Buddha, having continued his ministry for forty-five years, dies around 480 at the age of eighty, after which he is supposed to have entered final nirvana.

His body is cremated.

Buddha’s community of followers, the sangha, immediately faces the critical question of what it is to do in the absence of the master.

Those followers who have remained householders enshrine his bodily relics in monuments called stupas, inaugurating a cult of devotion to the person of the Buddha.

(The practice, bhakti, will focus not only on stupas but on many holy sites, such as the bodhi tree, which become centers of pilgrimage, and eventually on Buddha images as well).

Those Buddhists who had become monks and nuns undertake the gathering and preservation of the dharma, their master's teachings.

According to tradition (the historicity of which many scholars contest), five hundred enlightened monks meet immediately after the Buddha's death in a great council at Rajagriha, where all the sutras (the Buddha's sermons) and the vinaya (the rules of the discipline) are remembered and recited.