Siddhārtha Gautama
Undoubted Man, Disputed Century
- First attested
- the 240s BCEAshoka's pillar at Lumbinī, set up twenty years after his consecration, recording that he came in person and worshipped because the Buddha Sakyamuni was born there.
- Claimed
- 623 BCEasserted by The Theravāda Buddhist Era, counted from a parinirvāṇa in 544/543 BCE in the Sinhalese chronicles Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa; Nepal and UNESCO's Lumbinī listing give the birth as 623 BCE.
The claim runs about 400 years ahead of the evidence.
The 563–483 BCE dates printed in most handbooks are a modern reckoning off the Sinhalese chronicles rather than a Buddhist tradition or a piece of evidence — since Heinz Bechert's 1988 Göttingen symposium scholarship has clustered the death near 400 BCE, and nothing outside the texts attests the Buddha before Ashoka's Lumbinī pillar of the 240s BCE.
The historical founder of Buddhism who attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree and taught the Four Noble Truths.
Buddhists call him the Buddha, the awakened; Gautama is a clan name, Siddhārtha a personal name absent from the oldest suttas. That he lived, taught across the Gangetic plain and died at eighty is not doubted; when he did is. The Sinhalese chronicles' 218 years between his death and Ashoka's consecration give the 563–483 BCE of twentieth-century handbooks; Theravāda liturgy keeps 623–543. Heinz Bechert's Göttingen symposium of 1988 unsettled that, its papers running from 483 down to 368 BCE and clustering near 400; Richard Gombrich argued 404. The oldest evidence outside the texts is Ashoka's Rummindei pillar at Lumbinī, about 249 BCE — the full life-stories come later, Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita around the second century CE. Those stories make him a prince, though the Śākyas were an oligarchy.
Light
The Pali suttas give a teacher, not a god, and a path the tradition holds open to anyone who walks it — though Mahāyāna Buddhology makes far larger claims for him. The Kālāma Sutta has him telling enquirers not to accept a teaching on authority but to know it for themselves.
Shadow
A life this thinly evidenced takes the shape of whoever tells it. Philip Almond's The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988) traced how Victorian writers, working from a canon barely edited, produced a rational anti-clerical Buddha who looked remarkably like themselves.
