There is a legend about that , Buddha was from a rich family that teach him that the world was all good and the bad do not exist. He lived 29 years of his live thinking that life was only good until he found the truth , he found that people die and have diseases ,in other words , he found that people suffer.
He was having so much information to process, so that is why he left his aristocratic and materialistic home and think about the suffer and how the world really is. He runs away from his house in the search of ilumination.
s The buddhism is similar, in a nutshell, a Buddhist want to defeat the suffer with the ilumination ( that is like a total spiritual awake) or by nirvana (reincarnation). Also in buddhism is taught that virtues and moral help in the search of a non-suffering existence.
The buddhist don´t believe in any god , they just follow lessons that buddha taught after years of searching the spiritual illumination.But there are people that they admire named bodhisattva , that are people that go significantly inside the path of Buddha.