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Previous: Buddha-incarnation of Krsna, the founder of Buddhism who lived during the 5th century B.C., and appeared to bewilder atheists and dissuade them from performing unnecessary animal sacrifices; Two thousand five hundred years ago, Lord Visnu sent forth an empowered jiva known as the Buddha (the Enlightened One). Assuming the guise of Siddhartha Gautama, he took birth in Kapilavastu (present-day Nepal) as the son of King Suddhodana. At age twenty-nine he renounced the world and embarked upon a mission to preach ahimsa (nonviolence) and sūnyata (extinction of the self). He especially opposed the prevailing Karma-mimamsa philosophy of his time, which distorted Vedic knowledge and promoted unnecessary animal sacrifice. The Buddha's teaching rests on four principles: 1) material existence is duḥkha, miserable. 2) There is samudaya, a cause of material existence. 3) Because there is a cause, there is also nirodha, a way to remove material existence. 4) That way is marga, the path of righteousness that the Buddha himself exemplified. But as he circumvented the distortion of Vedic sacrifice in leading people away from the sin of animal slaughter, he denied the Vedas, the soul, and God. After the Buddha's disappearance, many schools of Buddhism came into being. See Avatara (Saktyavesa), Buddhism. Next: Buddhism-Vaisnava Vedantist acaryas such as Ramanuja, Madhva and Baladeva have analyzed four types of Buddhist doctrine. These four are held, respectively, by schools known as the Sautrantikas, Vaibhasikas, Yogacaras and Madhyamikas. The first doctrine views mind and matter as having real but momentary existencei.e. with each moment, the reality of mind and matter changes. The second views matter as being knowable only through the mind; mind and the matter known through it are momentarily real. The third views matter as unreal, mind as absolute, and the perception of matter as momentary imagination. The fourth, known as Sūnyavada, views the previous three doctrines as useless attempts at explaining what cannot be put into words. See Buddha, Mayavada philosophy, Nirvana, Scepticism, Six systems, Voidism.