"Buddha," a term from the Sanskrit language of ancient India, means "awakened." An epithet rather than a given name, it was employed 2,500 years ago to describe one of the many itinerant teachers who wandered among the towns and villages along the river Ganges. This man, known simply as the Buddha, became one of the most famous figures in human history. We know very little about him; scholars even disagree on the date of his death by as much as a century.
We do not know with certainty what language the Buddha spoke. We know that he left no writings, that what he taught was preserved in the memories of generations of his followers, not to be written down until some four centuries after his death. Thus, it is impossible to know precisely what the Buddha taught. Yet the authority of this man who authored no book was so great that works attributed to him have been composed in many languages and many lands over the centuries. His words and image made their way from India to the nations now named Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Over the past two centuries, Buddhism has become established in Europe, Australia, and the Americas.
The texts and practices that have been identified as Buddhist have varied widely across Asia and across history. What might be called Buddhist in Japan may not be recognized as Buddhist in Sri Lanka. Indeed, the mutual recognition of Buddhists from different regions of Asia has occurred with any frequency only over the past century, with the identification of Buddhism as a world religion, and even then Buddhists in one region have tended to claim that their Buddhism is more original or more pure or more efficacious than the Buddhism encountered elsewhere.
The Buddha taught that all beings in the universe are subject to rebirth without beginning. All beings in the universe were present, somewhere in the universe, when he taught the path to freedom in India. Some who had the good fortune to hear his teachings and put them into practice were able to follow the path and free themselves from rebirth. Others, less fortunate, have continued to be reborn again and again. The Buddha claimed simply to have uncovered a path that had been long forgotten. The path had been taught by other buddhas in the distant past and would be taught by other buddhas in the distant future. He was but one of many buddhas.
In what is traditionally considered to be his first sermon, the Buddha taught what have come to be known as the four noble truths: the apparently simple formula that life is qualified by suffering; suffering has a cause; there is a state beyond suffering; and there is a path to that state.
When the Buddha's words were written down, he referred to what he taught as the "dharma vinaya." "Dharma" is famously untranslatable; nineteenth-century translators used to render it as "law." It is derived from the Sanskrit root meaning "to hold," and Buddhist monks are fond of saying that it is what holds one back from falling into suffering. More recently it is often translated as "teachings" or "doctrine." "Vinaya" refers to the rules of monastic discipline. Thus, the Buddha divided what he taught into, perhaps, a set of doctrines and a set of rules.
