Siddhartha Gautama, who later become known as Shakyamuni Buddha,
was born about 2,500 years ago to King Shuddhodana and Queen Maya, rulers of
the Shakya people, a small tribe located at the foot of the Himalaya mountains. His family’s kingdom was small, but as a
prince, he wanted for nothing and lived a life of luxury.
Within
Buddhist tradition the story goes that Gautama’s journey of enlightenment began
with four meetings outside the Eastern, Southern, Western and Northern palace
gates with an old man, a sick person, a dead body and an ascetic (someone who
has renounced material comfort and leads a life of austere self-discipline
often as an act of religious devotion).
Whether this story is true or not, or whether he was just aware of the
suffering of people in general, Gautama decided to embark on a search to
understand how to overcome the sufferings of life and death. His father was against this, but Siddhartha
managed to sneak out of the house and embarked on his quest.
Indian
society was generally following the Brahmanic traditions, based on the Hindu
texts, the Vedas, but new religions were also gaining in popularity which
rejected these traditions. Some were
based on lives of hedonism and complete materialism and others on lives of
extreme self-denial and fatalism. None
of these seemed to provide answers to the questions he had about the reality of
life and even after studying with a couple of masters of yogic meditation and
achieving the same level as them, he felt that meditation had become the
purpose of their life, rather than a method to discern the answers he was looking
for. He also joined a community of
ascetics and endured several years of some of the severest austerities
including long periods of fasting, sleep
deprivation, and other endurances. But, even after pushing himself to the very
limits of human endurance, his tortured body was no closer to a solution.
Turning his back on this community of ascetics he
went to a river to bathe and a young girl from a nearby village offered him a
bowl of rice and milk. Feeling refreshed
he sat beneath a pipal tree with his legs crossed in the lotus position. Gautama then made a determination. Combining the two practices of self-denial
and meditation, he vowed to remain in this position, even if he were to die,
until he attained enlightenment. Gautama
started to meditate, reflecting on his life, and his journey to this point. And, as a result of this single-minded
reflection and his battered body’s renewed energy and focus from being cleansed
and nourished, his meditation took him deeper than he had ever gone before... (to be continued ...)
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