The Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama)
c. 480 BCE–c. 400 BCE · Lumbinī
The Buddha's dates are genuinely contested; no firm date exists and all figures are approximate. The traditional 'long chronology' gives c. 563-483 BCE, an 80-year lifespan worked out by Western scholars in the early 1900s (J.F. Fleet) from astronomical calculations and king-list synchronisms. Most modern scholarship favours a 'short chronology': at the 1988 Goettingen symposium edited by Heinz Bechert, the majority placed his death (parinirvana) within about 20 years of c. 400 BCE, and Pali scholar K.R. Norman argues for a death around 410-390 BCE. We store the modern short-chronology figures (c. 480-400 BCE) so the Buddha appears near his likely contemporaries (Mahavira, Confucius, the late Upanishadic sages, the early Greek thinkers); this is a scholarly best estimate, NOT a settled date, and the long chronology of c. 563-483 BCE remains defensible.
A wandering teacher—Siddhārtha Gautama, called the Śākyamuni ('sage of the Śākyas')—near-certainly lived in the Ganges basin of northern India in the mid-1st millennium BCE; his death is disputed, clustering somewhere between c. 480 and c. 400 BCE. That a historical founder existed, taught a path centered on the end of suffering, and gathered a renunciant community is historically reasonable. The richly detailed life, however—the birth at Lumbinī with its wonders, the sheltered prince and the four sights, the renunciation, the contest with Māra, the awakening at Bodh Gaya, and the final passing (parinirvāṇa) at Kuśinagara—comes overwhelmingly from biographies composed centuries later (the Buddhacarita, Mahāvastu, Lalitavistara, and Nidānakathā), and is layered with legend rather than recoverable as fact. Here the historical kernel is presented as attested and every narrative element above is flagged as later tradition. Following the site's house style, the figure is treated aniconically, with no portrait.
Did you know?
Socrates and the Buddha walked the earth at the same time
While Socrates questioned his fellow Athenians in the marketplace, the Buddha was teaching across northern India. On the dating most scholars now favor — Socrates c. 470–399 BCE and the Buddha c. 480–400 BCE — their lives overlapped almost entirely, and the two died within about a year of each other. Strikingly, neither wrote down a word of his own teaching; both survive only through their students.
Meet Socrates →How we know
Socrates c. 470–399 BCE; the Buddha c. 480–400 BCE (modern short chronology; the older 563–483 BCE dating is no longer the consensus). Overlap ≈ 70 years; deaths ≈ 1 year apart.
Three teachers, one century
The Buddha in India, Confucius in China, and Pythagoras in Greece all belonged to the same brief span of world history — the sixth-to-fifth centuries BCE — teaching within roughly a hundred years of one another, though the Buddha's exact dates (around 480–400 BCE on the shorter academic chronology) are still debated by historians.
How we know
Confucius 551–479 BCE; Pythagoras c. 570–495 BCE; the Buddha c. 480–400 BCE (short academic chronology; traditionally 563–483 BCE) — all active within the 6th–5th centuries BCE.
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Lumbinī
What they did here
TRADITION: the later biographies place his birth in a grove at Lumbinī, near Kapilavastu; an Aśokan pillar marks the spot as a pilgrimage site, though the marvels around the birth are hagiography.
About Lumbinī
Lumbinī, in the Rupandehi district of southern Nepal near the Indian border, is traditionally identified as the birthplace of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha. The site, marked since antiquity by the Aśokan pillar and the Māyādevī temple, is a major pilgrimage destination and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with The Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.