Siddhartha Gautama was born into the noble Shakya clan in Kapilavastu, northern India. The world at that time was abuzz with philosophy and metaphysical speculation and nowhere more so than India. Gautama, growing weary of his princely existence and realizing the central problem of suffering in life, set out to see if he could find Truth. He studied with some of the eminent sages of his day, practiced severe austerities but still did not feel that he had found any satisfying truth. Finally Gautama, as legend goes, sat under the bodhi tree in meditation, resolving to stay where he was until reaching enlightenment. After passing through many trials and temptations cast upon him by demons, Gautama emerged as the Buddha, Shakyamuni (sage of the Shakyas). The Buddha reached to the core of Vedic thought and rescued its hidden gem stripping it of superfluous theistic trappings. Here is the only major world religion that had its beginnings in a teaching in which concepts like God and the soul were not matters of primary concern. The Buddha was concerned with how to live in this world and he rightly saw that ignorance led to want which led to attachment which led to suffering and suffering is the thing that we all wish to avoid. This insight fed back into Vedic thought and remains the primary concern of Vedanta, the dominant philosophy of Hinduism. The Buddha's teachings have themselves emerged as one of the largest group of religious traditions in Asia and in recent times Buddhism has made significant progress in the rest of the world. By remaining an inclusive, tolerant and open-minded school of spiritual development, it has proved itself an attractive religious option in this day of increasing materialism, while many of its fellow religions remain stunted in obselete medieval dogmatism.