So far in this podcast I have mostly focused on the events that shaped western history, but doing that admittedly leaves out a lot of other events that were happening in places like China, Japan, Africa, and India. We kind of drifted near India in the last episode, because Alexander went conquering over in that direction, but we haven’t really spent any time on Indian history. So now that we’re done with Alexander and all the Golden Age of Greece stuff, and before we get on to the Roman Republic, let’s go back to India for a while and talk about one of the biggest events there around this time period.
So just to clarify, as far as time period, we’re going a bit backwards in time, back to the mid-500’s BC. We got all the way up to 167 BC in the last episode, because it made sense to talk about the the kingdoms that came about as a result of Alexander the Great’s mad spree of conquering, but now we need to go back 400 years in time to talk about the Buddha.
Buddha was probably born around 563 BC, although there is some scholarly debate about that date. Some scholars think he was born a good bit later than that. But the oldest tradition states that he was born around 563, so we’ll go with that.