- Lived:
- three chronologies compete — c. 563–483 BCE (the "corrected long chronology" in most Indian textbooks), c. 480–400 BCE (the "short chronology" now favoured by much scholarship), 624–544 BCE (the Ceylonese reckoning) — born in the Lumbinī grove, in the Terai plains of today's Nepal just north of the Indian border; lived his teaching life on the roads of the Ganges plain between Śrāvastī and Rājagṛha; died at Kusinārā (Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh)
- Field:
- founder of Buddhism — teacher of a path out of suffering, and builder of the saṅgha, the monastic order that became one of the oldest continuously running institutions on earth
- The Big Idea:
- Suffering is not fate, punishment or illusion: it has a discoverable cause, the cause can be ended, and the ending can be taught — to anyone, of any caste, in their own language.
- In their words:
- "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (his last words, Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, in T. W. Rhys Davids' 1881 rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- India produced him, exported him to half of humanity, and then forgot him at home for some six hundred years — and when the new Republic needed an emblem in 1950 it reached past every god and every king to the lions Aśoka set up where the Buddha first taught, put his wheel at the centre of the flag, and six years later watched half a million people the old order had called untouchable follow Ambedkar home into his fold. No other Indian's absence, and return, says more about India.