Philosophy of Buddhism in India

The founder of Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama was born about 567 B.C. in Southern Nepal near Kapilavastu (about 130 miles north of the modern city of Benares). According to tradition, his father (Suddhodana), a petty ruler of the Kshatriya class, was informed by a Seer at the birth of his son, that Gautama was destined to become a great ruler. However, if he were to see four things - disease, old age, death, and a monk who had renounced the world - then the boy would abandon his earthly destiny in order to become the founder of a new way of salvation for the entire world. As a result, Gautama’s father sought to keep him from these experiences. He built a palace in the midst of a sheltered park and ordered that neither the sick nor the aged nor the dead nor the monk should be allowed near the palace. So it was that the boy grew up shielded from the world.