1The story of the Buddha's life, like all of Buddhism, is a story about confronting suffering.
2He was born sometime between the sixth and fourth century B.C.,
3the son of a wealthy king in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal.
4It was prophesied that the young Buddha - then called Siddhartha Gautama -
5would either become the emperor of India or a very holy man.
6Since Siddhartha's father desperately wanted him to become the former, he kept the child isolated in a palace.
7Young Gautama had every imaginable luxury: jewels, servants, lotus ponds, even beautiful dancing women.
8For 29 years, Gautama lived in bliss, protected from the smallest misfortunes of the outside world.
9But then, he left the palace for short excursions.
10What he saw amazed him:
11first he met a sick man, then an aging man, and then a dying man.
12He was astounded to discover that these unfortunate people represented normal - indeed, inevitable - parts of the human condition
13that would one day touch him, too.
14Horrified and fascinated, Gautama made a fourth trip outside the palace walls
15and encountered a holy man, who'd learned to seek spiritual life in the midst of the vastness of human suffering.
16Inspired by the holy man, Gautama left the palace for good.
17He tried to learn from other holy men.
18He almost starved himself to death by avoiding all physical comforts and pleasures, as they did.
19Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn't bring him solace from suffering.
20Then he thought of a moment when he was a small boy:
21sitting by the river, he'd noticed that when the grass was cut, the insects and their eggs were trampled and destroyed.
22As a child, he'd felt a deep compassion for the tiny insects.
23Reflecting on his childhood compassion, Gautama felt a profound sense of peace.
24He ate, meditated, and finally reached the highest state of enlightenment: Nirvana.
25It refers to the "blowing out" of the flames of desire.
26With this, Gautama had become the Buddha, "the awakened one".
27The Buddha awoke by recognising that all of creation, from distraught ants to dying human beings, is unified by suffering.
28Recognising this, the Buddha discovered how to best approach suffering.
29First, one shouldn't bathe in luxury, nor abstain from food and comforts altogether.
30Instead, one ought to live in moderation.
31The Buddha called this the middle way.
32This allows for maximal concentration on cultivating compassion for others and seeking enlightenment.
33Next, the Buddha described a path to transcending suffering called The four noble truths.
34The first noble truth is the realisation that first prompted the Buddha's journey:
35that there is suffering and constant dissatisfaction in the world.
36The second is that this suffering is caused by our desires.
37As the Buddha said, "attachment is the root of all suffering."
38The third truth is that we can transcend suffering by removing or managing these desires.
39The Buddha thus made the remarkable claim that we must change our outlook, not our circumstances.
40We are unhappy not because we don't have enough money, love or status
41but because we're greedy, vain, and insecure.
42By re-orienting our minds we can grow to be content.
43With the correct behaviour and what we now term a mindful attitude,
44we can also become better people.
45We can invert negative emotions and states of mind,
46turning ignorance into wisdom, anger into compassion, and greed into generosity.
47The fourth and final noble truth the Buddha uncovered
48is that we can learn to move beyond suffering through what he termed the noble eightfold path.
49The eightfold path involves a series of aspects of behaving "right" and wisely:
50right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
51What strikes the western observer is the notion that wisdom is a habit, not merely an intellectual realisation.
52One must exercise one's nobler impulses on a regular basis, as one would train a limb.
53The moment of understanding is only one part of becoming a better person.
54After his death, The Buddha's followers collected his "sutras" (sermons or sayings) into scripture,
55and developed texts to guide followers in meditation, ethics, and mindful living.
56The monasteries that had developed during the Buddha's lifetime grew and multiplied, throughout China and East Asia.
57For a time, Buddhism was particularly uncommon in India itself,
58and only a few quiet groups of yellow-clad monks and nuns roamed the countryside, meditating quietly in nature.
59But then, in the 3rd century B.C.,
60an Indian king named Ashoka grew troubled by the wars he had fought and converted to Buddhism.
61He sent monks and nuns far and wide to spread the practice.
62Buddhist spiritual tradition spread across Asia and eventually throughout the world.
63Buddha's followers divided into two main schools:
64Theravada Buddhism which colonised Southeast Asia,
65and Mahayana Buddhism which took hold in China and Northeast Asia.
66Today, there are between a half and one and a half billion Buddhists in both East and West
67following the Buddha's teachings and seeking a more enlightened and compassionate state of mind.
68Intriguingly, the Buddha's teachings are important regardless of our spiritual identification.
69Like the Buddha, we're all born into the world not realising how much suffering it contains,
70and unable to fully comprehend that misfortune, sickness, and death will come to us too.
71As we grow older, this reality often feels overwhelming, and we may seek to avoid it altogether.
72But the Buddha's teachings remind us of the importance of facing suffering directly.
73We must do our best to liberate ourselves from the grip of our own desires,
74and recognise that suffering can be viewed as part of our common connection with others,
75spurring us to compassion and gentleness.