“The story of his death is told with great pathos and simplicity in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta. The Buddha was now eighty years old, worn out with toil and travel. At a village near the little town of Kusinagara, about 120 miles northeast of Benares, in 483 BCE, he passed away. The quiet end of the Buddha contrasts vividly with the martyr’s deaths of Socrates and Jesus. However, all three undermined, to different degrees, the orthodoxies of their time. As a matter of fact, the Buddha was more definitely opposed to earlier Vedic orthodoxy and ceremonialism than was Socrates to the state religion of Athens, or Jesus to Judaism, and yet he lived until the age of eighty, gathered a large number of disciples, and founded a religious order in his own lifetime. Perhaps the Indian temper of religion is responsible for the difference in the treatment of unorthodoxies.”
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