Siddhārtha Gautama · the Buddha

A prince of the Śākya clan who left a palace, a wife and a son after seeing what his father had spent eighteen years hiding from him — an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering monk. Six years of extreme asceticism nearly killed him and taught him nothing; he ate a bowl of rice, sat down under a fig tree, and refused to rise until he understood. What he then taught for forty-five years he framed as a physician frames a case: there is suffering; it has a cause; the cause can cease; here is the way. He claimed no revelation, named no god as his source, and appointed no successor but the teaching itself. Set beside Moses the contrast is total and worth sitting with: Moses receives, from Another, on a mountain, for a people. The Buddha notices, alone, under a tree, and says every one of you can check this.