The book includes biographies of the Chinese thinker Confucius and the founder of Buddhism, Buddha Shakyamuni, written by the outstanding orientalist, one of the founders of the Russian Indological school, the author of numerous works on history, religions, and the art of the East, academician Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg (1863–1934). They were first published in separate editions in 1891 in the Biographical Library, founded by the educator Florenty Pavlenkov and later becoming the prototype of the famous series “The Lives of Remarkable People.” These biographies, written with a wide readership in mind, collect all the reliable information about Confucius and Buddha Shakyamuni and at the same time tell a lot of interesting things about the life of China and India in ancient times.