About five hundred years before Jesus, in the plains below the Himalaya mountains, in what is now Nepal and northern India, a young prince named Siddhartha Gautama left his palace. He had grown up with everything a person could want, and then he saw an old man, a sick man and a dead body, and he could not stop thinking about them. If everyone gets old, gets sick and dies, what is the point of the palace?
He spent six years looking for an answer. He went hungry until he was almost dead, and it did not help. Then he sat down under a fig tree and stayed there, and when he got up he said he had woken up. From then on, people called him the Buddha, which means the one who woke up.
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