The religious and philosophical tradition founded on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama — the Buddha — in northeastern India around the fifth century BCE, whose analysis of suffering and the path to its cessation became one of the most consequential intellectual traditions in world history, spreading across Asia and now globally.
Buddhism begins with a simple observation: life involves suffering, and most of what humans do to escape suffering makes it worse. From this observation, a prince became a wandering monk, and a wandering monk's insight became a tradition that reshaped Asia. The Buddha did not claim to be a god. He claimed to have found a way out.