Gautama Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha (“the awakened one”), was a wandering ascetic and teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic plains of northern India. His exact dates are contested: early twentieth-century scholarship favored c.

563-483 BCE, while a 1988 symposium and much later work placed his death within roughly twenty years of 400 BCE, supporting a working span across the 5th-4th centuries BCE. All chronologies agree he lived about eighty years; they disagree only on which eighty.

No written records survive from his lifetime, so his teaching reaches us through oral traditions committed to text generations later. Tradition recounts that, having left a sheltered princely life and confronted aging, sickness, and death, Gautama pursued severe asceticism, abandoned it as fruitless, and attained awakening (bodhi) in meditation under the Bodhi tree.

He then taught for decades a practical path centered on understanding suffering and its cessation. For a mind-power atlas, the decisive contribution is his analysis of mind as the ground of experience: the opening of the Dhammapada - “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts” - reads as a foundational charter for the idea that inner mental states shape lived reality.