The Life of Siddhartha Gautama and the Great Departure

Siddhartha Gautama is traditionally held to have been born in Lumbini, in the foothills of the Himalayas in present-day Nepal, as the son of Suddhodana, a chief or raja of the Shakya clan, and his mother Maya, who according to canonical legend died seven days after his birth and was thereafter raised by her sister Mahapajapati Gotami. The most influential modern scholarly convention, associated with the work of Richard Gombrich and the "short chronology" adopted at a 1988 symposium in Göttingen, places the Buddha's death (parinirvana) at around 400 BCE, with his birth roughly eighty years earlier; the older "long chronology," still followed in Theravada countries and reflected in the traditional Buddhist Era calendar, places his death at 543 or 544 BCE. Both dating schemes rest on the same core problem: no contemporary inscriptional evidence for the Buddha's life survives, and the earliest textual sources — the Pali Canon's suttas and vinaya — were composed and transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing, by tradition at the Fourth Buddhist Council in Sri Lanka under King Vattagamani in the 1st century BCE. According to the traditional narrative, preserved most fully in later biographical compilations such as the Buddhacarita of Ashvaghosha (1st–2nd century CE) and the Nidanakatha, a sage named Asita foretold at the infant's naming ceremony that he would become either a universal monarch (chakravartin) or a fully awakened Buddha, prompting Suddhodana to shelter his son within the walls of the palace at Kapilavastu, surrounding him with pleasure and shielding him from the sight of suffering, old age, illness, and death.