We do not know for sure. But many modern scholars think the Buddha’s real focus was not on defending a literal cosmic map, but on using the ideas of his time as teaching tools for suffering, attachment, conduct, and liberation.
First, the history. In ancient India, Mount Meru was widely understood as the cosmic mountain at the center of the universe, with heavens above and lower realms below. Around this worldview were the six realms of existence: gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, hell beings, and other states of rebirth. These ideas shaped much of ancient Indian thought and influenced traditions such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and later Sikhism. Even today, some believers take these realms literally, while others treat them more symbolically, as moral and psychological maps of human experience.
That distinction matters. A tradition can preserve a story without requiring every later follower to treat it as a literal truth claim about the material world. In TST terms, this is the difference between belief and truth. A cosmological story may carry moral meaning, cultural power, and personal guidance without becoming an empirically established description of reality.
The Buddha appears to have worked within the symbolic and religious language available to him, but his deepest emphasis was on suffering, attachment, impermanence, and liberation. He seems to have incorporated local cosmology as teaching tools, not as the center of his message. In my reading, this fits well with the broader Buddhist shift away from a permanent self. What continues is not the self, but essence. Not a soul in the self-identity sense, but a continuity of non-self shaped by karma and craving. The idea of non-self is key to overcoming suffering in this life. In that framework, belief in Mount Meru and the six realms is not the focus. The more enduring insight is that part of human flourishing involves spiritual language that points beyond the self without requiring those stories to function as literal truths.
So the cautious answer is this: the Buddha likely taught within a worldview that included Mount Meru and the six realms, but his enduring message does not depend on those ideas being literally true. For many modern readers, that is part of what makes Buddhism so compelling. It allows a person to honor the story, learn from it, and still ask hard questions about what should be treated as belief, symbolism, and truth. It also helps explain the difference between early teachings that used stories as teaching tools and later traditions that sometimes treated surrounding imagery, ritual objects, or cosmological details more literally or devotionally than the original philosophical core may have required.