I, Buddha

The life of an exceptional man, famous but unknown, who revolutionized his times and still continues to win vast numbers of followers.

Siddartha was born six centuries before Christ, into an illustrious line of warriors, the Gautama.

But one day he decided to change his life: to take to the road and meet some of those who were suffering, « to seek a Truth I can feel, a Truth which, when the time comes, I will announce to men. And life will become easier for all of us, for at last it will have meaning. »

At first alone, then in the company of various unlikely disciples picked up along the way, he seeks out the poor, meets sages and ascetics, and gradually progresses, through rejections and adventures, on his path to the knowledge of man. He was the first to say that all men are equal.

With these imaginary Memoirs, José Frèches brings us closer to an extraordinary man, a man we have all heard of but whom we do not know.
A man whose immense charisma and message of tolerance and peace shocked his contemporaries and won many hearts throughout later centuries.
A man who became the object of a cult in the golden temples of Thailand, Vietnam, China and Japan, but who always insisted that he was not a god.

Surely no other man has ever been appropriated in so many different ways by civilisations so far apart from one another. For his message, beyond space and time, very soon acquired universal renown.