Thinkers Timeline

The Buddha was a teacher who lived in northern India around 2,500 years ago. His personal name was Siddhartha Gautama. 'Buddha' is a title. It means 'the awakened one' or 'the one who is awake'. Most scholars now think he lived from about 480 to 400 BCE, though older tradition gives earlier dates. He was born a prince of the Shakya clan, in what is now southern Nepal. The traditional story says his father tried to keep him from seeing suffering. The young prince lived in palaces full of beauty and pleasure. He married and had a son. Then, around the age of 29, he saw four things outside the palace: an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a wandering holy man. These sights changed him. He left his family and his comfortable life. He spent six years living as a wanderer. He tried very strict self-denial, eating almost nothing. This nearly killed him. He gave up extreme practices. He sat under a tree at a place now called Bodh Gaya and meditated. He said he reached awakening, a deep understanding of how suffering works and how to end it. He spent the next 45 years teaching across northern India. He gathered followers and built a community of monks and nuns. He died around the age of 80. His teachings became one of the world's major religions and philosophies.

Nagarjuna (approximately 150-250 CE) was an Indian Buddhist philosopher, widely considered one of the most important and influential thinkers in the entire history of Asian philosophy. He was born in South India, probably in what is now Andhra Pradesh, and became a Buddhist monk and teacher. He is the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, which became one of the dominant schools of Buddhist thought across India, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Very little is known about his life as a historical person: later tradition attributed extraordinary feats and a legendary biography to him, making it difficult to separate fact from story. What we do have are his philosophical texts, above all the Mulamadhyamakakarika, the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, a short but extraordinarily dense philosophical work in verse form that argues for one of the most radical positions in the history of philosophy: that nothing whatsoever has fixed, independent existence. He died sometime in the second or third century CE, but his ideas have continued to shape Buddhist philosophy and practice across Asia for nearly two thousand years.

Pāṇini was an ancient Indian grammarian whose work on the Sanskrit language is often described as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the ancient world. Almost nothing is known about him as a person. Scholars usually place him in the fifth or fourth century BCE, though some argue for earlier dates. He is said to have come from Shalatula, a town in the region of Gandhara, which is now in north-west Pakistan near the Afghan border. This area was on the north-western edge of the Indian cultural world and close to routes that connected India with Persia, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean. A few traditional stories about his life exist, but they are legends rather than reliable history. What survives and matters is his book. It is called the Ashtadhyayi, which means the Eight Chapters, because it is divided into eight books. The book contains around four thousand short rules called sutras. These rules together describe the grammar of the Sanskrit language of his time with extraordinary completeness and precision. The sutras are not written for beginners. They are compressed to the point of being almost impossible to understand without training. Each sutra uses only the smallest number of syllables needed to state a rule. The rules also refer to each other in complex ways — later rules assume earlier rules, some rules override others in specific conditions, abbreviations are used to save space. Reading the Ashtadhyayi properly requires first learning Pāṇini's own system of notation. Later Indian grammarians spent the next two thousand years writing commentaries that explained his work. The most important of these was by Patanjali in the second century BCE. Modern scholars have continued to study the Ashtadhyayi and have discovered that it anticipates many features of modern linguistic and computer science theory. Pāṇini's grammar is one of the oldest works in any field that still rewards close study today.