Who Was the Buddha? A Prince, a Problem and Forty-Five Years of Teaching

Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini, in present-day Nepal, to a family of the Shakya clan, probably in the fifth century BC, though estimates range over more than a century. The traditional account has him raised in comfort, deliberately shielded from suffering by a father who had been warned his son would otherwise renounce the world, and encountering on four excursions an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic, which is usually read as a compressed narrative statement of the problem rather than as biography. At twenty-nine he left his wife and newborn son, studied under two meditation teachers and mastered what they taught, then spent six years in extreme asceticism with five companions, nearly starving to death, and concluded that self-mortification was as useless as indulgence. He accepted a meal, was abandoned by his companions as a backslider, sat under a tree at Bodh Gaya and resolved not to move until he had understood, and reported at dawn that he had. He then taught until his death at about eighty, from what the texts describe as a meal that disagreed with him.

His first teaching, delivered to the five former companions, sets out four propositions framed like a medical diagnosis: the symptom, the cause, the prognosis and the treatment:

• •Life as ordinarily lived is unsatisfactory, a word usually translated as suffering but closer to unease, and covering not only pain but the dissatisfaction of pleasant things ending
• •The cause is craving, meaning the compulsive reaching for experience to be other than it is, which is driven by the illusion of a fixed self that must be defended and gratified
• •Because the cause is identifiable, the condition can end
• •The treatment is an eightfold path, covering understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration, grouped into ethical conduct, mental discipline and wisdom
• •Underlying these are three marks of existence: everything is impermanent, everything unsatisfactory when clung to, and nothing has a fixed unchanging self, including a person, who is a process rather than a thing

The Pali texts record a consistent refusal to answer certain questions, including whether the universe is eternal, whether it is infinite, whether the soul and body are the same, and what becomes of an enlightened person after death. The reasoning is given in a parable: a man shot with a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he knows the archer's name, caste and village will die before the answers arrive. The doctrine of no fixed self is the most philosophically demanding part of the teaching and the most misunderstood, since it does not deny that a person exists but denies that there is an unchanging essence behind the changing processes of body, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. He also declined to designate a successor, telling his followers that the teaching and the discipline would be their teacher, which shaped everything about how the tradition developed.

Nothing was written down for roughly four centuries. The discourses were memorised and recited communally by specialist monks, which is why the texts are so heavily repetitive and formulaic: the structure is a memory technology, with numbered lists, stock phrases and repeated frames that make errors detectable when a group recites together. A council is said to have been convened shortly after his death to agree the content, and further councils followed. The Pali canon was committed to writing in Sri Lanka around the first century BC, reportedly because famine threatened the community of reciters. Different schools preserved overlapping collections, and the surviving canons in Pali, Chinese and Tibetan agree substantially on the early material, which gives scholars a way to identify what is likely to be earliest by looking at what all of them contain.

The community he founded, of monks, nuns and lay supporters, spread across the subcontinent, receiving decisive support in the third century BC from the emperor Ashoka, who after a devastating campaign adopted the teaching, inscribed edicts on pillars across his territory and sent missions abroad. From there it moved south to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia as the Theravada tradition, which preserves the Pali canon, and north through Central Asia to China, Korea and Japan as the Mahayana, which developed new texts and the ideal of the bodhisattva who postpones liberation to help others, and then to Tibet, which added the tantric Vajrayana. It largely disappeared from India itself by around the thirteenth century. Modern transmission to the West began through colonial scholarship and accelerated in the twentieth century, producing both faithful transplantation and the secular extraction of meditation techniques from their ethical and doctrinal setting, which practitioners and scholars argue about continuously.

Siddhartha Gautama, born in what is now Nepal probably in the fifth century BC, left a comfortable household at twenty-nine, tried extreme asceticism for six years, rejected it as useless, and reported an understanding that he taught for forty-five years. Its core is four propositions structured as a diagnosis, identifying craving as the cause of an unsatisfactoriness that can therefore end, with an eightfold path as treatment, and holding that nothing including a person has a fixed unchanging self. He declined metaphysical questions as unhelpful, and the teaching was memorised communally for four centuries before being written down.