sourced story
Proposed deaths range from 486 to 368 BCEReputable source · 2 sourcesDebated

The Buddha's Dates Remain a Scholarly Dispute

One miscalculated king pushes an entire chronology sixty years in the wrong direction

On the timeline · around Proposed deaths range from 486 to 368 BCE · Origins in IndiaOrigins in IndiaThe Buddha's Dates Remain a Scholarly Dispute550 BCE525 BCE500 BCE475 BCE450 BCE425 BCE400 BCE375 BCE350 BCE

Quick facts

Old consensus
Buddha's death within a few years of 480 BCE
Anchor point
Reign dates of Ashoka the Great
Range of scholarly proposals for his death
486 BCE to 261 BCE
Most-favored range today
Between 410 and 370 BCE

What happened

For most of the 20th century, scholars accepted that the Buddha died within a few years of 480 BCE. That consensus collapsed once historians realized the dates used for the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the long Sri Lankan chronology were miscalculated by roughly 60 to 70 years, since Ashoka's reign is one of the few fixed points in early Indian history, cross-checked against Greek sources naming his contemporaries. Recalculating from a corrected Ashoka pushed the Buddha's death to somewhere around 486 BCE by one method, while a separate Indian short chronology puts it as late as 368 BCE. A modern academic survey of experts found proposed dates for the Buddha's death ranging all the way from 486 to 261 BCE, with most historians now favoring a date somewhere in the 5th century BCE rather than the traditional 6th century.

Why it matters

The size of the disagreement, more than a century in some versions, shows how thin the chronological record for early India actually is: there is no contemporary inscription or document from the Buddha's own lifetime, and every date depends on later king-lists and sectarian chronicles that do not agree with each other.

How we know

The dating debate rests on cross-referencing the Sinhalese Buddhist chronicles (the long chronology) against Indian and Chinese/Tibetan textual traditions (the short chronology), anchored to the more securely dated reign of Ashoka, whose edicts name Hellenistic kings of known reign dates.

Sources

See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.

Part of a timelineHistory of Buddhism26 events · A prince who saw four sights and walked out of his palace, and a teaching that spread from one valley in northern India to become a global religionView all →