The Awakened One and the Risen One

Buddhism: Its History, Its Beliefs, the Credibility of Its Stories, and How It Compares with Christianity

Oct 9, 2026 · @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND

Introduction

Most Westerners first encounter Buddhism as an image: a fat, laughing figure on a restaurant shelf, a calm face in a garden, a word like mindfulness on a wellness app. The laughing figure is not even the Buddha. He is Budai, a tenth-century Chinese monk whom some Chinese Buddhists honor as an incarnation of a future Buddha. The historical Buddha is Siddhartha Gautama, a teacher who lived in the borderlands of northern India and southern Nepal roughly five centuries before Christ.

The popular image presents Buddhism as a gentle philosophy of peace with no doctrines to quarrel over. That image is mistaken. Buddhism makes large claims about the universe, time, the self, and what lies beyond death. Those claims can be examined like any others, and they deserve serious consideration.

This essay asks four questions. What is the history of Buddhism? What does it actually teach? How credible are the stories told about its founder? And what follows, for a human life and a human society, if those teachings are true? Along the way, and at the end, Buddhism is set beside Christianity, because the two answer the same ancient question about suffering in ways that could hardly be more different.

A word about fairness. A Christian writing about another faith owes it the same honesty he would want for his own. Where Buddhism sees truly, that should be said plainly. Where it diverges from what Christians believe is true, that should be said plainly too, with reasons.

The Buddha as the Tradition Tells His Story

A title, not a name

Buddha is a title. It comes from the Sanskrit root budh, meaning “to wake up,” and means “the awakened one.” To understand what he woke from, one must understand the world as early Buddhists pictured it.

The wheel of rebirth

Buddhist art often shows the universe as a wheel, the bhavachakra or wheel of life. Its segments are the realms into which beings are born: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings. The wheel turns without end. A being dies and is reborn somewhere on it, then dies and is reborn again. Even the gods die.

Three features of this picture matter for everything that follows.

• No creator. Buddhism does not teach that a god made the wheel. It simply is, and on most accounts, it has turned without beginning.
• Rebirth is not good news. Western readers sometimes hear reincarnation as a second chance. Classical Buddhism heard it as a sentence. The endless round of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth is called samsara, and the goal is to escape it.
• Karma steers the wheel. Deeds leave traces that shape where and how a being is reborn. No judge oversees it; the moral order works like a law of nature.

The escape from samsara is nirvana, often translated as “awakening” or “enlightenment.” The word literally means a blowing out, as of a flame. One who attains it is no longer bound to be reborn. A Buddha is one who attains it on his own and then teaches others the path.

Many Buddhas

Because time in this picture is cyclical and vast, Siddhartha Gautama is not the only Buddha. Tradition holds that Buddhas arise again and again across the ages. Each one rediscovers and teaches the same truth, called the Dharma. Over time, people forget each teaching, the world sinks back into ignorance, and eventually another Buddha appears. Gautama did not claim to teach anything new. He claimed to have rediscovered what earlier Buddhas had found.

The vow of Sumedha

How does one become a Buddha? In the tradition, it takes an almost unimaginable span of lives, and it begins with a vow. In a former age, a previous Buddha named Dipankara was walking toward a muddy stretch of road. An ascetic named Sumedha lay face down in the mud and spread his hair over it so the Buddha would not soil his feet. Dipankara foretold that this man would, ages later, be born as Gautama and become a Buddha. Sumedha vowed to reach that goal.

From then on he is called the Bodhisattva, one whose being is set toward awakening. The Jataka tales, a large body of stories, recount his former lives. In one he is a monkey king who stretches his own body across a river as a bridge so his troop can escape hunters. In another he is a prince who gives his body to a starving tigress so she can feed her cubs. Across these lives he perfects generosity, patience, compassion, meditation, and wisdom, until he is born for the last time.

The prince and the four sights

The popular life story runs as follows. Siddhartha is born a prince of the Shakya clan. His mother dreams that a white elephant enters her side. At birth, he takes seven steps and announces that this is his last birth. His father, warned that the boy may renounce the world, shelters him in luxury. He marries and has a son.

Then, on outings from the palace with his charioteer Channa, he sees four sights: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering holy man. The first three show him that age, sickness, and death come for everyone, including his wife and child. The fourth shows him that some men are seeking a way out. He leaves the palace by night, abandoning his family, and becomes a wandering ascetic.

For about six years he studies under teachers and practices severe fasting until he is skin and bone. Concluding that self-starvation does not free the mind, he eats again and adopts what Buddhists call the Middle Way between indulgence and mortification. At Bodh Gaya, in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, he sits beneath a fig tree, later called the Bodhi tree. The tempter Mara assaults him with fear and desire and fails. Through the night he attains awakening. He then teaches for some forty-five years and dies at about eighty, entering what is called final nirvana.

The Buddha of History

Most scholars accept that a teacher named Siddhartha Gautama really lived. What we can know about him with confidence is modest.

• Place. He was born at Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal, near the Indian border. Around 249 BC, the emperor Ashoka erected a pillar there with an inscription marking the spot as the Buddha’s birthplace. That pillar is the oldest physical evidence connected to his life, and it was erected about a century and a half after his death.
• Clan. His family name, Gautama, marks his lineage; his people were the Shakyas, which is why he is also called Shakyamuni, “sage of the Shakyas.” The Shakyas appear to have been governed by an assembly of leading families rather than a monarch. His father, Shuddhodana, was likely a chief or noble, not the great king of the later stories.
• Dates. The traditional dates are about 563 to 483 BC. Many scholars now place his death later, around 400 BC. No one knows precisely.
• Setting. He grew up in a world shaped by Vedic religion, with its priests, sacrifices, and caste order, and by a growing movement of wandering ascetics who rejected home life in search of release. He belonged to that movement. Ideas such as rebirth and karma were already in the air; he did not invent them.

The earliest sources

There are no records of the Buddha written in his lifetime. The monastic community preserved his teachings through memorization and recitation. By its own tradition, the collection known as the Pali Canon was first written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BC, about three to four centuries after his death. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts, birch-bark scrolls from the region of Gandhara in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, date to about the first century BC and first century AD. Scholars nonetheless judge that a substantial core of the material goes back at least to the third century BC.

What do these earliest layers say about his life? Surprisingly little. In a discourse called The Noble Search (Majjhima Nikaya 26), which many scholars count among the oldest autobiographical passages, the Buddha says simply that while still a young man, with dark hair and in the prime of life, he shaved his head, put on the ascetic’s robe, and left home, though his mother and father wept and wished otherwise. There is no palace, no sheltering father, no chariot rides, and no four sights. A young man left home to seek what lies beyond death.

How Credible Are the Stories?

The Buddha’s familiar life, the prince and the four sights, is a later composition. Its fullest classic forms are the Buddhacarita of the poet Ashvaghosha, from the first or second century AD, and the Nidanakatha, the introduction to the Jataka commentary, from about the fifth century AD. These are five to nine centuries removed from the man they describe. Historians of Buddhism say so openly, and many Buddhist scholars agree.

Three observations follow.

First, the story grew. The earliest layer gives a young man leaving home. Later layers add the palace, the miraculous conception, the seven steps, the gods arranging his outings, and the demon Mara. This is the normal pattern of legend: the farther a story travels from its source, the more wonderful it becomes.

Second, the four sights appear to have been borrowed. In the Pali Canon itself, the full tale of a sheltered prince who sees an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a renunciant is told not about Gautama but about Vipassi, a Buddha of a far earlier age (Digha Nikaya 14). The tradition taught that every Buddha’s life follows the same pattern, so one Buddha’s story could fit another. The four sights are best read as a teaching template rather than a biographical report.

Third, the deepest claims cannot be checked at all. The Buddha’s authority rests on what he said he saw on the night of his awakening: his own former lives, the deaths and rebirths of other beings, and the end of his own rebirth. No one else was there, and nothing in the world could confirm or refute it. According to the tradition, the Jataka tales of former lives as monkeys and princes are things the Buddha remembered, and no one else could witness. Many of them reuse Indian folk tales that circulated independently.

Set beside the Gospels

It is fair to ask how the Christian sources compare under the same standard. The table gives approximate gaps between each founder’s death and the sources about him.

Source type	Buddha (died about 400 BC)	Jesus (died about AD 30 to 33)
Earliest datable reference	Ashoka’s inscriptions, about 150 years later	Creed quoted by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 7, which many scholars date to within about 5 years
Earliest written documents	Pali Canon written down about 300 to 350 years later; oldest manuscripts about the same	Paul’s letters about 20 to 25 years later; Mark about 35 to 40 years later
Full life narratives	Buddhacarita about 450 to 550 years later; Nidanakatha about 800 to 900 years later	Matthew, Luke, and John about 40 to 65 years later
Outside, non-follower witnesses	None known	Josephus (about AD 93) and Tacitus (about AD 116)

The Gospels were written within the lifetimes of people who knew Jesus, and they claim to rest on eyewitness testimony (Luke 1:1-4; John 19:35; 1 Corinthians 15:6). Legend certainly grew around Jesus, too. The so-called infancy gospels of the second century and later have the boy Jesus striking playmates dead and turning clay into birds. But the early church rejected those writings, and they stand outside the New Testament. The canonical accounts are restrained by comparison.

This comparison does not prove the Gospels true. It shows only that the window for legend to replace memory was far narrower.

Why credibility matters differently to each faith

Here the two religions part ways in a way that is easy to miss. Buddhism does not stake its truth on the historical accuracy of the Buddha’s biography. By its own teaching, the Dharma is an eternal truth that many Buddhas have rediscovered; if Gautama had never lived, the path would still be true. Many modern Buddhists can therefore treat the miracle stories as symbolic and lose nothing they care about.

Christianity cannot do that. It stands or falls on historical events, above all the resurrection. Paul states the stakes himself: “if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17, KJV). Christianity therefore invites historical scrutiny in a way Buddhism does not. For Buddhists, the question is whether the teaching proves itself in practice. For the Christian, the question is whether a man actually rose from the dead.

What Buddhists Believe

The Buddha’s teaching is usually summarized from his first sermon, given to five former companions in a deer park near Varanasi. At its heart are the Four Noble Truths, laid out like a physician’s diagnosis and prescription.

1. Suffering (dukkha). Ordinary life is marked by suffering. The word means more than pain. It covers unsatisfactoriness, the way every pleasure fades and every possession slips away.
2. The cause of suffering. Suffering arises from craving (tanha, literally “thirst”): craving for pleasure, for existence, and even for non-existence.
3. The end of suffering. When craving is extinguished, suffering ends. That extinction is nirvana.
4. The path. The Noble Eightfold Path is the way to that end: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These are commonly grouped as wisdom, ethical conduct, and meditation.

The three marks of existence

Buddhism teaches that all conditioned things share three marks.

• Impermanence (anicca). Nothing lasts. Every thing and every state of mind arises and passes away.
• Suffering (dukkha). Because nothing lasts, clinging to anything brings sorrow.
• Not-self (anatta). No permanent self or soul exists. What we call “I” is a changing bundle of body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Believing in an enduring self is the root illusion from which craving springs.

This last teaching set the Buddha apart from the Hindu thought around him, which held that each person has an eternal self, the atman. It raises an obvious question: if there is no self, what is reborn? The classic answer, from a dialogue called The Questions of King Milinda, compares rebirth to lighting one lamp from another. The second flame is neither the same as the first nor wholly different. A causal stream continues; no soul travels.

Karma

Intentional actions produce consequences in this life and in future lives. Good deeds tend toward happier rebirths and harmful deeds toward painful ones. No god administers karma. It operates impersonally, like cause and effect in nature.

Nirvana

Nirvana is the end of craving, rebirth, and suffering. The Buddha declined to say what it is in positive terms. Asked whether an awakened one exists after death, does not exist, both, or neither, he set the question aside as one that does not lead to liberation. Some Buddhists describe nirvana as a peace beyond description; critics have read it as extinction. Buddhists generally reject both “eternal life” and “annihilation” as accurate descriptions.

Ethics

Lay Buddhists commonly undertake five precepts: not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to take intoxicants. Monks and nuns keep hundreds of further rules. Buddhism also prizes four boundless attitudes: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

How Buddhism Spread and Divided

Buddhism did not remain one thing. Over twenty-five centuries, it divided into several traditions that differ about as much as Catholic, Orthodox, and Pentecostal Christianity, and in some respects more.

The early community and Ashoka

After the Buddha’s death, his monks held councils to settle the teachings and the monastic rules. Within about a century, disputes over discipline produced the first lasting split. The decisive turn came under Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor of India who reigned roughly 268 to 232 BC. Horrified by the slaughter of his conquest of Kalinga, he embraced Buddhist ethics, set up inscribed edicts across his empire, and sponsored missions abroad. By tradition, his son Mahinda carried the teaching to Sri Lanka. Royal patronage turned a movement of wandering ascetics into an international religion.

The three great branches

• Theravada, “the teaching of the elders.” Preserved in the Pali Canon, it prevails today in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos. Its ideal is the arahant, one who reaches nirvana by his own effort, usually as a monk.
• Mahayana, “the great vehicle.” Emerging around the turn of the era, it produced new scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra and the Perfection of Wisdom texts. Its ideal is the bodhisattva who postpones final nirvana to save all beings. The philosopher Nagarjuna (about the second century AD) taught that all things are “empty” of independent existence. Mahayana spread along the Silk Road to China in the first centuries AD, then to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
• Vajrayana, “the diamond vehicle.” A form of Mahayana with esoteric rituals, mantras, and guru lineages, it took root in Tibet from the seventh and eighth centuries AD. The Dalai Lama belongs to this tradition.

Two East Asian schools worth knowing

Pure Land Buddhism teaches devotion to Amitabha, a Buddha who vowed to bring all who call on his name into his paradise, the Pure Land. In Japan, Honen and especially his disciple Shinran (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) taught that human effort is useless for salvation and that one must rely wholly on Amitabha’s “other-power.” Christian observers, including the theologian Karl Barth, have noted its striking resemblance to salvation by grace through faith.

Zen (Chinese Chan) stresses seated meditation and sudden insight over scripture and ritual. Its paradoxical teaching stories, the koans, are meant to break the grip of ordinary reasoning.

Decline in India and the modern West

In the land of its birth, Buddhism faded after the first millennium. The sack of the great monastic university at Nalanda around AD 1193 is often taken as its symbolic end there. Buddhism survived and flourished elsewhere in Asia.

The Buddhism most Westerners know is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century product sometimes called Buddhist modernism. Asian reformers and Western enthusiasts presented it as rational, scientific, and free of superstition, emphasizing meditation and ethics and downplaying gods, demons, merit-making, and miracles. The secular mindfulness movement of recent decades extends that trend. Traditional Buddhism, as most Buddhists have practiced it throughout history, has been far more devotional and supernatural.

Today Buddhism has about 324 million adherents, roughly 4 percent of the world’s population. According to the Pew Research Center, it was the only major religion whose numbers fell between 2010 and 2020, mainly because of low birth rates in East Asia and because some people raised Buddhist left the faith.