The Buddha

Refused to answer the metaphysical questions, on the grounds that a man shot with an arrow does not need to know who fired it before having it removed.

Who they were

Siddhārtha Gautama, of the Śākya clan, later called the Buddha — the awakened one. Born at Lumbinī in what is now Nepal, and active in the Ganges plain.

The dating has moved. The traditional figures of 563–483 BCE have been substantially revised by scholarship, and most specialists now place his death somewhere in the range 410–370 BCE, making him roughly a century later than the received account. His historical existence is not seriously disputed.

Where they came from

The traditional life, as the texts give it: born to a ruling family; a prophecy that he would become either a great king or a great renunciant; a father who confined him to palaces to prevent the second.

Then the four sights — an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic — which disclosed to him at twenty-nine that ageing, illness and death were universal and unavoidable, and that someone had chosen to look for a way through.

He left, studied under two meditation teachers and mastered what they taught, found it insufficient, and spent six years in extreme austerity with five companions — reportedly reducing his food to almost nothing. He concluded that self-mortification was as useless as indulgence, accepted a meal, and was abandoned by his companions for it.

He then sat under a tree at what is now Bodh Gayā and, by the tradition's account, awoke.

He taught for forty-five years, and died at eighty at Kuśinagara after a meal — the text names it sūkara-maddava, whose translation has been argued over for centuries, being either pork or a kind of mushroom.

What they taught

The four noble truths and the eightfold path, the three marks, and dependent origination.

And a refusal that is as characteristic as anything he affirmed. The texts record a set of questions he declined to answer — the avyākata, the undeclared: whether the world is eternal or not, whether it is finite or infinite, whether the soul is identical with the body, and whether an awakened one exists after death.

His stated reason is a parable. A man shot with a poisoned arrow refuses to have it removed until he knows who fired it, of what caste, what his name was, what the bow was made of, and what feathers were used. He dies before the enquiry finishes. The questions are not answered, on this account, because answering them does not conduce to liberation and the time is short.

That refusal is unusual among religious founders and is doctrinally load-bearing. Buddhism's metaphysics is deliberately thin, and its later philosophical elaboration — including Nāgārjuna's — is in significant part an argument about how thin it is entitled to be.

The ordination of women is a genuinely contested episode. The texts describe his aunt and foster-mother, Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, requesting ordination; the Buddha refusing repeatedly; Ānanda interceding; and the Buddha agreeing subject to eight additional rules subordinating nuns to monks — and remarking that the teaching would now last half as long. Modern scholars have raised serious questions about whether this passage is early or a later interpolation, and the full ordination lineage for nuns lapsed in Theravāda countries and has been contentiously revived in recent decades.

What we can and cannot say

We can say he existed and taught, and that this is as well established as anything about a figure of that period.

We can say the biography accreted. The four sights, the palaces and the prophecy read as hagiography — the shape a founding life is expected to take — and there is no way to recover what lies under them.

We can say the earliest textual layer is difficult to isolate. The Pāli Canon was transmitted orally for several centuries, contains material of different periods and dialects, and scholars disagree about which strata are earliest. Confident quotation of what the Buddha said should be read as "what the tradition records", which is not the same thing.

We can say the refusal of metaphysics is genuinely in the earliest material and is not a modern secularising gloss — though it is regularly used as one, by people who then attribute to him a naturalism the texts do not support. He also plainly taught rebirth, karma across lives, and cosmological realms.

We cannot say what happened under the tree. The tradition's own position is that the question is not answerable in words, which is either profound or convenient and is probably both.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading