Gautam Buddha "Siddhārtha Gautama"

Born : Nepal, Lumbini April 8, 563 BC

The Buddha (also known as Siddhattha Gotama or Siddhārtha Gautama)was a philosopher, mendicant, meditator, spiritual teacher, and religious leader who lived in ancient India (c. 5th to 4th century BCE).He is revered as the founder of the world religion of Buddhism.He taught for around 45 years and built a large following, both monastic and lay. His teaching is based on his insight into duḥkha (typically translated as "suffering") and the end of dukkha – the state called Nibbāna or Nirvana. The Buddha was born into an aristocratic family, in the Shakya clan but eventually renounced lay life. According to Buddhist tradition, after several years of mendicancy, meditation, and asceticism, he awakened to understand the mechanism which keeps people trapped in the cycle of rebirth. The Buddha then traveled throughout the Ganges plain teaching and building a religious community. The Buddha taught a middle way between sensual indulgence and the severe asceticism found in the Indian śramaṇa movement.He taught a spiritual path that included ethical training and meditative practices such as jhana and mindfulness. The Buddha also critiqued the practices of brahmin priests, such as animal sacrifice. A couple of centuries after his death he came to be known by the title Buddha, which means “Awakened One” or the "Enlightened One".Gautama's teachings were compiled by the Buddhist community in the Suttas, which contain his discourses, and the Vinaya, his codes for monastic practice. These were passed down in Middle-Indo Aryan dialects through an oral tradition. Later generations composed additional texts, such as systematic treatises known as Abhidharma, biographies of the Buddha, collections of stories about the Buddha's past lives known as Jataka tales, and additional discourses, i.e, the Mahayana sutras

Biography

The earliest Buddhist sources state that the Buddha was born to an aristocratic (khattiya) family called Gotama (Sanskrit: Gautama), who were part of the Shakyas, a tribe of rice-farmers living near the modern border of India and Nepal. According to Akira Hirakawa, the Shakya "was an oligarchy with the leaders alternating as head (rajan) of the tribe," and he also notes they were unlikely to have been divided into the four castes.Their capital was Kapilavastu.[note 1] The Buddha's father was Śuddhodana, "an elected chief of the Shakya clan".His mother, Māyā, died in his infancy and he was raised by Mahapajapati Gotami as a stepmother.The Buddhist tradition regards Lumbini, in present-day Nepal to be the birthplace of the Buddha. The early Buddhist texts contain very little information about the birth and youth of Gotama Buddha. Later biographies developed a dramatic narrative about the life of the young Gotama as a prince and his existential troubles.They also depict his father Śuddhodana as a hereditary monarch of the Suryavansha (Solar dynasty) of Ikṣvāku (Pāli: Okkāka). This is unlikely however, as many scholars think that Śuddhodana was merely a Shakya aristocrat (khattiya), and that the Shakya republic was not a hereditary monarchy.Indeed, the more egalitarian gana-sangha form of government, as a political alternative to Indian monarchies, may have influenced the development of the śramanic Jain and Buddhist sanghas, where monarchies tended toward Vedic Brahmanism. According to later traditional biographies such as the Mahavastu and the Lalitavistara, his mother Māyā was a Koliyan princess. Legend has it that, on the night Gotama was conceived, Queen Māyā dreamt that a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side,and ten months laterSiddhartha (Pāli: Siddhattha, meaning "he who achieves his aim") Gautama was born. The day of the Buddha's birth is widely celebrated in Theravada countries as Vesak.Buddha's Birthday is called Buddha Purnima in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India as he is believed to have been born on a full moon day. According to the later biographical legends, during the birth celebrations, the hermit seer Asita journeyed from his mountain abode, analyzed the child for the "32 marks of a great man" and then announced that he would either become a great king (chakravartin) or a great religious leader.Suddhodana held a naming ceremony on the fifth day and invited eight Brahmin scholars to read the future. All gave similar predictions. Kondañña, the youngest, and later to be the first arhat other than the Buddha, was reputed to be the only one who unequivocally predicted that Siddhartha would become a Buddha. According to the early Buddhist Texts of several schools, and numerous post-canonical accounts, Gotama had a wife, Yasodhara, and a son, named Rāhula.[Besides this, the Buddha in the early texts reports that "'I lived a spoilt, a very spoilt life, monks (in my parents’ home)." The legendary biographies like the Lalitavistara also tell stories of young Gotama's great martial skill, which was put to the test in various contests against other Shakyan youths