After years of being sheltered from the vicissitudes of life in his palace, left his family and life of luxury in search of deeper truths about the nature of reality, suffering, and the human mind. After years of wandering, fasting, and meditating, and engaging in all sorts of spiritual practices and finally fed up with all of them, the story goes that he sat underneath a bodhi tree and refused to get up until he finally knew the mind's true nature. Day in and day out he sat under the tree and went to war with his own mind, overcoming all forms of struggle, of suffering, of temptation one by one, until finally he reached what we now call enlightenment and became the awakened one, or the Buddha. After his awakening, he spent the next 40 years before his death, walking around the Indian subcontinent, offering his teachings to anyone who was interested. He built a huge following and upon his death generated a new world religion, spiritual path, and philosophy. This religion philosophy, known as Buddhism, would migrate out of India and throughout the rest of Asia, morphing and evolving and mixing with the cultures of different societies, eventually producing the beautiful traditions and various schools of Buddhism. The core of Buddhism, however, revolves around the four noble truths. Life is suffering, we suffer because we crave or desire, there is a way out of suffering, and the eightfold path is the way out. The eightfold path is a set of eight practices, both ethical and meditative, that when done correctly and consistently lead one to enlightenment. In addition to this, Buddhism highlights the three marks of existence, impermanence in Pali pronounced Anika, suffering or unsatisfactoriness in Pali known as Dukkha, and no-self or Anatta. And argues that we humans are subject to delusion regarding these three intrinsic qualities of our existence, that we try to protect ourselves from them in a myriad of ways and thus escape them, but these attempts just create more suffering. Through meditation practice specifically and following the eightfold path generally, we can come to see the ubiquitous presence of these three marks of existence with increasing clarity and liberate ourselves from the immense suffering we create for ourselves by denying or running away from them. In short, Buddhism seeks to liberate human beings from the unnecessary suffering that stems inevitably and inexorably from our constant desiring, our ego delusions, and our desperate clinging and attachment to things that, by their very nature, change and dissolve away.