Buddha

The figure quoted more than almost anyone else on the subject of the inner life left almost nothing in writing and held no position of authority. He was a wandering teacher in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains, somewhere in the 6th or 5th century BCE, and the tradition that grew out of his teaching became Buddhism.

Buddhist legend places his birth at Lumbini, in present-day Nepal, to royal parents of the Shakya clan. He did not stay. He gave up that household life and took up the life of a wandering ascetic — begging for food, practising austerity, meditating. The turning point, as tradition records it, came at Bodh Gaya in what is now Bihar, India, where he attained nirvana.

What followed was decades of movement rather than retirement. He travelled the lower Indo-Gangetic Plain teaching, and around that teaching assembled a monastic order, the sangha, which outlived him and carried the material forward. Tradition holds that he died at Kushinagar and reached parinirvana.

The reason his words still circulate is partly structural: they were preserved and transmitted by a community he set up himself, and they came from someone who had tested both extremes — a royal household and years of severe asceticism — before settling on what he went on to teach.