In Buddhism, the word "buddha" means "enlightened one." Then there's the Buddha, a man named Siddhartha Gautama who was the founder and sacred embodiment of the religion. We honestly don't know many facts about his life, because no written records existed until centuries after his lifetime. We don't even know when that lifetime was, although it was said to be somewhere around the sixth century BCE. But we do know that he was born in the village of Lumbini in Nepal, near the Indian border.
Lumbini with its many Buddhist temples and monasteries thrives economically because of tourism, but suffers from avid tourists taking anything that's not nailed down as a souvenir. At the same time, archaeologists are sifting through Lumbini's past to research the actual life of Siddhartha Gautama and separate the facts from the magical and sometimes contradictory legends that have grown around him. Read what has been discovered so far at Smithsonian magazine.