A Short Version of The Buddha's Life

By John Allcock

The story of the Buddha’s life provides an important perspective on his teachings. It is quite a story.

The person who became known as the Buddha was born in approximately 563 BCE ( and died in 483 BCE) in a place called Lumbini, nnow part of Nepal, just over the border from Northern India. His name was Siddhartha Gautama--Siddhartha meant "one who will achieve his goal" and Gautama was the family name. 

His father was a king with a number of palaces--think summer home in the Hamptons, a penthouse in Manhattan. The story goes that in a dream his father was told that Siddhartha would either be a great spiritual leader or a great king. Being a protective sort, his dad favored the king route—to  keep him in the family business. So the king was the most overprotective parent imaginable, having Siddhartha always surrounded by servants,  and kept in opulent palaces shielded from the outside world.

But despite his father's best efforts, Siddhartha was a seeker, and he found himself yearning for something more than the material gifts of the palace.  So in his early 20s he convinced an attendant to take him outside the palace walls.

There he encountered what would come to be called the four heavenly messengers. First, a sick person, then an old person, and then a dead person (in those times they had charnel grounds where the dead were left to rot by a river--no funeral homes to hide and try to restore the corpses like today.)  In each case he asked the attendant "what is this" and the response was, “These are normal conditions of sickness, old age and death. They are inevitable and will happen to you and the ones you love.” Then he encountered a renunciant--a wandering ascetic who had given up worldly goods to try to find enlightenment without resorting to material comforts (these were common in India in those times).

Siddhartha decided to renounce the life of luxury and try to find true happiness—freedom from suffering— not in material things but by following the course of the renunciants. Although married with one son (betrothed by his parents in his teens), he left his cushy life and travelled around India for 6 years, studying with various renunciants. He became an accomplished meditator in accord with ancient Indian traditions, but did not find freedom from worldly suffering with the existing approaches. He even tried  extreme asceticism, which resulted in starvation approaching death, but that did not work either.  

Then he meditated under a tree (the Bodhi tree in a place called Bodh Gaya) and came to a number of realization about how to free oneself from suffering. He realized that a middle way, one between extreme asceticism and the materially focused life of the palace was the true path, and that if the focus was on wise choices in this lifetime, it was actually possible to free yourself from suffering in this life.  He began teaching this new approach, along with principles and practices embodying that perspective. His teachings caught on rapidly, and he soon had a large and growing group of followers, some of whom became monks to teach the approach.

What he taught was revolutionary, as India was a caste society (and to some extent it still is) and the common belief was that your fate was predestined. So, there was nothing you could do to find enlightenment or happiness in this world. The Buddha taught the opposite—that freedom from suffering was available to anyone in the present moment. 

In the early days of his teaching, he came upon a renunciate who asked him three questions: are you a god, are you a prophet, are you an angel? Siddhartha replied "no" to each question, and said "I am awakened". So he came to be known "the Buddha" which means "the awakened one". Thus, his teachings came to be known as Buddhism.

His approach spread throughout India, as he taught for over 40 years and died when he was 80 near his birth place.

The teachings continue to spread,  and they reached Southeast Asia around 200 BCE, and then Japan (where Zen Buddhism was born) and China (which had its own form of Zen) and then Tibet (which is widely known as Tibetan Buddhism), all around 700 CE. 

Although the teachings have continued to spread (reaching the United States in material numbers in the mid-1900s), there is no single Buddhist organization with centralized decision making. There is not a precise count of the number of practicing Buddhists in the world today, with numbers ranging from 350 million to over 500 million people, mostly in Asia. 

While people who identify as Buddhists share the core teachings, each culture to which Buddhism has spread has added its own interpretations. This blog, and the classes I teach at Yoga Mammoth, are drawn from the modern branch of Buddhism that is largely based on the first written record of his teachings (the Pali canon) which lays claim to most closely following his original approach.

All the teachings have a noble goal, in the words of the Buddha, “freedom from suffering.” If you are interested, come join us.