Two and a half thousand years ago, a prince named Siddhartha Gautama left his palace in northern India and set out to answer a single question: why do we suffer? David Grubin's film traces that search through the life story that became Buddhism's founding narrative, from the sheltered youth and the four sights that shattered it to the years of ascetic starvation and the night of enlightenment under a fig tree in Bodh Gaya. Richard Gere narrates, and the story is carried by animated Indian paintings, location footage from the sites where Buddha taught, and interviews with scholars including Robert Thurman alongside poets, historians, and practicing Buddhists who connect the teachings to modern life. The film treats the Buddha's biography and the core ideas, the nature of desire, impermanence, the path out of suffering, as inseparable, laying out doctrine through the events that produced it rather than as abstract philosophy. It closes with meditation practice as it's taught today, linking a twenty-five-century-old story to a living tradition.