Siddhartha Gautama was the prince of the Kapila kingdom and became known as Shakyamuni, the saint of the Shakyamuni tribe.
The world's first enlightened person, the founder of Buddhism, the statue enshrined in the middle of the Mahavira Hall, the folk usually call it the Buddha.
It is said that Siddhartha's mother, Mahamaya, touched a handful of branches of a towering tree in a place called Lumbini Garden, and her son was born.
As a prince, he has always been well cared for, enjoying a generous material life, carefree, and never left the palace before getting married.
Presumably, Siddhartha is an extremely innocent young man, and it is easy to lose his country after succeeding to the throne, so his father thinks it is necessary to let him experience the outside world.
After traveling out of the palace several times, Siddhartha was extremely shocked in his heart, it turned out that the commoners and himself lived a completely unruly life. Some people are starving because they have no food, some are suffering because of illness, and some are helpless because of old age.
Siddhartha became confused, began to resent the daily state of abundance and luxury, and began to wonder what was causing most people to suffer.
It is a pity that Siddhartha did not realize that the suffering of the poor was caused by the oppression of the aristocracy, and the spark of revolution could not be ignited in his heart.
But he stood on a higher height, trying to relieve the suffering of all.
The rich are also bitter, they also have the troubles of lust, and they are also happy and angry about gains and losses, and they also cannot get rid of the torture of birth, old age, sickness and death.
How to solve this problem? Since all sentient beings are suffering, it is natural to explore the truth from the direction of suffering.
At the age of 29, Siddhartha renounced his noble position and enviable family and began to practice to realize the true meaning of suffering and the method of liberation.
Begging, dieting, austerity, meditation, and reducing the need for material things as much as possible to make oneself suffer.
For six years, there is no law.
Siddhartha, after reflection, believes that excessive penance, like excessive pleasure, does not allow one to be in a normal state and does not lead one to enlightenment. So the prince ate with his body and mind, and since his thoughts were fruitless, he let go of all thoughts and did not deliberately seek any more.
On that day, Siddhartha walked and sat on the ground under a Bodhi tree, and completely entered the wonderful realm of "non-thinking, non-thinking".
In 588 B.C., Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi tree for seven days and became a Buddha!
Because I am not a Buddha, I can't describe that kind of realization. Basically, it should be: the birth and death of the universe, all causes and effects, are interpreted in the Buddha's mind, so that the nature of the world, the nature of time and space, and the supreme enlightenment is attained.
Enlightenment does not mean that he has superpowers, it does not mean that Shakyamuni can soar through the clouds, eat and drink, and move mountains and seas.
To a certain extent, he is still an ordinary body, but his cognitive dimension of the world is higher than that of us ordinary people.
In other words, the Buddha provided us with another way of thinking and understanding the world.
After that, the Buddha summarized the teachings and disseminated the teachings, forming a sect with an extremely broad and far-reaching influence - Buddhism.
Of course, every leader of the sect must inevitably be endowed with divinity by believers.