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Most Buddhists do not consider Gautama Buddha to have been the only Buddha. The Pāli Canon refers to many previous ones (see list of the named Buddhas), while the Mahāyāna texts additionally have many Buddhas of celestial origin (see Amitābha or Vairocana as examples; for lists of many thousands of Buddha names, see Taishō Tripiṭaka ...
Siddhartha Gautama, [e] most commonly referred to as the Buddha (lit. ' the awakened one '), [4] [f] [g] was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia [h] during the 6th or 5th century BCE [5] [6] [7] [c] and founded Buddhism.
This list shows the distribution of the Buddhist religion, practiced by about 535 million people as of the 2010s, [1] [2] representing 7% to 8% of the world's total population. It also includes other entities such as some territories. Buddhism is the State religion in four countries — Cambodia, Myanmar, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. [3]
Buddhism flourished under the Indo-Greek and Greco-Bactrian kings. One of the most famous Indo-Greek kings is Menander (reigned c. 160–135 BCE). He may have converted to Buddhism [65] and is presented in the Mahāyāna tradition as one of the great benefactors of the faith, on a par with king Aśoka or the later Kushan king Kaniśka.
A Buddha is a being who is fully awakened and has fully comprehended the Four Noble Truths.In the Theravada tradition, while there is a list of acknowledged past Buddhas, the historical Buddha Sakyamuni is the only Buddha of our current era and is generally not seen as accessible or as existing in some higher plane of existence.
The birthday of the historical Buddha or Shakyamuni Buddha, known as Vesak in several countries, celebrates the birth of the child who became Prince Siddhartha around the end of the 4th century B.C.
[385] [403] [404] Scholars such as Bronkhorst also think that the four noble truths may not have been formulated in earliest Buddhism, and did not serve in earliest Buddhism as a description of "liberating insight". [405] According to Vetter, the description of the Buddhist path may initially have been as simple as the term "the middle way". [140]
Mahayana practitioners have historically lived in many other countries that are now predominantly Hindu or Muslim; remnants of reverence for bodhisattvas has continued in some of these regions. The following is a non-exhaustive list of bodhisattvas primarily respected in Buddhism.