‘Buddhi’ means the intellect and ‘Dha’ means mastery. So, anyone who has attained complete mastery over his/her intellect is referred to as a Buddha. This term is generally used to recognize the sage Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.
Siddhartha Gautama was born between the 5th – 4th century BCE in an aristocratic family in the Lumbini region of modern-day Nepal. At the time of his birth, a yogi predicted that either he’ll become a powerful emperor or a great sage. To ensure that the latter doesn’t happen, Siddhartha’s father decided to keep him in the palace, away from the rest of the society, surrounded by all kinds of comforts and pleasures of life. He even married a princess at the age of 19 and was leading a very comfortable life.
But one day Siddhartha decided to explore the town. For the first time in his life, he saw an old man, a sick man, and then a funeral procession. Seeing all this he had a deep sense of longing to seek the meaning of life, which made him renounce all the pleasures he was surrounded with. He left everything behind and started exploring different schools of spirituality, prevalent at that time by traveling to various parts of India. After practicing mendicancy, meditation practices, and asceticism for several years, Buddha understood the mechanism that keeps humans trapped in the cycle of birth and death.
For the next 45 years of his life, he taught what he has realized by finding a middle path between severe asceticism and ‘Dhyana’ meditation practices. He traveled extensively in the Gangetic Plain (current day Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Southern Nepal), building a considerably large religious community. A couple of centuries after his death, Buddha’s teachings were compiled by his followers in the form of Suttas (discourses) and the Vinaya (rules and procedures to be followed by the Buddhists).
The core of Buddha’s teachings can be summarised as – the universe is governed by the laws of karma and in order to rise above these laws to attain the ultimate liberation (Nirvana) from suffering, one needs to walk the path of self-realization. Depending on different schools of Buddhism, Buddhist spiritualism includes a number of meditations like Shamatha, Vipassana, Metta, Dhyana, Anussati, etc.