life, indicates that he was experienced in dealing with foreign rulers.

As Indian societies developed in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, centralised kingdoms capable of mobilising resources for military campaigns expanded at the expense of their weaker neighbours. While Schumann hypothesises that Kapilavastu had been sacked by Kosala, it is unclear whether Sakya became a tributary of the Kosalan kingdom as a result of conquest or voluntary submission, though the Sakyan nobles continued to consider themselves of greater pedigree than their Kosalan overlords. During Gautama’s lifetime, Kosala was engaged in a struggle for control of farmland and trade routes along the Ganges valley with the nearby kingdoms of Magadha and Kasi, as well as a network of republican city-states dominated by Vaishali known as the Vrijian Federation.

The commercialisation of society led to greater socioeconomic inequality. On the assumption that Gautama was not completely cut off from society during his childhood and adolescence, he would have witnessed the penury of the peasants and slaves who toiled the land and encountered the old and sick in Kapilavastu, but it was only as an adult that he suffered a spiritual crisis after recognising that sickness, old age, and death are inescapable for humans. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was 29 years old when he renounced his life of luxury to seek answers to his spiritual questions. Based on the extensive efforts it took for Gautama to achieve his Enlightenment as the Buddha, Vishvapani argues that the spiritual crisis took place earlier in life, perhaps in Gautama’s early 20s.

Later in life, Gautama explained that human life is bound together with dukkha, a term that is usually rendered as suffering but also suggests a sense of constant unease and anxiety-discontent that continues to linger in the background even during good times. He came to recognise that the source of this anxiety-discontent was the transient nature of the human condition, one in which death and decay are inevitable. In a quest to delay the inevitable, men and women sought comfort and security by acquiring cattle to work the land and arming themselves for protection. Yet these very efforts only made things worse, as farmers became anxious about the wellbeing and safety of their livestock, and the taking up of arms heightened anxieties between hitherto peaceful neighbours. Gautama realised that he, like the rest of humanity, struggled to break away from the cycle.

He was not alone in seeking a broader understanding of the world and the cosmos. The Ganges Valley societies believed that the cosmos had been around for an inconceivably long amount of time measured in aeons rather than centuries. How it came to being was not only unknown but unknowable, and there was no creation myth or any creator gods. Within this vast expanse of time, each individual was as ancient as the universe and was constantly reborn. Yet this endless cycle of rebirth in the human world was also an endless cycle of suffering and death. It was possible for virtuous humans to be reborn in the divine realms where there was no sensation or suffering, or conversely to face unimaginable pain in the various realms of hell. While everyone believed that a person’s actions or karma in one lifetime determined their rebirth in the next, there was no consensus on what deeds were beneficial or harmful.

In tribal communities like Sakya, people mostly believed in local gods and spirits, most of whom had to be appeased by offerings. Elsewhere in the Ganges Valley, there was already a well-established tradition of the shramana, religious seekers who wandered around the country disowning all material wealth and living off the charity of others. Many people believed that giving alms to these itinerant holy men would promise a better rebirth. Another major religious tradition were the Brahmins, who emphasised fire sacrifices to the gods to renew the creative power of the universe and to ward off evil spirits. While Brahmin priests challenged the established warrior aristocracy in northern India, the hierarchical structure of Brahmin society, which was a precursor to the Indian caste system, was appealing to powerful rulers as an instrument to preserve social order.

The Brahmins’ influence on Sakya was limited, and Gautama found the ascetic lifestyle of the shramana far more appealing. Accordingly, he renounced the material wealth and luxury of his aristocratic surroundings and became a shramana himself. According to tradition, he left home shortly after his wife gave birth to their son Rahula. In later accounts, Gautama leaves his family in the middle of the night while they are sleeping, but the earliest accounts indicate that Gautama departed after many arguments with his father and stepmother who begged him not to leave. The young Sakyan noble believed that true nobility lay in his spiritual quest to free himself from the endless cycles of birth and death in the human world.

Gautama’s charioteer Chandaka brought him to the Anoma River on the Sakya frontier, where he shaved off his hair and changed into the clothes of a beggar. Most shramanas did not live in complete seclusion, but on the fringes of society as they travelled from town to town begging for alms. Rather than wandering into the dense woods that covered the Ganges Valley at that time, which risked attacks from bandits and wild animals, Gautama took the main roads and came across fellow shramanas who directed him to Rajagriha, now Rajgir in Bihar province, where many famous teachers lived. After walking 400 miles from Kapilavastu, Gautama arrived at the city, then the thriving capital of the powerful kingdom of Magadha.

Upon his arrival, Gautama witnessed fierce arguments among shramanas and Brahmins gathered in the parks outside the city to debate their ideas. He identified over 60 different ideologies among the religious groups in Rajagriha and was appalled by the passions and emotions that fuelled the debate. Of all the different shramana groups, Gautama was most influenced by the Jains, who practised non-violence towards all living things. Jain ascetics believed that the way to achieve liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth was to stop accumulating karma, which meant gradually refraining from any action and preparing for death by starvation.

Having decided to become a shramana without any preconceived notions or affiliations to any schools of thought, Gautama remained open-minded while seeking a teacher. He disregarded the size of their following, their appeals to tradition or scripture, or even arguments based on reason and logic, but rather focused on how their followers lived and behaved. Gautama first studied meditation under Arada Kalama, who quickly recognised his new pupil’s talents. With Arada’s guidance, Gautama achieved a state of Nothingness that was akin to Nirvana. When Arada died not long after, Gautama inherited leadership of the school. However, he was soon dissatisfied because he emerged from the meditative state unchanged, and no closer to Nirvana.

Gautama then sought the guidance of another famous teacher named Udraka Reamaputra, who had inherited his father Rama’s school and achieved an enigmatic state of mind beyond Nothingness called “the Sphere of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception.” As with Arada, Gautama grasped the teaching quickly and became the leader of the community but once again lost faith in the doctrine and went in search for something more. Having abandoned meditation, Gautama and a group of five companions stayed in a cave in the hills around the city of Gaya that came to be known as Pragbodhi. They resorted to self-mortification, taking inspiration from the Jains by wandering naked, refusing to wash, and scavenging food instead of begging. He tried to slow down his breathing and eventually attempted to stop eating altogether, surviving on the smallest morsel of food. He became extremely emaciated and was close to death, but realised that the extreme punishment he had inflicted on his body left him no closer to finding his spiritual solution.

Gautama recalled the memory of the blissful moment he had spent sitting under the rose-apple tree while his father was working in the fields. He decided to abandon the ascetic lifestyle and began to eat and wash. Later accounts speak of a girl who offered him a bowl of milk-rice, thinking that he was a spirit. Gautama’s decision appalled his five companions, who accused him of betrayal and abandoned him. He was now 35 years old and completely on his own, and decided to wander into the depths of the jungle. The region around Gaya was associated with ghosts and spirits, and there were many shrines among the woods where people would make offerings to appease them. Gautama would visit the shrines, but rather than making any offerings he carried on his meditation and learned to overcome his feelings of unease in the wilderness. He experienced both positive and negative thoughts, but realised that he could sustain the positive states by focusing his mind on them. He managed to recapture the blissful state that he had experienced as a child, but he went several steps further to let go of even joy and happiness until he reached a state of perfect equanimity. Over time, he found it quicker to enter this state, and was able to spend longer within it. Gautama sensed that he had finally found the path to Enlightenment.

On a moonlit night in summer, Gautama crossed the Lilajan River and arrived at a clearing by the river near the village of Uruvela, now known as Bodh Gaya. He sat down under the shade of a fig tree known as the bodhi tree and began to meditate. According to traditional myth, while Gautama was meditating he was visited by Mara, a demonic god who sought to distract him from his meditative practice, encouraging him to perform sacrifices to the gods or to return to his ascetic life, but Gautama remains calm and vanquishes everything that Mara threw at him. As a last gambit, Mara offered up his daughters Craving, Lust, and Discontent, but Gautama remained unmoved. Mara might be understood as a manifestation of Gautama’s doubts which he overcomes by reaching a completely new level of mental clarity, thus removing the final obstacle to his full Awakening. This state of mind, which he described as “Nirvana in this life,” saw him let go of the most essential desires: both the desire to exist and the desire for annihilation.

After entering the new state of mind, Gautama arrived at a new truth, a recognition that nothing in the universe was permanent, that by extension the soul was not eternal, and even gods were not immortal. Gautama also claimed to have had visions of his many previous lives, filled with both good and bad deeds, and concluded that kindness and generosity brought happiness to the world, while selfishness and cruelty brought suffering. These insights liberated Gautama from desire, from being, and from ignorance, enabling him to live without accumulating karma and freeing him from the cycle of rebirth. Upon achieving his Enlightenment, Gautama uttered a triumphant cry “My emancipation is secured, This is my last birth, There will be no becoming!” Through this action, Gautama had transformed himself into the Buddha, or The Enlightened One, but this title was not coined until the 3rd century BC. In the Pali Canon, the Gautama referred to himself as “Tathagata,” an enigmatic term thought to mean “one who has achieved his religious objective.”

While it only took him a single night of meditation to achieve his Enlightenment, he continued to sit under the tree for another seven days, during which a famous legend speaks of Gautama’s unflinching calm as a storm approached and a mythical serpent known as a naga protected him by coiling around his body and sheltering him with his hooded head. As the weeks passed, Gautama took time to reflect on his newfound understanding and use it as a foundation for new ideas about how to live. Gautama’s philosophy no longer had a need for tree spirits or Brahmin priests, recognising that an individual’s spiritual path was dependent on their own life choices. This fundamental doctrine known as dependant arising is expressed by the well-known Buddhist formula: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist.”

According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was not the first Buddha, and several of his predecessors had attained Enlightenment but remained secluded as hermits. Gautama had considered doing the same, doubting whether he could effectively convey his understanding to help others. The Pali Canon records a conversation with the god Brahma Sahampati, following which Gautama saw that all humans had the potential to achieve Enlightenment and he then set out to find his first disciples. He duly made his way to the Isipatana deer park near Varanasi, where he knew he would find his five former companions who had abandoned him earlier. On his way he encountered other religious seekers from the ascetic and Brahmin traditions but failed to persuade them of his Enlightenment.

When he reunited with the five monks in Isipatana, they were glad to see him but also expressed initial doubt of his Enlightenment. The earliest texts offer little information about how they were persuaded to join him again, but Gautama’s demeanour and the way he spoke to them seemed to have a profound impact. The Discourses show that the Buddha was an excellent communicator who was willing to talk to anyone and spoke to them in ways they would understand. When speaking in public, Gautama put his audience at ease by using the local vernacular rather than priestly Sanskrit. The first of the five to grasp the Buddha’s teaching about the impermanence of the world and the principle of dependent arising was Kaundaniya, and the other four quickly followed suit, thus becoming the first arahants or disciples.

Later accounts of the conversion of the five ascetics involve the Buddha teaching them of the Four Noble Truths: That suffering is all-around, and there is no need to deliberately invite it; that there is craving for the world, which brings pain; that suffering will cease when craving ceases; and that the way to cease craving is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path, a set of practices that outlined a Middle Way between self-mortification and material indulgence. The next convert was a young man from a merchant family named Yasha who had become disillusioned about his life of luxury. Before long, Yasha’s family and friends also came to receive the teaching, and Gautama had the beginnings of a new religious movement on his hands. He described his followers as Shakyaputra shramanas or ‘sons of the Sakyan.’ While they identified as ascetics, the renunciation of worldly goods was not a requirement, as long as the believer understood the teachings or Dharma and lived according to their principles.

Having assembled several dozen followers, the Buddha advised them to go on their separate ways, to ensure that the teaching could reach as many people as possible. According to Alexander Wynne, the instruction that the teaching was open to everyone regardless of nationality or class ensured that Buddhism would become the world’s first universal religion. While Gautama could have chosen to remain at Isipatana as a teacher, after the monsoon rains ended he also chose to resume his wanderings. On the way back to Rajagriha, he stopped at Uruvela, where according to legend he visited the shrines of various demons and vanquished them, a demonstration that brought him new converts. The accounts of these mythical battles are found in the earliest texts, indicating that the Buddha’s contemporaries believed that he was capable of performing miracles. He explained to the local priests that the meaning of fire was not to harness power over the earth, but rather to burn away the worldly desires that bring forth suffering from the mind.

By the time he reached Rajagriha, he was already accompanied by 1,000 recently ordained monks. He was received with honour by King Bimbisara of Magadha, who patronised the Shakyaputra community by granting them a plot of land. While in Rajagriha, the Buddha received two brothers named Upatissa, and Ashvajit who were ordained as monks and given the names Sariputra and Maudglalyayana respectively. The Buddha soon recognised them as his chief disciples and they helped to increase his following. However, the townsfolk of Rajagriha were soon angered by the Buddha’s success in taking away their sons and husbands to become full-time religious seekers. Gautama recognised that not everybody could be expected to abandon their families and homes and merely exhorted his disciples to abstain from harmful substances such as alcohol and other intoxicants.

Having accomplished his religious mission, Gautama reckoned that it was time to return home to Kapilavastu, where he would tell his old friends of his experiences. Buddhist tradition states that around seven years had passed between Gautama’s departure from home and his return after his Enlightenment. His homecoming was not without its problems, and when his father Suddhodana saw him walking around barefoot in rags he was rebuked for being a beggar. Gautama replied that he was no longer a Sakyan but claimed descent from the lineage of Buddhas. When the older generation of Sakyan nobles expressed scepticism about the Buddha’s teachings, the legend speaks of Gautama rising into the air and shooting streams of water from his body, proving his supernatural powers. The younger generation was more open-minded and Gautama’s old charioteer Chandaka, who had bid him a tearful farewell at the banks of the Amona River many years earlier, was the first to become a monk. Gautama’s brother-in-law Nanda followed suit, albeit with some reluctance after marrying a beautiful wife. Later, Gautama’s paternal cousins Ananda and Anuruddha joined him, as did his maternal cousin and brother-in-law Devadatta. Gautama’s wife and son were less impressed, and Rahula demanded his inheritance on behalf of his mother. Instead, Gautama ordained him as a novice monk. Suddhodana attempted to intervene on behalf of his grandson, but while Gautama agreed that in future a novice could only be ordained with permission of both parents, he insisted on keeping Rahula with him.

While the Pali Canon includes a vast collection of the Buddha’s teachings after his Enlightenment, there are few details available to piece together a chronological sequence of the Buddha’s life and activities after leaving Kapilavastu for the second time. He returned to his hometown around four years later when he learned that his father was dying. By the time Gautama arrived, a diplomatic crisis had broken out between the Sakyans and the Koliyans over the use of the waters of the Rohini which had been affected by drought. Amidst the rising tensions, Sakyan and Koliyan warriors lined up on the banks of the Rohini and prepared to do battle with each other. With a foot in both camps, and with his father incapacitated, Gautama intervened to diffuse the crisis. He described the people turning against each other “like fish in water too shallow,” before turning to the generals and asking them how much water was worth, and how much the lives of warriors were worth. When the generals responded that water was worth very little and their warriors were priceless, Gautama told them that it would not be worth sacrificing the lives of the warriors for a little water. The commanders had no response, and Gautama told them, “If I hadn’t been here you would have unleashed a river of blood. Ask yourselves, why do you act in this way? It is because you are blindly driven by your passions and therefore live in continual conflict.”

After both sides stood down their armies, Gautama rushed back to his dying father’s bedside, where according to Buddhist tradition Suddhodana finally understood his son’s teaching and became an arahant shortly before his death. Vishvapani suggests that Gautama might have achieved the conversion by informing his father of his intervention on the banks of the Rohini, which demonstrated that he was equally equipped to exercise leadership and solve political problems. After Suddhodana’s death, Gautama’s cousin Mahanama succeeded him as chief of the Sakyans. Gautama’s teaching at the Rohini won him the full respect of his compatriots of all generations, and he frequently travelled through his homeland as he and his disciples continued their itinerant way of life. At the time of his father’s death he was 40 years old, and he would have 40 years to live, during which he was constantly on the move, though his most important base was at Shravasti.

The lifestyle of the shramana became second nature to him, and he had no trouble sleeping rough in parks at the edge of town even in old age. His growing Shakyaputra community posed a threat to other shramana sects by attracting defectors who found his message more compelling. He sought to redefine what it meant to be a shramana by stating that it was not merely about being dressed in rags, but having a mind free from attachments. The Buddha advised his followers to avoid impassioned debates when their teachings were questioned, nor to feel any sense of elation if their teachings were being praised. While the Buddha believed that only people who accepted his teachings were truly enlightened, his teaching was also grounded on having no firm attachment to any knowledge or philosophy, including his own. The Discourses attributed to the Buddha nevertheless convey a sense of frustration with shramanas who were wedded to their preconceived notions, though he never stopped trying to get through to them, reckoning that they only had to understand a single sentence for them to accept his ideas.

The Buddha sought understanding with rival sects by identifying common experiences and to exploring how to interpret them. Nevertheless, his answers to enquiries about the nature of the soul or of life after death often seemed evasive, enigmatic, and confusing to the questioners. To explain the views of popular philosophies of the day, he employed a famous parable about a group of blind men being asked to describe an elephant, but each only being able to touch a particular part of the elephant’s body, while he was able to see the full picture. While the Buddha had great respect for the Jains and admired the lengths they went to in practising self-mortification, he sought to demonstrate that they were mistaken in their belief of an eternal soul. He described a king who asked his servants to bring him music after hearing the sound of a lute for the first time. When they present him with the instrument, the king is unhappy and demands that he only wants the sound. When the servants explain that the sound is produced when the pieces of a lute are fitted together in a certain way and a person plays on it, the king is confused and takes apart the lute and sets it on fire in an effort to find the essence of the music. When he fails to do so, he gets angry and accuses his servants of misleading him. The Buddha explains that like the king, most shramanas were obsessed with seeking the essence of the soul without understanding that it is a process. Rather than asking irrelevant metaphysical questions, the Buddha taught that the important question was how to live and what actions to take in an impermanent world that changes in response to human actions.

In his answers to unknowable questions, the Buddha often resorted to the imagery of fire. He compared the cycle of rebirth to one flame lighting another based on karmic mechanisms, and the process of Enlightenment as exhausting the fuel and leaving the fire to burn out. Through these metaphors, and the idea of an ever-changing world, the Buddha was able to define his Middle Way between eternal doctrines that everything exists and nihilist doctrines that nothing exists. The various analogies, allegories, and metaphors the Buddha used to convey these ideas eventually persuaded some doubters, though others continued to be perplexed by them.

The way in which the Buddha taught mankind to live is commonly known as the Noble Eightfold Path. The eight elements can also be divided into three categories known as the Threefold Way, concerning ethics, development of the mind, and wisdom from experience. The Buddha’s ethical precepts were largely inspired by Jain ideas of not killing living beings, not lying, not stealing, and avoiding sexual misconduct and intoxicants. Beyond this, he counselled his followers to have pure intentions, to seek kindness and wisdom rather than being guided by selfish desire or hatred. Through these actions, an individual could expect a better rebirth.

The second part emphasises the development of the mind through different stages of meditation to let go of anxieties and desires and to develop self-awareness, before reaching the higher states of contentment, tranquillity, and finally equanimity, the state in which Gautama had achieved his Enlightenment. The final stage required mature reflection of meditative experiences to eradicate selfish attitudes and motivations and obtain a clearer understanding of the world and how to live within it. This was an iterative process, and the Buddha frequently reminded his disciples to examine whether they had any desires or attachments.

The Buddha’s ideas brought spiritual consolation not only to his monastic followers, but to those who remained within their existing social communities. He claimed to have insight into the afterlives of the deceased and was constantly being asked by the townsfolk about the fate of their friends and relations. He eventually became tired of this and advised them to prioritise their own spiritual path. Despite his teachings about giving up material attachments, the Buddha had many adherents among wealthy merchants, without whom the monastic communities could not have been maintained. He advised them to divide their wealth into four parts: keep a quarter to maintain standards of living, save a quarter for the future, give a quarter to friends, and give the final quarter to the religious community.

With his base in Shravasti, Gautama also had a powerful patron in King Prasenajit of Kosala, his feudal overlord. While the Brahmins were also influential at court, Prasenajit appreciated the honest advice he received from Gautama and his monks. The Buddha’s instructions to his disciples to avoid attachments meant that early Buddhists tended to live solitary lives, and the community was less institutionalised than after the Buddha’s death. While the Vinaya that forms the first part of the Tipitaka contains over 200 rules governing conduct, during the Buddha’s lifetime many monks simply followed his example. Like their teacher, the monks of the Shakyaputra community shaved their hair, wandered in rags, ate one meal a day, and were accustomed to sleeping rough, moving often but staying put during the rainy season. The need for refuge inspired the creation of sangharamas or monastic gardens, which later became permanent monasteries. The most important of these was the Jetavana outside Shravasti, financed by the wealthy merchant Anathapindika, where the Buddha spent 25 rainy seasons. Each morning, he and his fellow monks would go into the city to beg for alms, early enough for the heat to be bearable, but late enough for there to be daylight. According to an account in the Vinaya, this rule was adopted after Gautama was begging for alms in the dark and fell into a swamp. As he clambered out, he frightened a local woman who believed he was a demon and cursed him.

Dependence on the local community for sustenance encouraged the monks to take care of their spiritual welfare. The Buddha also expected his monks to spend time in the wilderness, where they encountered wild animals, bandits, evil and friendly spirits, and the temptations of women passing by. The responsibilities of teaching kept Gautama from retreating to the wilderness permanently, but he would still do so for months at a time and instructed his followers not to disturb him. While the Buddha was at ease in such situations and Buddhists often incorporated local traditions of spirit worship, his monks reported being attacked by hostile spirits who resented their intrusion into their abodes. The scriptures speak of early Buddhists displaying remarkable calm when attacked by bandits. A famous tale tells of the Buddha’s encounter with the notorious murderer Angulimala, who wore his victims’ fingers as a necklace. Gautama approached him calmly, and despite pursuing him relentlessly Angulimala was unable to lay a finger on him. He was so stunned that he immediately accepted the Buddha’s instruction to let go of his urge to kill and became a monk.

Buddhist nuns were even more vulnerable in the wilderness but displayed an equal measure of calm. One of them was said to have denied a seducer by ripping out her eyeball and presenting it to him. The number of nuns increased over the years, though they were initially prevented from joining. According to the Vinaya, after Suddhodana’s death Gautama’s widowed stepmother Prajapati begged him to be allowed to join the community. While he initially refused, Prajapati led a delegation of 500 Sakyan women to plead with Ananda. After Gautama informed Ananda that he believed women could achieve Enlightenment, he relented and allowed them to be ordained, but only upon accepting eight additional rules that subordinated them to the monks. Owing to these restrictions, and based on Gautama’s sayings in the Pali Canon, he and the Buddhist community in general have been criticised for being misogynistic. Gautama often disparaged women when he spoke to male monks about the need to avoid their temptations, and a ban on any form of sexual intercourse appears to have been adopted early on. Nevertheless, Vishvapani argues that Gautama was among the earliest religious thinkers to believe that men and women have equal opportunity to achieve their spiritual objectives, and that the Buddha’s initial reluctance to allow women to become wandering nuns was due to social anxieties about the prospect of women leaving their children and families at home. After the Buddha’s death, the community appears to have become more patriarchal, and some Buddhist scholars believe that the eight rules were inserted by monks after Gautama’s lifetime.

As his fame and prestige increased throughout the Ganges Valley, the Buddha relied on fellow monks to support his day-to-day activities, effectively performing the role of a personal assistant. This role fell to several different monks during the early years of the movement, but around 20 years after the Buddha’s Enlightenment his cousin Ananda took up the role for the rest of Gautama’s life. This proximity supposedly explains how Ananda could record the Buddha’s sayings after his death. While he encouraged individualism, the Buddha recognised that his followers would benefit from the support of their peers and held regular assemblies twice a month on the new moon and the full moon to maintain community and cohesion. These meetings were inspired by the Sakyan noble assemblies, and while senior members of the community led the debate, all decisions were made by consensus. The meetings also involved monks chanting the Buddha’s teachings in unison, a common practice to aid memorisation. The assemblies also gave an opportunity for monks to confess their failures and violations of rules to the wider community. This self-reflection was aimed to encourage improvement in behaviour, but repeated violations could invite disapproval and expulsion from the community.

As the community increased in size, a more hierarchical system developed, with senior monks having their own disciples. As the Buddha’s chief disciple, Sariputra had a large following of his own, and after his death he was cremated and his ashes placed in a stupa in Shravasti, where his followers continued to worship him. The veneration of the relics of revered monks continues throughout the Buddhist world. The earliest monks followed the Buddha out of their convictions and emulated his itinerant lifestyle, as the decades passed new members of the community adopted more sedentary practices. This risked a split in the Shakyaputrans after Gautama’s death, and debates about the future of the community began in the final decade of his life. The most serious challenge came from his cousin and brother-in-law Devadatta, a senior monk who enjoyed a following in Rajagriha and advocated a more extreme form of renunciation. According to the traditional account, Devadatta urged Gautama to retire and transfer leadership of the community to him. When Gautama refused indignantly, Devadatta sought to kill him and take over the community, while persuading prince Ajatashatru of Magadha to kill his father Bimbisara. Despite his best efforts, Devadatta was unable to harm the Buddha, but Ajatashatru seized power from his father and starved him to death.

The demise of Bimbisara, who had married King Prasenajit’s sister, encouraged Kosala to declare war on Magadha, and Ajatashatru was defeated and captured in battle. After being restored to the throne and agreeing not to attack Kosala, Ajatashatru met the Buddha and asked him to describe the fruits of the ascetic life. Gautama’s response about the moral clarity that his way of life offered impressed Ajatashatru and led him to confess his regret at killing his father. While Ajatashatru would become a powerful and successful military leader, the Buddha informed his monks that he was still destined to suffer in the next life for patricide.

In the final years of the Buddha’s life, tensions were also increasing between Kosala and Sakya. According to the Buddhist tradition, Prasenajit and Gautama met for the last time when they were both 80 years old. The king visited the Buddha in a modest hut he was staying in, and the two men enjoyed a poignant conversation in which Prasenajit expressed his admiration for the degree of harmony among the Shakyaputra community, observing that Gautama’s reputation was greater than his own among the Kosalan people. However, when Prasenajit left the hut he found that the commander of his royal bodyguard had seized the capital of Shravasti and placed his son Vidudabha on the throne. Prasenajit fled to Rajagriha to appeal for aid from Ajatashatru but arrived late at night and found the city closed, the old king was forced to take refuge in a humble inn and died that night. Meanwhile, Vidudabha supposedly held a grudge against the Sakyans because he had been unaware that his mother was the daughter of the Sakyan chief Mahanama and a slave girl. He vowed to destroy Sakya, and made good on his vow by launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing. While Buddhist tradition claims that Vidudabha and his army were killed by a flood on the way back to Shravasti, the historical record indicates that King Ajatashatru of Magadha invaded Kosala and killed Vidudabha in the process.

By now Gautama’s chief disciples Shariputra and Maudgalyayana were both dead, and he had lost his patron Prasenajit. As a result, he went to the hills above Rajagriha where he enjoyed the protection of Ajatashatru. Despite his advanced years, every day he and Ananda climbed down the mountain to the city to beg for alms. However, he was dismayed to hear that Ajatashatru planned to invade the Vrijian Federation. His speeches in defence of their virtues did little to dissuade the king. Gautama then summoned a large body of monks to the hillside where he stayed and delivered an address on how the community should organise itself in his absence, refusing to designate a successor and praising the virtues of decentralised power. He and Ananda then left Rajagriha and headed on the road towards the Vrijian capital of Vaishali.

At the port of Pataligama on the Ganges, now known as Patna, he encountered the Magadhans building a fortress in preparation for their campaign. Gautama received alms from the Magadhan ministers but made no comment about the military preparations. He continued to Vaishali, where the community was meeting on land owned by the wealthy courtesan Ambapali. Despite her lifestyle and profession, she was curious to meet the Buddha and invited him and his monks to dinner at her mansion. Ambapali was impressed by the Buddha’s teachings and agreed to donate her park to the Shakyaputras, and would eventually join the community herself.

As the monsoon rains arrived, the Buddha fell seriously ill, but despite the pain he went into Vaishali and sat down at a sacred tree known as the Capala shrine, where according to the Buddhist tradition there was a great earthquake, signalling the Buddha’s intention to relinquish his life force and enter Final Nirvana in three months. Gautama and Ananda then left Vaishali and resumed their wanderings accompanied by a small party of monks and headed towards Sakya via the republic of Malla. At the village of Pava, the party stayed with a metalworker named Chunda, who had previously hosted Gautama before. He prepared a

meal whose main ingredient was either boar meat or truffles. The Buddha suspected something was wrong with the food but agreed to eat it to avoid embarrassing Chunda, but advised him to offer other food to the other monks. He fell violently ill after the meal but told Ananda that Chunda should not be blamed.

Despite his discomfort, he continued on his way to the Mallan capital of Kusinagara. He arrived at a grove of sala trees just outside the town and asked Ananda to prepare a bed for him, where he lay down to rest on his right side.

Recognising the end was near, Ananda invited the local people to see the Buddha for one last time. Although he sought to prevent the crowd from disturbing Gautama, a shramana named Subhadda was desperate to talk to him and became the final monk to be ordained personally by the Buddha.

Shortly before he ascended to Final Nirvana, Gautama turned to the monks gathered around him and asked whether they had any questions or doubts about his teaching. Despite being prompted twice, they still remained silent, so he instructed them to remain attentive to the Dharma. He then entered into a coma which was interpreted as a meditative state and attained Final Nirvana at the age of 80, in approximately 404 BC.

After seven days, his body was cremated, and after the ashes were cleared the mourners found bejewelled stones rather than charred bones. These were determined to be the Buddha’s relics, and after some dispute they were divided eight ways between various communities in the Ganges Valley.

Since the Buddha had decreed that there should be no successor and that the Dharma was all they needed for a teacher, his disciples gathered at the First Buddhist Council to gather his teachings. During this meeting, Ananda is supposed to have recited verbatim the 17,000 discourses contained in the Tipitaka. Most scholars believe that while the senior monks would have gathered together to share the Buddha’s teachings, the full set of discourses was likely compiled over the next century.

The Shakyaputra community had spread far and wide during the Buddha’s lifetime, but Buddhism would reach new heights under the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya in 322 BC. Although Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka had received a Brahmin education, after conquering much of the Indian subcontinent he found that the Buddha’s teachings were more suitable for his requirements, and he governed his empire according to Buddhist principles. The reign of Ashoka between 268 and 232 BC marks the zenith of Buddhism in India, and after the collapse of his empire in the 2nd century BC the Brahmins re-established their dominance.

While Buddhism declined in India itself, Ashoka’s missionaries spread the faith to Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and thence into China, Korea, and Japan. Buddhism also reached Tibet and Mongolia via Nepal. The Buddhist community founded by Gautama some 2500 years ago numbers some 500 million around the globe, making it the fourth largest religion in the world.

What do you think of Gautama Buddha? Is it important to distinguish between history and legend in his biography? Do his teachings offer a solution to widespread anxieties and fears in the materialist world of the 21st century? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.