Buddha

The Buddha (Будда) is the founder of Buddhism. A Confession (Исповедь, 1879–82) also calls him Sakya Muni (Сакиа-Муни).

In A Confession

• Chapter VI. The Buddha is one of the four, with Socrates, Arthur Schopenhauer and Solomon, who give the same answer to the question of life (VI.10). His story is told as “what the Indian wisdom tells”: Sakya Muni, “a young, happy prince, from whom the existence of sickness, old age, and death had been hidden”, meets an old man, a sick man and a dead man (VI.18–19).¹ He “could find no consolation in life, and decided that life is the greatest of evils”, and gave all his strength to freeing himself and others from it, so that life “shall not be renewed any more” (VI.20).² VI.25 gives his answer in short: “To live in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible — we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life.”³
• Chapter VII. Those who live in ignorance “have not yet understood that question of life which presented itself to Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha” (VII.4). Those who take the way of epicureanism forget “the things that gave Buddha no peace — the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death” (VII.8).⁴ Tolstoy could not take that way himself: “I, like Sakya Muni, could not ride out hunting when I knew that old age, suffering, and death exist” (VII.11).⁵
• Chapter XIV. Among the saints’ lives he came to love was that of “Prince Joasaph (the story of Buddha)” (XIV.7).⁶ The PSS commentary identifies it as the life of Joasaph in the Prologue, under 18 November, “a Christian retelling of the legend of the Buddha”.⁷ Maude’s translation drops the name Joasaph and keeps only “the story of Buddha”.

Open questions

• Neither the PSS commentary nor the Tolstoy Digital person list gives the Buddha’s dates or names his source for the Sakya Muni story in chapter VI. The story of the three encounters is not traced to a source here.
• The identification in the first sentence is general knowledge, not from these sources.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — the text of A Confession (PSS 23:1–59) and its commentary (PSS 23:515–537); Johan’s reader notes of 10 October 2026 asked for this page.