What do we actually know about the historical Buddha?

Less than the legends say, but more than nothing. Historians are fairly confident that a man called Siddhartha Gautama, a wandering religious teacher in the eastern Gangetic plain in the 6th or 5th century BCE, founded Buddhism. Most accept that he lived, taught and founded a monastic order under Bimbisara, the ruler of Magadha, which makes him a contemporary of Mahavira, the Jain teacher. "Buddha" means "the awakened one".

The tradition adds the famous details: born in Lumbini, in today's Nepal, to royal parents of the Shakya clan, he renounced home life to become a wandering ascetic. These details come from Buddhist legends, not from records made at the time. No written records about him were found from his lifetime, or from one or two centuries after. The oldest writing that names him comes from the emperor Ashoka, in the 3rd century BCE, who left a pillar at Lumbini marking the Buddha's birthplace. The earliest full biography, a poem by Aśvaghoṣa, dates from the first century CE.

Even so, the texts keep a very human picture of the end of his life. In the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the Buddha says he is turning eighty and compares his body to an old cart held together with straps.

The legends are a problem for historians because the earliest biographies already contain many supernatural elements. In the 19th century some scholars removed them to leave a rational, Socratic teacher, but later scholars suspect that this made a Buddha to their own taste. Rupert Gethin says that, as Buddhist tradition tells it, the story of the Buddha's life is not history and not meant to be. Michael Carrithers, though, thinks the general outline (birth, renunciation, awakening, teaching, death) must be true.