The serene Buddha statue in every yoga studio hides a startling historical fact: there are zero written records from his lifetime, and the earliest physical evidence is a pillar erected by Emperor Ashoka more than two centuries after he died. This episode sets aside the golden statues to reconstruct the narrative biography of Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Shakya clan on the Himalayan periphery, looked down on by mainstream Brahmin culture, who had wealth, status, a wife named Yasodhara, and a son named Rahula before an encounter with old age, sickness, and death sent him out of the palace in the middle of the night.

The conversation explores the Sramana counterculture that viewed domestic life as a burning building, the brutal asceticism that left him able to feel his spine through his stomach, the bowl of rice pudding from Sujata tha ...