Buddha was born about 25 hundred years ago in Kapilbastu, Lumbini to King Sudhodhan and queen Mayadevi. Seven days after giving birth to Gautama Queen Mahadevi and thereafter Siddhartha was brought up by his stepmother, his mother’s younger sister, Gautami. He was provided all sorts of education which were given to every prince of those days. He astonished all his masters by reciting to them everything they desire to teach him and he also proved himself pre-eminent at sports.
Nevertheless, melancholy pervaded his being and he surrendered himself more and more to medication. To dispel his sadness his parents conceived the idea of giving him a wife and he was married to Yaasodhara, a prince of the Koliya clan. Yasodhara gave Siddhartha a son. This did not make him happy either. At the age of twenty-nine, having failed to obtain from his father to leave to adopt the ascetic , Siddhartha secretly left the palace, and abandoned wife, child, kinsfolk, and all his possessions. He went forward to seek salvation. He followed the monk Alara-kalama and later Udraka Ramaputra and learnt very well whatever was taught to him and these masters gave him the status equal to that of their own. Though he was much benefited from the teaching of these masters, sought the solution of the problems which vex him in the mortifications; he attained to the consumption of a single grain of rice in the day, and ended by reducing himself almost to the condition of a skeleton. However, finding in asceticism no help toward s the solution of the problems of metaphysics, he changed his system and returned to ordinary life.
Sakyamuni went to forth to the town to-day called Bodh-Gaya. There he seated at the foot of a tree and declared that his body may wither away in this position of meditation, he would not leave it until he had attained the ‘Bodhi” or perfect knowledge.
One night the miracle happened; he attained the “Bodhi”-Enlightenment (Nirvana) an inward illumination laid all things open to his understanding.