'Very little is known about the life of Buddha, except through textual sources and oral tradition,' said archaeologist Professor Robin Coningham, of Durham University, U.K., who co-led the investigation, in a statement. Even more vexingly, it has also been unclear just when any of those few plot points happened. Then, he sat, under a Bodhi tree, and in mediation reached enlightenment.īesides those plot points, scholars know little else about Buddha’s life. For years, he wandered the Earth with almost nothing at all. But, at 29-years-old, the young prince spurned that wealth for a life less insulated from pain, more real. In Buddhist tradition, Buddha was born as Siddhārtha Gautama, an heir to all the mansions, glittering baubles, and regal status of a dynastic Hindu lineage. The tale is recorded in a 249 BC pillar that the Mauryan Emperor Asoka put at the spot, commemorating the sacred birth that happened there and establishing the region as a point of pilgrimage for centuries to come. The Maya Devi Temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has long been venerated as the location of the garden where Maya Devi, wife of King Suddhodana, gave birth to the future Buddha. The timber shrine was found under newer, but also hidden, brick temples near the Maya Devi Temple in Lumbini, Nepal, at the toes of the Himalayas. The report will be published in the December issue of the journal Antiquity and broadcast as a National Geographic documentary this winter. The find, sure to be controversial, is the first material archeological evidence to support assigning Buddha’s life to a particular century. Archeologists have unearthed a Buddhist shrine in Nepal that puts Buddha’s birth in the sixth-century BC, at least a hundred years earlier than most scholars have in recent years plotted the date.

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