The Age of the Buddha

Along the Ganges plain, a generation of wandering teachers broke from Vedic orthodoxy to ask what caused suffering and how to end it. Siddhartha Gautama, a prince who left his wife Yasodhara and infant son to seek an answer, found it under a tree and spent the rest of his life teaching it — attended for decades by his cousin and closest disciple Ananda, and challenged from within his own order by his rival cousin Devadatta. A contemporary, Mahavira, arrived at a rival path of radical non-violence that became Jainism.

Both movements needed patrons to survive, and found them in the kings of Magadha: Bimbisara, an early supporter of the Buddha, and his son Ajatashatru, who seized the throne by force and only later turned to the faith his father had sheltered.