Two and a half thousand years after his death, the man known as the Buddha remains one of history's most influential teachers, yet almost nothing about his life was written down until centuries after he lived. This film traces the story handed down through generations: a sheltered prince named Siddhartha Gautama who leaves his palace, encounters old age, sickness, and death for the first time, and abandons his family to search for a way beyond suffering. Animated sequences and location footage from India recreate his years of extreme asceticism, his meditation under the Bodhi tree, and the sermon at Deer Park where he first taught what became the Four Noble Truths. Buddhist scholars and monks appear throughout to explain how a single man's search for enlightenment grew into a religion practiced by hundreds of millions of people. The film treats the biography as inseparable from the teaching, following both the historical figure and the ideas about desire, impermanence, and the end of suffering that his life is said to demonstrate.