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Favorite thing: The historical Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, was the son of Suddhodana, ruler of Kapilavastu, and of Maya Devi, a princess from the neighbouring kingdom of Devdaha (on the outskirts of present-day Butwal). According to legend, the pregnant Maya Devi was travelling between the two states when she came upon a pound of extraordinary beauty, surrounded by flowering sal trees. After bathing in the cool water, she suddenly went into labour, and just had time to walk 25 steps out of the water and grab the branch of a tree for support before the baby was born.

After the birth, a sheer predicted that the boy would become a great teacher or a great king. Eager to ensure the latter, his father shielded Siddhartha from all the knowledge of the world outside his palace. At the age of 29, Siddhartha left the palace for the first time and came face to face with an old man, a sick man, a hermit and a corpse. Shocked by this sudden exposure to human suffering, the prince abandoned his luxurious life to become a mendicant holy man, fasting and meditating on the nature of existence. After some severe austerities, the former prince realised that life as a starving pauper was no more conducive to wisdom than life as a pampered prince (”the middle way”).

Finally, after 49 days of meditation under a Bodhi tree, on the site of modern-day Bodhgaya in India, Siddhartha attained “enlightenment” and renamed Buddha (“the enlightened one”), and for the next 46 years he teached the middle way, a path of moderation and self knowledge though which the human beings could escape the cycle of 1000 births and achieve Nirvana.