According to legend, shortly after Siddhartha’s birth, a wise man prophesied that the child would grow up to be either a powerful king or a great spiritual leader. His father, the king, did everything in his power to ensure that his son and heir would have no reason to pursue religious life, showering him with every privilege and luxury and sheltering him from the harsh realities of the world outside the palace.

At the age of 29, dissatisfied with palace life, the prince ventured beyond the palace walls on a journey that would change the course of his life. On the first trip, he saw a sick man; on the second, an old man; and on the third, a corpse. These were his first encounters with life’s inevitable suffering, and he was devastated. Then, on a fourth trip, Siddhartha saw a mendicant spiritual seeker and had a revelation: there might be a way out of suffering, and the possibility seemed to lie in the religious life.

Soon thereafter Siddhartha left the palace to seek the end of suffering. He studied with two renowned spiritual teachers and then embarked on a journey with five companions, meditating and taking up severe ascetic practices, such as prolonged fasting, that nearly killed him.

Ultimately, he had another realization: the way out of samsara—the cycle of birth, suffering, and death—lay neither in indulgence—his palace life—nor in extreme physical denial—his spiritual life thus far. There was a “middle way” to end suffering, through training the mind. He resolved to meditate under a ficus tree (now known as the Bodhi tree), in a town called Bodhgaya, until he had discovered the answer to his quest. 

After 49 days, he had a series of insights into the nature of reality, and he became enlightened. For the next 45 years, until his death, he was known as the Buddha (“the Awakened One”), and taught the path to liberation that he had realized.

Discover Deck 1:

Was the Buddha a God? The Buddha said he was not a god to be worshiped; he’s an example of a human being who became awakened. 

How did the Buddha become enlightened? It took 49 nights of meditation under the Bodhi tree. 

What is enlightenment? Can anyone become enlightened? Enlightened beings have escaped the cycle of existence known as samsara, and reached the end of suffering. The Buddha said that this path was open to anyone.

Who were the Buddha’s first disciples? Meet the five spiritual seekers who had been the Buddha’s earlier companions and abandoned the path of asceticism. 

What was the Buddha’s world like during his teaching years? The Buddha lived in a time known as the Axial Age, a time of expanding empires and spiritual and philosophical flourishing. 

Did the Buddha have past lives? Before he was a prince, the awakened one experienced life as a parrot, monkey, rabbit and other animals and humans. 

What happened after the Buddha died? The Buddha’s death is referred to as parinirvana, meaning that he won’t be reborn again. 

Are there other Buddhas? In addition to the historical Buddha, there are many buddhas (“awakened ones”). 

Why are there so many different kinds of images of the Buddha? Buddhism spread to different cultures with their own artistic traditions. 

What did the Buddha look like? No likenesses of the historical Buddha were made during his lifetime, but here’s what we can piece together. 

Recommended reading: 

• Leaving the Palace by Ann Tashi Slater 
• How a Mother Would Tell the Buddha’s Birth Story by Anne Cushman 
• In Defense of “Enlightenment” by Bhikkhu Bodhi 
• A Short History of Buddhism by Sherab Chodzin Kohn
• Unanswered Questions in Buddhist Studies by Donald S. Lopez Jr.

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According to the early Buddhist scriptures, it was then that he remembered an experience he had had as a boy, when he had spontaneously entered a deep and joyful meditative state. It occurred to him that the same kind of meditative state might help him gain the insight he was looking for.

So at the age of 35 he vowed to sit in meditation, without getting up, until he had discovered ultimate freedom. There he remained, in the shade of a large ficus tree, for seven weeks, in a northeastern Indian town known as Bodhgaya.

On the 49th day, according to legend, the Buddha entered into a state of concentration so deep and clear he began to see the nature of his mind and that of the universe. During three phases or “watches” of the night, he apprehended how suffering and unhappiness are caused by our actions, and by our clinging to an illusory sense of self. And he became aware of how to let go of all that.

When the morning star rose in the sky, the man who had been Siddhartha Gautama, the prince of the Shakya tribe, was now the Buddha—the Awakened One.

The Buddha would spend the next 45 years of his life sharing the path of practice that leads to awakening so that others could work to attain the same state of enlightenment—freedom from suffering and samsara—that he had achieved.

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Today, some Buddhists often point to this story to explain that they don’t worship the Buddha as a god or some kind of divine messenger. Instead, he was a human being who awakened—attained enlightenment—through his own efforts, as can other humans who follow his teachings. The Buddha images on altars are symbols of the enlightened state and the Buddha’s teachings. When Buddhists bow to the Buddha they are not worshipping a god but paying respect to the Buddha’s example and teachings.

There is much in early scripture to support this view. The last words of the Buddha recorded in the Pali canon have been translated many ways, but in all translations the Buddha advises the monks attending him to work hard for their own liberation. He does not say, “Pray to me when I’m gone, and I will save you.” He says, “All conditioned phenomena are impermanent; strive on diligently.”

On the other hand, early scripture does attribute certain godlike powers to the Buddha, suggesting that many early Buddhists did not see him as just another human. Though there is no all-powerful creator god in Buddhism, the Buddha lived in a polytheistic culture, and some of this polytheism is reflected in early texts in stories of the Buddha interacting with gods. However, the gods are trapped in samsara themselves and play no role in helping individuals attain enlightenment. The stories of gods and other mythical creatures in the Pali canon can be appreciated as fables.

In the famous story in which the Buddha denied he was a god he also denied he was a human being. How so? He explained that he was no longer limited to an identity as any type of being. He compared himself to a lotus that is rooted in water and mud but blossoms in clear air, unsullied by the muddy water in which it grew. In the same way, he said, he was born in the world and grew up in the world, but he had risen above the conditioned world and was untouched by it. “Remember me as awakened,” he told his inquirer. In other words, as an enlightened being, the Buddha was liberated from clinging to an illusory sense of self and the suffering that clinging causes.

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The Buddha said of his enlightenment, “Ignorance was destroyed; knowledge arose; darkness was destroyed; light arose—as happens in one who is heedful, ardent, and resolute.” On the night of his enlightenment underneath the bodhi tree near Bodh Gaya in India, the Buddha recalled his past lives, understood the workings of karma and rebirth, and saw the origin and ending of suffering. This understanding freed him from the cycle of death and rebirth and led to his most fundamental teachings: the four noble truths and the eightfold path.

According to Buddhist tradition, any being can become enlightened as the Buddha did. In the Theravada tradition, enlightened beings other than the Buddha are known as arhats, or worthy ones. In Mahayana Buddhism, all beings are already inherently enlightened but have yet to realize it. In the Mahayana, all enlightened beings are Buddhas. 

Enlightened beings have escaped the cyclic existence, known as samsara, and attained nirvana, where there is no more birth and death and no more suffering. Upon enlightenment, beings escape the three fires, or poisons, of anger, greed, and delusion.

Despite some disagreement about what constitutes enlightenment and how possible it is for us to achieve it, enlightenment remains the final goal of the Buddhist path. All Buddhist teachings point toward the goal of enlightenment and freedom from suffering. 

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But when they looked closer, the five ascetics realized that the Buddha had become a different caliber of being—noble, wise, and beyond all suffering. The Buddha taught them that the means to awakening wasn’t self-indulgence or self-denial but a path in between—the Middle Way. He then taught them his foundational insights—the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path leading to enlightenment. And thus was born the sangha, the first community of followers.

Over the next 45 years of his life, thousands of people from all walks of life became the Buddha’s students—from beggars to kings, from murderers to Brahmin priests. Many decided to abandon the householder life and join the monastic community that arose around him. Among them were all the members of the Buddha’s family, including his wife, son, and father.

The Buddhist scriptures are populated with great, colorful examples of the Buddha’s main students, many of whom became enlightened quickly while others struggled for years to train their minds. Some became teachers in their own right: Sariputra and Maudgalyayana, for example, who were renowned for their profound psychic powers. Another principal disciple, Mahakasyapa, is believed to have called the First Council after the Buddha’s death, when 500 enlightened monks gathered to inventory all of the Buddha’s sermons and set the course of his teachings going forward—although scholars attest that it’s unlikely the First Council actually happened.

Religious texts tell us that in the earliest days of the monastic community, the Buddha did not ordain women, though this hasn’t been verified by scholarship. The story goes that between the exhortations of his stepmother, Mahapajapati (and 500 women who accompanied her), and the influence of his disciple Ananda, the Buddha created the first order of Buddhist nuns. Texts known as the verses of the elder monks and nuns (the Therigatha and the Theragatha, respectively), tell the stories of many of the Buddha’s students, showing the vast variety of people who became his followers and were able to reach enlightenment by practicing the path he taught.

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Tradition says the Buddha lived most of his adult life in the ancient kingdoms of northeastern India, in the modern-day states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The Ganges River and its many tributaries flow through this region, and in the mid-first millennium BCE it was a land of lush forests and wetlands.

For centuries the people of the Gangetic plain were nomads, but by the Buddha’s lifetime, the nomadic culture had given way to permanent settlements, agriculture, and commerce. Society was organized around familial clans, and the precursor of today’s caste system was already in place. The Buddha-to-be was born into a clan called the Shakya or Sakya―in Sanskrit, “those who are capable.” One of the names he would later be known by was Shakyamuni, or “sage of the Shakyas.”

Buddhist scholars such as Trevor Ling point out that the Buddha-to-be was born in an area where the caste system was known, but did not necessarily predominate. This gave him the insight that the caste system of the brahmins–the highest, priestly caste–was not the only way for society to be organized.

Traditional narratives describe the future Buddha as the son of a king. Scholars say the clans were actually headed by chieftains who were chosen by consensus rather than by birth, but by the middle of the 1st millennium BCE kingdoms were forming, sometimes violently, on the Gangetic plain. Within a few generations, the clans dissolved and were absorbed into kingdoms.

The Gangetic plain in the mid-1st millennium was also a place of spiritual upheaval. Religion had been guided by ancient Sanskrit verses and hymns called the Vedas for many centuries. The oldest collection of these, the Rig Veda, dates to approximately the 15th – 9th century BCE. When the Buddha was born new texts called the Upanishads were gaining prominence. They were full of ideas that challenged old ways of thinking. Mendicant “holy men” called shramanas―renunciates―wandered the plain seeking an end to rebirth and the suffering attendant upon it. The Buddha joined their ranks when he left home to seek the end of suffering.

This time and place of change and upheaval proved to be a fertile time for religion and philosophy. Many new sects emerged in this period in addition to Buddhism, including Jainism. It was a fortunate time for a great teacher to be born.

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According to Buddhist teachings, all beings cycle continually through one lifetime after another before developing to the point where they can reach enlightenment. The Buddha was no different, although the stories of his past lives, known as the Jataka tales, indicate a pretty remarkable being.

In the 547 story-poems about his past lives that are collected in the Pali canon, which includes some of the earliest Buddhist scriptures we know, the Buddha takes birth as various kinds of humans (ranging from murderers to sages to a princess), myriad animals (elephants, deer, monkeys, birds—you name it), and numerous deities and metaphysical beings (a tree sprite and the lord of gods, for starters). The tales are chock-full of wily criminals, evil seducers, and magnanimous kings.

Each story functions as a teaching about selflessness, compassion, determination, wisdom, or some other virtue that the Buddha-to-be perfected on the path to enlightenment. In many of the tales in which he is born as an animal, he offers up his own body as food to a human in need or in order to save the life of another animal. In one of the most famous, he gives his body to a starving tigress about to eat her cubs. In another, he is a rabbit who throws his body on a fire in order to feed a hungry mendicant in the forest. The beggar turns out to be the god Shakra, who then marks the moon with the image of a rabbit to commemorate its generosity.

Over the centuries, the Jataka tales melded with folk stories from various cultures where Buddhism took hold, begetting more tales about the Buddha’s past lives. Some tales even overlap with stories known from the Hindu Panchatantra or with Aesop’s fables. The Jataka tales have been illustrated in paintings and sculpture from all across the Buddhist world.

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According to the Pali Canon, which contains some of the earliest written records of the Buddha’s life and teachings, about three months after the Buddha’s parinirvana, circa 400 BCE, about 500 of his senior monks met to discuss how their teacher’s wisdom and the rules he developed to guide the monastic community (the Vinaya) would be preserved. This became known as the first Buddhist council.

Some 70 years after his death, a second council was held to come to terms around a set of ten disputed rules for monks and nuns. It is widely believed that this was the first schism in the Buddhist monastic community, or sangha, and two branches were formed then—one that wanted to uphold all the rules of the Vinaya, and another that wanted to relax some of them.

A third council is said to have taken place during the reign of the Indian king Ashoka, who converted to Buddhism around 250 BCE. Ashoka was a powerful supporter of Buddhism and promoted the spread of the religion across the subcontinent. The council was intended to rid the sangha of corrupt and heretical monks. Crucial components of the Buddhist scriptures are said to have been formalized at this meeting, too. By the time of Ashoka, writing had become widespread in India, and Ashoka recorded sayings, or edicts, about Buddhism and other subjects in various languages across the subcontinent.

The third council was also believed to have been the genesis of teaching missions sponsored by Ashoka, where learned monks and nuns who could recite the Buddha’s teachings by heart were encouraged to act as emissaries to other lands and offer the Buddha’s dharma.

These emissaries took Buddhism to Sri Lanka, Burma, and elsewhere. In the successive centuries, Buddhism spread further into East and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas and became a prominent world religion.

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That said, scriptures from early Indian Buddhism talk about five buddhas that have existed during the current cosmological era or kalpa—a term that means an aeon, or the period from the origination to the end of the present world. The Buddha we know about, Shakyamuni Buddha, was the fourth of this group. The fifth is known as Maitreya, or the Buddha of the future.

In Theravada Buddhism, the tradition practiced mainly in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka, people pay homage to 29 buddhas, most of whom existed during other kalpas, according to the scriptures.

The Mahayana Buddhist schools of East Asia and Tibet know countless buddhas and bodhisattvas—awakened beings who stick around in this world in order to help others reach awakening. We see them in artworks, and their legends populate scriptures and Buddhist stories.

Not every buddha is specifically known to us. One class of enlightened beings is made up of buddhas “on their own” (in Pali and Sanskrit paccekabuddha, pratyekabuddha). These beings have achieved awakening without a teacher or guidance, and they don’t teach the path to enlightenment or have followers.

And let’s put to rest the perennial confusion about the fat, laughing “buddha” figure who graces menus and knickknack shelves. That’s Budai (or Hotei, in Japanese), a semilegendary Chinese monk who may have lived around the 10th century. Considered a deity of contentment and abundance, Budai is also a protector of children and the sick. A collection of Zen stories mentions him briefly as a possible emanation of Maitreya, the buddha of the future, but he has never held the place of Shakyamuni Buddha.

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Because early representations in wood could not be preserved and many later works have been destroyed over time, we have no way of knowing how many images have been created over time of the Buddha. The ones we do know—created in stone or wood, on paper or cloth—range from countless depictions of a serene, meditating Buddha—eyes shut, lips gently curved in a smile—to the emaciated Buddha-to-be practicing austerities (and not counting the roly poly, laughing “buddha” who isn’t actually the Buddha at all).

The Buddha is believed to have told his followers that they should not rely on images or iconography to inspire their spiritual practice—a grass mat and the shade of a tree were all that was needed to pay homage to his example and meditate. But soon after his death, disciples began incorporating symbols of his teaching into Buddhist religious life, as objects of inspiration and veneration.

The stupa (a structure or building in the abstract shape of the meditating Buddha); a dharma wheel symbolizing the Buddha’s teaching and the eightfold path; and a lotus flower signifying a purified mind were among some of the earliest symbols used by the Buddha’s followers. Representations of the Buddha’s footprint carved in stone became a prominent representation of the Buddha’s impact and teaching and were considered to be like relics of his body.

It wasn’t until about the first century BCE that images depicting the Buddha in human form were created—many inspired by the Hellenistic sculptural tradition in parts of India and present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan that were under Greek political influence. As Buddhism spread north and south from India, images of the Buddha, his enlightened disciples, and his life stories were increasingly incorporated into the art and cultural forms of the host regions.

In Tibetan Buddhist art, religious scrolls, or thangkas, were painted with images of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and sages, as well as deities and beings that may represent guides or helpers, or symbolize aspects of the Buddha’s—and the follower’s—spiritual journey.

And in Thailand, Burma (present-day Myanmar), and other parts of Southeast Asia, sculptural Buddha images proliferated. Temple altars in the region are packed with donated Buddha figures, because contributing a Buddha to the monastic community is considered a meritorious act that will improve the donor’s karma.

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