Buddhism began with the life of Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-483 B.C.), a prince from the small Shakya Kingdom located in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal near Bihar. Brought up in luxury, the prince abandoned his home and wandered forth as a religious beggar, searching for the meaning of existence. The stories of his search presuppose the Jain tradition, as Gautama was for a time a practitioner of intense austerity, at one point almost starving himself to death. He decided, however, that self-torture weakened his mind while failing to advance him to enlightenment and therefore turned to a milder style of renunciation and concentrated on advanced meditation techniques. Eventually, under a tree in the forests of Gaya (in modern Bihar), he resolved to stir no farther until he had solved the mystery of existence. Breaking through the final barriers, he achieved the knowledge that he later expressed as the Four Noble Truths: all of life is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; the end of desire leads to the end of suffering; and the means to end desire is a path of discipline and meditation. Gautama was now the Buddha, or the awakened one, and he spent the remainder of his life traveling about northeast India converting large numbers of disciples. At the age of eighty, theBuddha achieved his final passing away (parinirvana) and died, leaving a thriving monastic order and a dedicated lay community to continue his work.

A school Buddhism partakes both of sensualism and idealism it admits sensual perception as the source of knowledge but it grants to nature only an apparent existence. On this universal illusion Buddhism founded a gigantic system of cosmogony establishing an infinity of degrees in the scale of existences from that of pure being without form or quality to the lowest emanations. According to Buddha the object of philosophy as well as of religion is the deliverance of the soul from metempsychosis and therefore from all pain and illusion. He teaches that to break the endless rotation of transmigration the soul must be prevented from being born again by purifying it even from the desire of existence. Buddha denied the authority of the Vedas and abolished or ignored the division of the people into castes admitting whoever desired it to the priesthood. Though his morals and his precepts are pure and elevated in theory the metempsychosis and the pantheism which are essential parts of the system often inculcate in practice more regard to animals than to men and place the highest moral perfection in the destruction of personality. In the course of time much was added to the original doctrine of Buddha in the way of mythology sacrifices penances hierarchy and mysticism.

A complete collection of the sacred books of Buddhism forms a theological body of 108 volumes. These works were originally written in Sanskrit and afterward translated into Tibetan. Buddhism possesses a literature of its own its language and style are simple and intelligible to the common people to whom it is particularly addressed. For this reason the priests of this religion prefer to write in the dialects used by the people and indeed some of their principal works are written in Prakrit or in Pali. Among these are many legends and chronicles and books on theology and jurisprudence. The literary men of Buddhism are generally the priests who receive different names in different countries .