In the oldest Upanishads, composed by brahmin teachers of the Ganges plain, the way out of the round of rebirth ran through the self. Behind the body and the passing mind, they taught, stands an inner essence, conscious and unchanging, and whoever knows it is free. Wandering renouncers, the śramaṇas who had left home and the Vedic sacrifice behind, offered other ways out: the Jains taught austerity, and the Ājīvikas taught that fate alone decides when release comes. The Buddha answered all of them with one claim. Suffering ends not when we find our true self but when we see that no such self is there to find — and then the craving that clings to passing things goes out.
He wrote nothing. His discourses were handed down by word of mouth, attributed to him by the early community and written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. His dates are uncertain. The Theravāda countries keep the Sri Lankan chronicles' reckoning, 624 to 544 BCE, and Western reference works long printed 563 to 483 BCE; most historians now place his death near 400 BCE. About a century and a half later Aśoka, the Mauryan emperor, set up a pillar at Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, inscribed to mark the birthplace of the sage of the Śākyas, the Buddha's clan.
In the Middle Length Discourses he recounts his search in his own voice. He left home, he says, troubled that his life was subject to ageing, sickness and death. The later biographies, the Buddhacarita among them, tell a more dramatic story — a prince kept in a palace who met an old man, a sick man and a corpse — but the earliest texts say little of his youth. He studied with two meditation teachers, Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, mastered the states of absorption each could teach, and left both because those states did not end suffering. He then starved himself until, the texts say, his bones showed through his skin. The turning point came when he gave up the fasting. He remembered sitting as a boy in the shade of a tree while his father worked, absorbed and at ease, and took that calm as the way. His five companions in austerity left him, sure he had given up the search; the tradition places his awakening soon after, under a tree at Bodh Gaya.
What he taught is set out as four truths: life as we live it is dukkha, unsatisfactory and uneasy; craving gives rise to it; it can end; and an eightfold path of conduct, meditation and understanding leads to that end. A person, on this analysis, is five changing groups of processes — body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Each is impermanent, none obeys our wishes, and so none of them is a self. The brahmins understood karma as ritual action; he recast it as intention, so that a deed takes its moral weight from the motive behind it. Richard Gombrich, a historian of early Buddhism, reads a number of the discourses as replies, some of them satirical, to passages of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, one of the two oldest Upanishads.
He was just as clear about what he would not answer. Asked whether the world is eternal, or whether one who has reached the goal exists after death, he set the questions aside because answering them would not lead to the end of suffering. He compared his own teaching to a raft, to be left on the bank once the river is crossed, and told his hearers to test what they were taught by their own experience.
For some forty-five years, the texts say, he walked between the towns of the Ganges plain, supported by the kings of Kosala and Magadha. The Vinaya, the monastic code, tells that he at first refused to admit women to the order, then admitted them at the request of Mahāpajāpatī, his aunt and foster-mother. By tradition he died at eighty at Kusinārā, after a meal from Cunda, a smith, and told his followers that the teaching and the discipline would be their teacher after him.
How much of the canon is his remains disputed. Gombrich holds that the main body of the discourses is the work of one mind; other scholars accept some teachings as his and not others. The Pāli version kept by the Theravāda, now the tradition of Sri Lanka and much of Southeast Asia, is the only complete collection of the early Buddhist texts to survive in a classical Indian language. Europe came to it partly through Schopenhauer: Karl Eugen Neumann, a Viennese reader of Schopenhauer's, translated the Middle Length Discourses into German between 1896 and 1902, calling the Buddha by the Pāli form Gotamo.