The book includes biographies of the Chinese thinker Confucius and the founder of Buddhism, Buddha Shakyamuni, written by an outstanding orientalist, one of the founders of the Russian Indological school, the author of numerous works on the history, religions, art of the East, academician Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg. They were first published in separate editions in 1891 in the Biographical Library, founded by the enlightener Florenty Pavlenkov and later became the prototype of the famous series "The Life of Wonderful People." These biographies, written for a wide readership, contain all the reliable information about Confucius and Buddha Shakyamuni and along the way tell a lot of interesting things about the life of China and India in antiquity.