“Neither a god, nor a guru, nor a savior”, who is Buddha? This essay bets on understanding this unclassifiable figure through an inventory of the fundamental principles of Buddhist doctrine and the unraveling of its most famous shortcuts. By following Gotama's “Spiritual Awakening” step by step, a stimulating look is offered, far from any reductive pessimistic asceticism, on the one who through his emancipatory quest “heals the whole world”. From contemporary Greeks of the Awakened to current scientific research, from Schopenhauer to Einstein, from Nietzsche to Lévi-Strauss, this portrait of Buddha is also an illuminating account of the "chosen affinities of Buddhism and the West" and of the influence constant exercised by the sage on our thought.