Siddhartha Gautama

Who was Siddhartha Gautama?

Siddhartha Gautama is the man who became the Buddha. You will also see the name written Siddhartha, Siddhārtha, Siddharta, Gotama or Gautama Buddha. Tradition dates him to 563 to 483 BCE, though many scholars now place him later. He grew up in a Śākya noble family around the royal court at Kapilavastu. By tradition he left home at twenty-nine and searched for six years, part of it by starving himself. After his awakening under the Bodhi tree he taught for about forty-five years, and he died at Kusinārā, in a grove of sāla trees, at eighty. One honest caveat belongs here. Everything we know about him came down by mouth and was written centuries after his death.

What are the Four Noble Truths?

They are his first teaching and the frame everything else hangs on. One. Suffering runs through ordinary life. Not only the obvious kinds, also the low ache of getting what you wanted and needing the next thing by evening. Two. The cause is craving, in three forms. Wanting pleasure, wanting to keep existing, wanting to stop existing. Three. It can end, and the ending is not a mood, it is complete. Four. There is a path, and it is practical. The shape is medical on purpose. Diagnosis, cause, prognosis, treatment. He is not asking you to believe it. He is asking you to test it.

• The Four Truths follow a medical framework: diagnosis, cause, prognosis, and treatment.
• Craving (taṇhā) creates suffering in three forms: for pleasure, for existence, and for non-existence.
• Cessation of suffering is not theoretical but achievable through systematic practice.

Listen to the story “The Four Noble Truths”

What is the Noble Eightfold Path?

The eight parts are the treatment named in the fourth truth. They fall into three groups. How you behave, how you steady the mind, and what you understand. The old words for those are ethics, concentration and wisdom. The eight are not steps. You do not finish one and move on, they grow together, and weakness in one shows up in the others. It is also called the Middle Way, because it walks between two dead ends the Buddha had already tried himself. A life of having everything, and a life of punishing the body. Neither one ended the wanting.

• The eight factors develop together, not one after the other.
• Three trainings work as one: ethics (sīla), concentration (samādhi), and wisdom (paññā).
• The Middle Way avoids the extremes of indulgence and asceticism.

Listen to the story “The Noble Eightfold Path”

What did Siddhartha Gautama teach?

Siddhartha Gautama taught the Four Noble Truths, and they are laid out like a doctor's notes. First the diagnosis. Suffering runs through ordinary experience. Then the cause. Craving, in three forms, for pleasure, for existing, for not existing. Then the good news. It can actually stop. Then the treatment. The Noble Eightfold Path, eight parts of a life that grow together and cover how you behave, how you steady the mind, and what you understand. He set this out in his first talk, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, and by tradition he went on teaching it for forty-five years.

What is dependent origination?

Dependent origination is the Buddha's answer to where things come from. Nothing in your experience shows up on its own. Everything arrives because conditions came together. Think of water in a pot. It depends on snow in the mountains, on clouds that gathered somewhere else, on the hands that carried it. Take one condition away and it is not there. He looked at suffering the same way and traced it through twelve links, from not seeing clearly all the way to the pain, and back out again. The useful part is where the chain is thinnest. Between a feeling and the craving that follows it there is a gap, and that gap is where you can act.