The Buddha

c. 528 BCE — South Asia, Ancient India

Today: Northern India and Nepal (enlightenment at Bodh Gaya)

A prince named Siddhartha Gautama left his palace to seek the root of human suffering, and the answer he taught — that craving binds us, and a disciplined path can free us — grew into one of the world's great religions. Buddhism spread without armies, carried by monks and merchants along trade routes from Sri Lanka to Japan, remaking cultures it never conquered. It belongs to a remarkable moment historians call the Axial Age, when, within a few centuries and with little contact, thinkers across Eurasia independently reimagined ethics and the divine.

Worth knowing: The Buddha lived at roughly the same time as Confucius in China, the Hebrew prophets, and the first Greek philosophers — a worldwide burst of new ideas around 500 BCE that no one has fully explained.

Pattern: Ideological movement — A belief system rises, spreads, institutionalizes, and then schisms — changing the rules people accept as legitimate.

Entry 43 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.