Who is Buddha?

Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha or "the Enlightened One," was born in what is now Nepal to a wealthy chieftain and family. He went on to create the religious and philosophical system named for him.
Buddhist lore says Siddhartha' father tried to hide all pain and misery from his son so Siddhartha would remain content with his privileged life. However Siddhartha escaped the palace to discover how poverty and disease effected others. This led him to renounce his wealth and position to become a monk and seek enlightenment. First he tried exposing himself to hunger and hardship. When that failed, he followed a middle path of meditation and moderate self-care. When he found enlightenment, he shared his practice with others.

Siddhartha Gautama, or as the world came to know him, the Buddha, lived roughly around 5 centuries before the Christ Era in Northern India just south of Nepal. Son of a wealthy King, Siddhartha was raised in a lifestyle of unequal luxury, having every conceivable advantage at his fingertips. The reason Siddhartha was brought up with such luxuries can be traced back to an experience he had when he was very young. While still a small child, a fortune teller predicted that Siddhartha would grow up to be one of two things: a wealthy and powerful king or a religious leader and mystical healer. His father frightened that Siddhartha could end up leaving the family business and become the latter tried to hedge the bet by giving him the fulfillment of every desire imaginable and, at the same time, he removed of all those individuals presently suffering from life's various vicissitudes. This, he thought, would ensure that his son not want, or need, to contemplate man's existence and his place and purpose in this world. These ultimate questions that lack definitive answers being the root of man's spiritual quest and/or journey.
Despite all of his father's efforts to minimize Siddhartha's experience to just positive aspects of reality, when Siddhartha was a young man in his late twenties, the "powers at be" intervened and he had a couple of disturbing experiences that changed his sheltered outlook of life in very distressing ways. Siddhartha finally got a peak of life's ugly certainties: the absolute and undeniable fact that all beings will eventually get older, become sick or get injured, and will ultimately perish from this world becoming worm food and/or dust. How, and why, does this happen to all living beings is what he thought to himself? And he, being one of those living beings, for the first time he saw his own eventual fate. This scared Siddhartha in ways he never thought possible, and forced him to reexamine his life and everything he thought he knew about the world. Needing to find answers to the question of what to do about the plight of humans and their eventual suffering and death, Siddhartha decided to leave his world of sensual delights, which at the time included a beautiful wife and young child, and search for the answers to life's great questions.
Siddhartha was gone many years trying all available methods that were in existence at that time in India that attempted to ease human suffering. Already living a very hedonistic lifestyle for the better part of 30 years and seeing its eventual shortcomings, he thought perhaps life would be better served if he became an ascetic and deny all worldly pleasures; however, this way was ultimately just as disappointing. Not knowing what to do next he decided to meditate on his questions while sitting under a Bodhi Tree. How long Siddhartha sat under that tree meditating is a matter of dispute among scholars and historians, but what is unanimously agreed upon is what happened to him while he sat there contemplating man's suffering and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Under the Bodhi Tree Siddhartha became a Buddha, or in other words, he became "awakened" or "enlightened" to man's problem of suffering. It is at this time that Siddhartha "discovered" the four noble truths and "the middle way" to life. These discoveries would eventually become the central tenets of a new religion or world philosophy called Buddhism. Siddhartha finally leaped up from the lotus position and went out to tell others what can be done of the problem of suffering. Those he told, in turn, told others, and they told others, for generations and generations to come until the present day where Buddhism is the world's 3rd largest religion with more than one billion followers in roughly a dozen different countries all over the world.

Siddhartha Guatama, otherwise known as the Buddha, is the historical founder of Buddhism. He was born to noble lineage in the 6th century BC in what today is Nepal. As traditional accounts of his life have it, Prince Siddhartha once ventured out beyond his father's palace for the first time, and witnessed the 'four sights' of disease, old age, death, and asceticism, which were to inform the essential principle of his newfound pursuit to end suffering.
According to Buddhist history, Siddhartha Guatama abandoned his princely life and pursued extreme forms of meditation until he at last reached enlightenment and attained nirvana, or the complete cessation of suffering. He went on to teach across India and gathered numerous disciples.
The historical Buddha is a matter of some debate, but throughout time he has come to be the primary figure in Buddhism and an important one in some other religions (including Hinduism), though is not typically considered a god or a divine being to be worshipped.
His teachings went on to develop into many different schools, with many followers concentrated largely in Asia, but still considered one of the main world religions.

The historical Buddha -- also known as Shakyamuni Buddha or Gautama Buddha -- was a man who is believed to have lived in ancient India between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and who is now considered to be the founder of Buddhism. Though details of his life-story may be apocryphal, it is generally rendered as follows:

The Buddha (then known as Prince Siddhartha) was born into a wealthy royal family. When he was just an infant, a wise man with psychic abilities predicted that the young boy would grow up to be either a great political ruler, or a great spiritual teacher. The Buddha's father -- who wished his son to become a political leader -- kept the boy within the luxurious confines of the palace. As a result, it wasn't until many years later -- when one day he snuck out of the palace -- that the young man came face to face with the realities of suffering, old age, illness and death.

Seeing these things sparked within his heart deep compassion, and a desire to discover a way out of suffering. He left the royal palace and engaged for many years in deep meditation, which culminated in his Enlightenment: the complete liberation from psychological suffering. The remainder of Buddha's life was spent teaching what today are known as the Four Noble Truths -- which describe suffering and the cause of suffering, and liberation from suffering and the path to this liberation. These Four Noble Truths became the foundation of the Buddhist religion.

Buddha, also known as Gautama Buddha or Siddhartha Gautama, was the founder of the Buddhist religion. It's generally accepted that he was born in what is now modern-day Nepal sometime around the 5th or 6th centuries CE. Born into a wealthy royal family, Buddha lived a life of luxury, insulated from the appalling poverty endured by most people in the kingdom.
When he first ventured out into the world beyond the opulent confines of the royal palace, Buddha was shocked by the hunger, disease, and suffering that he witnessed. It was then that he began to form the basis of the religion that would one day bear his name. The harsh realities of life led him to construct an ethical system that, through meditation and good conduct, would allow people to free themselves from attachment to the world, with the inevitable suffering it brings.
Buddha became a holy man and set out to pursue what he called The Middle Way, a lifestyle that was neither ascetic nor luxurious, neither rich nor poor. Growing up rich in a large palace hadn't brought Buddha any satisfaction—but neither had leading a grim life of ascetic self-denial. It was only one day, when Buddha sat meditating beneath the Bodhi tree—The Tree of Awakening—that he was finally able to achieve enlightenment, penetrating the inner truth of life. Having reached this state of wisdom, Buddha spent the remainder of his long life teaching others, bringing countless disciples to the same level of spiritual enlightenment as himself, and, in the process, establishing one of the world's great religions.