By traditional account Siddhartha Gautama was born around the modern Nepal–India border, in Lumbini, as a prince of the Shakya clan. He grew up amid every comfort; in adulthood, his encounters with sickness, old age, and death shook him. In his late twenties he left his palace, his family, and his inheritance to become a wandering ascetic, in the company of the Śramana movements then flourishing across northern India.

He abandoned extreme asceticism: between indulgence and deprivation, he taught, lay a Middle Way. Sitting beneath a fig tree at Bodh Gaya he is said to have reached the inner clarity that earned him the title of Buddha — 'the awakened one'. He spent the next forty years teaching: the Four Noble Truths (suffering exists, has a cause, can cease, and there is a path to its cessation), the Eightfold Path, and the philosophy of impermanence (anitya) and non-self (anātman).

The Buddha's teachings were preserved first orally and then in writing after his death. From the 3rd century BCE, under the patronage of the Mauryan king Ashoka, Buddhism began to spread beyond India, travelling along the Central Asian routes to China and from there to Korea and Japan. Today it is among the most widely practised philosophical and religious traditions on Earth — and is increasingly read as a psychological-ethical teaching as much as a religion.