No writing survives from the Buddha's lifetime; the first comes from an emperor's pillar
Siddhartha Gautama founded one of the world's great religions, yet nothing was written about him for one or two centuries after he died. The earliest firm trace is Emperor Ashoka's pillar at Lumbini, marking his pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Buddha Shakyamuni, the Sage of the Shakyas.
Buddha is a title, not a name: it means one who has woken up, from a root that can also describe a flower opening. His given name, Siddhartha, means he who achieves his goal, and Gautama was his clan name. In the early discourses he usually calls himself the Tathagata, a word of uncertain meaning often read as one who has thus gone, or thus come, beyond all passing phenomena.
Tradition says he was born to royal parents of the Shakya clan at Lumbini, in today's Nepal, left home to live as a wandering ascetic, reached awakening at Bodh Gaya in Bihar and died at Kushinagar. Most scholars accept that he really lived and taught in the eastern Ganges plain in the 6th or 5th century BCE, founding his order under King Bimbisara of Magadha and dying in the reign of Ajatashatru, which made him a contemporary of the Jain teacher Mahavira. Traditional East Asian reckonings put his death far earlier, at 949 BCE.
His teaching was a Middle Way between indulgence and harsh self-denial, set out in the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and resting on the idea that everything arises in dependence on other things. Followers preserved it orally in Middle Indo-Aryan dialects. The Pali expert Oskar von Hinuber argues one account of his last days was composed no later than 350 to 320 BCE, perhaps preserving genuine memory. Full life stories arrive much later, beginning with the poet Ashvaghosha's epic in the first century CE.
Those biographies are thick with marvels, and scholars disagree about what to do with them. Nineteenth-century writers stripped out the miracles to leave a rational, Socratic teacher; critics now say they simply built a Buddha to their own taste. Rupert Gethin argues the life story was never meant as history but as a pattern carrying timeless truths. Buddhism later faded in India after the 8th century while flourishing across Southeast and East Asia.
Source: The Buddha
