Next, I will discuss Buddhist philosophy and the Buddhist approach to suffering. But before I do, I wanted to relate Buddha's life—which, if nothing else, is a marvelous story.

The Buddha’s dates are uncertain and range from 624 BCE (earliest birth) to 368 BCE (latest death). Whatever his dates, he began as a wandering ascetic and lived for some 80 years. His movement, Buddhism, arose in reaction to the increasing remoteness and abstruseness of Vedic Brahmanism. His followers deified him and, accordingly, mythologized his life; and it would be profitless to try, if that were possible, to separate the mythology from the reality.

According to tradition, Siddharta Gautama, later known as the Buddha, was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, to King Shuddhodana of the Shakya clan. His mother, Mahamaya, dreamt of a white elephant with six tusks entering her right side. Ten lunar months later, while strolling in a garden in Lumbini, she grabbed onto the drooping branch of a sal tree, and Siddharta ("He who has achieved his aim") emerged fully formed from under her right arm. Siddharta proceeded to take seven steps before announcing that this would be his last life.

Seven days later, Mahamaya died. The court astrologers predicted that Siddharta would become either a chakravartin (universal monarch) or a buddha (enlightened one). Not wishing to lose his son and heir—and, at that, a future chakravartin—to a life of renunciation, Shuddhodana confined him to a life of luxury within the precinct of the palace, where he would not be exposed to religious teaching or human suffering. At the age of 16, Siddharta married the beautiful princess Yashodara, and everything seemed on track for Shuddhodana.

But at the age of 29, having tired of the delights of the........

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