Before Siddartha Gotama's birth, his mother dreamt of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus flower.

Birth and Youth of the Siddhartha (563-547)
According to traditional accounts, Siddhartha was born in 563BC. His father was Shuddhodana, a leader of the Shakya peoples, who ruled from Kapilavastu, near the border between India and Nepal. At his conception, his mother, Maya, dreamt that a great white king elephant touched her with a lotus blossom. As the time of his birth neared, she set out for her native village of Devadaha, but when she reached a grove at Lumbini, she gave birth, Siddhartha appearing from her side. She died only seven days after his birth. The Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (r. 273-36] erected a pillar to mark the place, which was rediscovered in 1898. The circumstances of his conception and manner of his birth made it evident that he was no ordinary child. This was confirmed when a sage named Asita came down from the Himalayas to see the child, and, after inspecting his features, declared that he would either be a world conqueror or become the enlightened one (Buddha).
Lamenting that he would not live to hear his teachings, he directed his disciple Nalaka to follow the new teacher.
The King, naturally pleased that his son might become a world-conqueror and equally alarmed at the prospect he might become a religious teacher, resolved that his son would know only the pleasures of the princely life and never encounter anything which might tempt him toward religion.

Prince Siddhartha accordingly grew up amid the luxury and pleasures of the palace, became adept at archery, and excelled in other princely accomplishments. A princely education included the Vedas, together with phonetics, ritual, grammar, etymology, metrics, and astronomy, which made it possible to better understand their meaning. Yet even though kept away from the sorrows of the world, the boy evinced an unusual sensitivity that presaged his future. Once when his father was performing a ritual plowing ceremony, the boy, effortlessly and without any training, became absorbed in a deep meditative concentration, which would later be called the First Meditation (dhyana). On another occasion, he observed birds pulling worms from the earth, and reflected on how every living thing harms other things as a consequence merely of living.

At a palace festival, the young prince sat down under a tree and was soon lost in meditation. It is said that though the shadows of all the trees had lengthened, the shadow of the tree under which he sat had not moved.

The scene awakened in the Prince an aversion to sensual pleasures, showing him such pleasures concealed loathsomeness of material things. So Siddhartha secretly left the palace on his favorite horse with his charioteer to seek the good (kusala). When he reached the Anoma river, he shaved his head, put on the robes of an ascetic, giving his charioteer his princely clothes to return to the palace. He then continued southward toward Rajagriha, the capital of Magadha.

During an excursion outside the palace gates, Prince Siddartha encountered four images: old age, sickness, death, and an ascetic spiritual seeker.

The Intellectual Milieu
In India there was an ancient tradition of meditation and asceticism, dating to the Indus Valley civilization about 2500BC. A great body of literature, called the Upanishads, had developed which summarized the teachings of ascetics. There were two patterns of asceticism: that of the brahmans (priests) and that of the wandering ascetics, called sramanas, "those who strive." The Brahmans followed the Four Stages of life: studying under a teacher when young; returning home to marry and raise a family; turning over daily affairs to a son and taking up meditative practices; and, finally, leaving home to live in the forest, there to die. The Sramanas take up the life of wandering as youths, discipline themselves through austerities, and practice a "discipline" or yoga. The goal of all their efforts was Liberation, which was defined differently by different thinkers. But a common thread was disdain for the gods and practices of the Vedas and a ferment of ideas, ranging from atheism to personal devotion to a personal god (bhakti). We know from Buddhist and Jain texts that more than twenty different sects, today mostly known only by name, flourished at that time.

The Six Teachers
· At the time Siddhartha began his life as a wandering ascetic, there were in northern India six famous ascetics who led groups of disciplines: Purana Kassapa who argued that the person is unaffected by the goodness or badness of his actions. Morality did not exist; murder and theft were acceptable as those acts did not harm those who performed them.
· Makkhali Gosala who contended that a person's success or failure was due to fate and that an individual's actions could not influence the course of his life. His followers were knows as the Ajivakas, which probably refers to their practice of extreme austerities, love of solitude, and disdain for any kind of comfort. So difficult a practice never had many followers, yet the school continued to exist until the 14th century AD.
· Ajita Keshakambala, who was materialist, held that everything was composed of four elements (earth, water, fire, and wind), and that moral acts were meaningless. This position was later maintained by the Lokayata or Charvaka tradition.
· Pakudha Kacchayana who held that there were seven elements, the four recognized by Ajita plus pain, pleasure, and life. The elements are unchanging and are the only reality. Thus if a person is stabbed with a knife, the knife does nothing but pass through the spaces between the elements, thus is of no consequence, even if the person dies. This position is later represented in the Vaisesika school.

The future Buddha bid farewell to his wife, Princess Yasodhara and new son, Rahula, before renouncing the householder's life to seek an end to suffering.

· Sanjaya Bellatthiputta who refused to answer any question directly, being a skeptic because of doubts about the nature of knowledge and investigations of logic, and who, through his students, exercised a significant influence on Buddhism.
· Mahavira, one of the founding figures of Jainism. Mahavira belonged to the nirgrantha ascetics, those who freed themselves from all fetters through the practice of austerities until they conquered (jain) ignorance. Jainism belongs with Buddhism as one of the great heterodox schools of Indian thought.

Far from the palace, Prince Siddartha exchanged his fine clothes for rags and cut his long hair.

The Wandering Ascetic (533-528)
When Siddhartha reached Magadha, an important kingdom in Central India, he studied first under Alara Kalama from whom he learned the technique of meditation that enabled the adept to attain a state of nothingness. But Siddhartha found this teaching lacking, so he left. On his way to another teacher, King Bimbisara offered to make him a minister, but Siddhartha declined. He then sent a retainer to persuade Siddhartha to abandon his meditation, but to no avail. Siddhartha then sought out Uddaka Ramaputta who taught the technique of meditation of neither perception nor non-perception, a meditation which removed the mind from all contact with the world of sensation. Though more profound than the meditation of nothingness, when the meditation was over, the problems of the world returned, thus quieting the mind was an inadequate technique for attaining true wisdom.
In the company of Kondanna, Bhaddiya, Vappa, Mahanama, and Assaji, Siddharta entered the forests to practice the greatest austerities of self-mortification in order to gain wisdom and freedom. He would clench his teeth and press his tongue against his palate continually, learning to ignore the pain. He once tried to stop all breathing, closing his nose and mouth, only to have his ears begin to breath which he stopped for a while only with the greatest effort.

He experienced pain as strong as if a "man were to bore one's skull with a sharp drill" or to "bind one's head tightly with a hard leather thong" or to "rip up the belly with a sharp butcher's knife" or to "seize a man by his arms and scorch and thoroughly burn him in a pit of charcoal." Finally he began a great fast, gradually reducing the amount of food he ate until he no longer required food. He became progressively more emaciated, his hair fell out, his skin hung loose in folds, the skin of his stomach clinging to his backbone, and his body was in constant pain.
In this state he discovered a fundamental truth about austerity and self-mortification: the pain such practices create produces in turn delusions, fears, and doubts magnified by deprivation and by clinging to life. It will not, cannot, lead to wisdom. He was closer to wisdom as a small child when he fell into the First Meditation. For six years he had practiced austerities and self-mortifications so extreme that they amazed his companions, but now he resolved to abandon them, to their disappointment and disgust at his apparent weakness. "The ascetic Gautama has fallen into luxurious ways and abandoned his spiritual efforts," they decided and abandoned him. Later legend says that he performed these austerities near Mount Dandaka in Gandhara.

The Attainment of Enlightenment (April/May 528)
Having rejected the luxury of the princely life with his "great renunciation" and now having abandoned its opposite, the way of austerity and self-mortification, Siddhartha returned to his first intuitions, meditation without austerity, but disciplined with the yoga he has learned from Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta. He took enough food to gain some strength, accepting rice and milk from Sujata, and sat under a ficus tree, later called the bodhi or enlightenment tree at Bodhgaya. What was needed was to move beyond all that could be experienced, until it came to an end, which did not reveal ultimate reality as was usually assumed, but was a state of non-cognition. According to the Therevada tradition the enlightenment occurred on the night of the full moon, in the month of Visakha, corresponding to April/May of the Western calendar.
Later legend explains that as Siddhartha sat under the tree, the demon Mara came terrorizing him with the fear of death, in the form of a huge army with soldiers holding every imaginable weapon, windstorms, whirlwinds, showers of hot rocks, sandstorms, but none could come close to the meditating Prince. Mara then tried darkness, but the light of his meditation defeated it. Clubs, spears, axes, arrows, and other weapons hurled at him turned into fragrant flowers that fell harmlessly at his feet. No one can escape the desire for life, and the food and sleep that sustain it, and the fear of death is the most difficult thing to over come. But Siddhartha overcame all the challenges of Mara, at the most desperate moment touching the earth for security. The earth responded with a deafening roar that scattered the frightened hosts of Mara. When Mara was vanquished, Siddhartha attained enlightenment and became the Buddha.
The legendary account of Mara's temptation is to seen as a parable of Siddhartha's struggles to understand what binds us to existence. Having returned to a disciplined meditation, Pali tradition says that in the first part of the crucial night he acquired a supernatural ability to remember all his previous lives and he began to reflect on his past and how his lives had been directed by certain factors.

The young ascetic practiced extreme self-mortification for six years in the hopes of discovering Truth. It is said he ate little more than a single sesame seed or grain of rice each day. After these six years he determined to continue his quest in a new manner. He would practice a Middle Way between self-mortification and self- indulgence.

Then in the middle of the night, he saw how similar factors directed the lives of others, understanding how one's own actions contribute to the course of life and how things beyond one's total control also influence it. He saw that greed and hatred produced evil consequences which destroyed both the person who had them and what they exercised that greed and hatred on, that one's own dispositions and lusts urged on one courses of action which needed to be curbed, and that confusion, our inability to understand what our actions entail and how our lives are shaped, bedevils us longest. We must eliminate them, one by one, and as we do so our freedom and wisdom increase. At the end of the night, he discovered the Four Noble Truths, became the Buddha, and called himself the Tathagata, "he who has arrived," meaning he had attained the truth.
What, then, was the content of his insight and how did it occur? Was it only the Four Noble Truths, or these and the Chain of Dependent Origination, or another of his first teachings? Was it a matter of a disciplined control over our desires and dispositions or knowledge that overcame the ignorance which kept us from wisdom? Was it attained by series of progressively more profound insights into the nature of existence or of deeper meditative states? Was it a sudden leap of understanding that transfigures the mind and its grasp of the world? Did it consist in a discipline of meditation or action which could be mastered, or in a body of wisdom which could be taught, or in intuition which were beyond language and thought and could be attained but not directly taught? None of these questions can, or could be answered, and important differences among Buddhist philosophers hinge on the different answers to these questions. The meaning of the words which Siddhartha, now the Buddha, did use—moksa "freedom" or "release" (vimoksa, vimukti) and nirvana "cessation"—do not resolve any uncertainty.

Soon thereafter, a young woman offered the future Buddha a bowl of rice and milk. He accepted it, restored his strength, and began his practice anew.

The First Sermon
After he had attained Enlightment, the Buddha sat beneath the bodhi tree for seven days in a deep meditation. When he emerged from it, he went and sat under a different tree to consider what he had come to understand and the bliss it produced. According to Buddhist religious beliefs, others had reached the state of enlightment before Siddhartha, but had entered into nirvana without ever having taught. The Buddha, too, had doubts about teaching and was hesitant to do so, for reasons unknown but subject to much learned discussion. Legend says that the Buddha decided to teach only after the god Brahma encouraged him to do so. He first thought he should approach his former teachers Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, but they had died.
His first sermon was delivered in the Deer Park outside Benares, represented in art as "the turning of the Wheel of the Law." There he proclaimed the Middle Way that abjured a life of self-indulgence as well as of self-mortification. A life of moderation and self-discipline which could be practiced by all. He told the five men who became his first disciples the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-Fold Way which are the core of his doctrine and are accepted by all who call themselves Buddhists. His second sermon enunciated the doctrine of "no-self" (anatta), which characterizes philosophical Buddhism.
From Benares, Buddha went to Uruvela where he converted a thousand people who worshiped fire, led by the Kassapa brothers, and delivered the Fire Sermon. When they heard this sermon, the Kassapa brothers and their followers all became followers of the Buddha.

The Missionary Effort
and the Buddhist Order (523-483)
Within three months, the Buddha had converted sixty monks to his cause, from every class, brahmans to outcastes. He traveled between the capitals of the main states of north India--Magadha, the Licchavi Confederacy, Kosala, and Kashi. During the twenty years of travel when he never had a home, he converted many to his teachings. Buddha accepted people from every part of society, men and women, whoever sought enlightenment. At first his mendicant followers stayed in caves and forests, begging for food and dressing in rags, and were called bhikkhu or "beggars." To prevent excesses of indulgence or mortification, the Buddha developed a simple rule for the monks. They were permitted to live in monasteries, accept food and clothing from the faithful, and take medicines from physicians. At the urging of his step-mother who cut off her hair and wore the yellow robes of the Order, the Buddha accepted women into the Order, but provided special rules for nunneries. At the beginning Buddha himself accepted lay persons as monks with the simple proclamation: "Come, Oh Monk." Those accepted into the order shaved their heads, removed their moustaches, dressed in yellow robes, and studied under a teacher. Monks took their refuge in the Buddha, his teachings (the law or Dharma), and the Order (Sangha), the Three Jewels of Buddhism.

He sat under the shade of a pippala tree (now called a Bodhi tree) determined not to rise until fully enlightened. He realized the 4 Noble Truths and the secret to true peace and happiness.

As a Buddha, an awakened one, he returned to teach his five fellow practitioners the Noble Truth of Unsatisfactoriness, the Noble truth of the Cause (Craving), the Noble Truth of Cessation, and the Noble 8-fold Path leading to the cessation of all suffering. The wheel of Dharma had been set in motion.

The monastic movement began to take shape after Buddha's conversion of King Bimbisara when Kalanda donated a bamboo grove and the King built a monastery, known as the Bodhimandala, for the Buddha and his thousand followers. Two disciples of the ascetic Sanjaya, Sariputta noted for his wisdom and Moggallana noted for his psychic powers, converted to Buddhism and became among his most important disciples. A third disciple of importance was Mahakassapa who was noted for his asceticism. The Buddha enjoined his disciples to convert others saying:
The converts to Buddhism were of two types, lay people who accepted the Three Jewels and the mendicant monks who instructed lay believers and were supported by them. They were expected to observe the Five Precepts:

1. Not to kill 2. Not to steal 3. Not to engage in sexual misconduct 4. Not to utter false statements 5. Not to drink intoxicants.

In addition, they were expected to abstain from eating after midday, attending music or dance performances, and using perfumes and garlands on six days each month. Observance was an injunction, but it was not compulsary and there was no penalty for violations. For monks and nuns the Rule was compulsary and there were penalties the most severe of which might involve suspension from the Order or, in extreme cases, expulsion. Expulsion might result from sexual misconduct, stealing, taking human life, or lying about spiritual attainments. Monks wandered for most of the year, but during the rainy season, they congregated at retreats where they undertook concentrated study of the Law and Rule.

In one noteworthy story, the Buddha distracted murderer Angulimala from killing his own mother and 100th murder victim. Inspired by the Buddha's fearlessness and wisdom, Angulimala became a disciple and later attained enlightenment himself.

The Buddha gained many followers. On one occasion 1250 monks gathered spontaneously to hear his teaching. (This day is commemorated as a holiday in Buddhist countries.)

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After 45 years of teaching the Dharma, the Buddha passed into Parinirvana. In his last sermon, he encouraged his disciples to diligently seek the truth and not to hold on to that which is impermanent.

The Death or Parinirvana of Buddha 483 BC
After a lifetime of missionary efforts, called retreats, the Buddha saw dissent among his followers. His cousin Devadatta and Prince Ajatasatru, who had killed his father King Bimbisara, plotted to take control of the order and the kingdom of Magadha. Devadatta asked to lead the order, but the Buddha refused, saying that the monks follow his teachings not his person, leading Devadatta to attempt to kill him. First he released a mad elephant which charged the Buddha, thundering "like the black clouds at the end of the world," but was stopped by the Buddha raising his hand, evoking in the elephant a loving kindness and causing it to kneel down in homage. Devadatta then pushed a boulder which broke apart merely scratching the Buddha's foot and proposed new austerities for monks in the attracting new recruits. All his efforts failed. Prince Ajatasatru, now King, regretted the murder of his father and became a Buddhist. Devadatta created a schism, but the Buddha sent Moggallana and Sariputta to win them back, and they returned to the Order. Devadatta regretted his error and was received back into the Order as well.
The Buddha, now about 80, left for a visit to Vaisali where he converted the courtesan Amrapali who gave her garden to the Order. He continued his journey and was given some food by a blacksmith which poisoned him, causing violent diarrhea and hemorrhaging. Weakened by this, he continued on to Kusinagara where he died in a grove of sala trees.

His body was cremated, as was the custom of the time, and his remains were divided among the peoples of northern India who constructed stupas to enshrine them. The account of the division (the Mahaparinibbana-sutta) of his relics gives us a detailed view of the extent of the Buddhist community, the number of adherents in particular places, and a synopsis of his teachings.

In 1898, Peppé excavated an old stupa at Piprahwa and found an urn with an inscription from the time of King Asoka or before which stated that the contents were the remains of the Buddha. In 1958 another urn was discovered in Vaisali and, though without an inscription, has been identified as containing his remains on the basis of its similarity to the one found by Peppé.