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Enlightenment Under the Bodhi Tree

After abandoning both indulgence and starvation, an ascetic finds a middle way and becomes the Buddha

On the timeline · around Traditional biography · Origins in IndiaOrigins in IndiaEnlightenment Under the Bodhi Tree550 BCE525 BCE500 BCE475 BCE450 BCE425 BCE400 BCE375 BCE350 BCE

Quick facts

Location of awakening
Bodh Gaya, under the Bodhi tree
Figure who revived him beforehand
Sujata, a milkmaid (traditional account)
Core teaching established
The middle way
Years spent teaching afterward
45 (traditional)

What happened

After leaving home, Siddhartha studied under established meditation teachers and then practiced extreme physical austerity, near-starvation among them, for years without reaching the answer he sought. Tradition holds that a milkmaid named Sujata found him in the woods, mistook him for a tree spirit because he had become so emaciated, and offered him rice milk that revived him and ended his asceticism. He then went to Bodh Gaya, seated himself beneath a Bodhi tree, and vowed to remain there until he understood how to live without suffering. Buddhist tradition calls the balance he found between indulgence and self-mortification the middle way, and this is where he reached the awakening that made him the Buddha, going on, by tradition, to teach for 45 years before his death at 80.

Why it matters

The middle way, rejecting both indulgence and extreme self-denial, became one of Buddhism's foundational principles and shaped the moderate, structured monastic discipline that later Buddhist communities across Asia would adopt rather than the harsher asceticism practiced by some other Indian religious movements of the period.

How we know

The account of the Buddha's austerities and awakening is preserved in his own first-person narration in Pali canon texts, part of an oral tradition later committed to writing; there is no independent contemporary record outside the Buddhist textual tradition.

Sources

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