*Buddha* — 'the awakened one' — is the title given to Siddhartha Gautama of the Shakya clan. Traditional dates place him at 563–483 BCE, but since the 1980s linguistic and archaeological work has pointed to a later range, roughly 480–400 BCE. Either way he lived in the same centuries as Confucius and the Greek pre-Socratics.

In the legend, Siddhartha was raised as a prince, encountered old age, sickness and death outside the palace walls, and saw the emptiness of his own position. He tried years of extreme asceticism, wasted his body, found no answer. Tradition says he finally reached awakening seated under a *bodhi* tree at Bodh Gaya, when he embraced a *middle way* — neither indulgence nor mortification.

The spine of his teaching is the Four Noble Truths. First: life is shot through with *dukkha* — unsatisfactoriness, anguish. Second: the cause of *dukkha* is *taṇhā*, the ceaseless craving and clinging to self. Third: cessation is possible (*nirvana*). Fourth: there is a path to cessation — the eightfold ethical and meditative practice. The structure makes no claim about a god; the Buddha looks less like the founder of a religion than the author of a diagnosis.

The Buddha wrote nothing. His teaching was transmitted orally for centuries and committed to writing around the 1st century BCE as the Pāli Canon in Sri Lanka. From there spread the differing traditions — Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana — to China, Tibet, Japan and beyond. The four-step diagnostic frame (suffering – cause – cessation – path) has provided the ethical and psychological scaffolding for billions of lives across two and a half millennia.