The Sources
Part of the difficulty in recovering the historical Buddha resides in the nature of our sources. The earliest Buddhist scriptures first existed in oral form and were not written down until three to four hundred years after the Buddha’s death. Furthermore, as the Buddhist tradition continued to develop and spread to different regions of Asia, new scriptures were added to reflect the philosophical emphases of emerging new sects. As Buddhism evolved, followers’ views of the Buddha’s life and its significance also changed.
The Pali Canon, the Buddhist texts closest in time to the life of the Buddha, are the most reliable sources for constructing the life of the historical Buddha. There are also collections of scriptures in Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese, which were written later and are less historically dependable than the Pali Canon.[1] The Pali collection comprises a large number of volumes, enough to occupy a couple of feet on a library shelf. The most important part of the canon for our purposes is the set of writings called the Suttas, or discourses, which the Buddhist tradition considers the direct words of the Buddha himself.
Historical Facts of Gotama’s Life
Interestingly, the Pali Suttas tell us very little about the Buddha’s life prior to his awakening experience. The focus of these writings is his teachings. If we adhere to the standards of modern historical scholarship, we can construct only a bare-bones outline of his life using these scriptures.
Based on those standards, we can say with fairly high confidence that there was in fact an individual named Gotama who was born into privileged circumstances in the area near the current border between India and Nepal. At the time, this region was occupied by Aryans known as the Sakyas. According to traditions based on the Pali texts, Gotama was born in the year 563 bce. As with Zoroaster, however, scholars are not in complete agreement about when Gotama actually lived, but the range of dates is not nearly as broad as Zoroaster’s. The majority of scholars today would place Gotama’s date of birth near 490 bce. In any event, the Indian sage lived well within the Axial Age.
Historical scholarship also tells us that Gotama underwent a profound life-changing experience near the age of thirty that eventually led him to new insights into the human condition and to a new spiritual movement based on his discoveries. He taught his ideas to a growing body of followers throughout northeastern India during a period of great social change and religious ferment. There is good reason to believe that the Suttas of the Pali Canon accurately reflect the essential core of his teachings, though almost certainly some ideas of later interpreters have been included. Following the Buddha’s awakening, his teaching ministry lasted for several decades until he died. Tradition says he lived until the age of eighty.
Embellishments to the Story
Beyond these sparse statements, little else can be said about the historical Buddha with much certainty. This meager outline, however, leaves out much of the Buddha’s life story that has provided inspiration and meaning to Buddhists for over two millennia. For this reason, we must risk leaving the historically verifiable facts and venture into the realm of myth and legend. It is precisely in this realm, however, that we ascertain so much of what made the Buddha such a compelling figure for millions. The life of the Buddha as told in these traditions—whether historically true or not—is the very embodiment of Buddhist teachings, so we dare not neglect the legendary literature.
There are several versions of the early life of Gotama and how he came to claim the title the Buddha, but most of them are variations on a basic story line that begins with Siddhattha Gotama being born to the king and queen of the realm of the Sakyan peoples. Modern historiography places doubt on this royal lineage. While it is probably true that Gotama’s family was privileged and members of the warrior caste, it is unlikely that his parents were monarchs, since the small states of this area were tribal republics ruled by councils of elders. But again, to remain strictly on the side of history eliminates the deeper significance of the story.
One late addition to the narrative suggests that Siddhattha was conceived by his mother, Queen Maya, during a dream in which she was impregnated by a white godlike King Elephant, implying that the conception was divinely ordained and supernaturally accomplished. This variation goes on to say that ten lunar months later, the child Siddhattha was born while his mother was on a journey to the home of her parents. Along the way, she gave birth in a grove of trees near the town of Lumbini. The child came forth from his mother’s side while she stood upright, holding the branch of a tree. Immediately, the newborn took seven steps and confidently declared that he was born for the good of the world and this would be his last birth in the samsaric realm. Clearly, this tale is mythic, but it serves to foreground the universal significance of Siddhattha’s life.
Not all versions include this miraculous birth story, but most of them contain the account of how King Suddhodana—Prince Siddhattha’s father—consulted with court astrologers after his son’s birth. The soothsayers all agreed: the king’s firstborn would become a cakravartin, a “wheel turner,” one whose existence would decisively change the lives of others. The court sages, however, were not clear about the specific domain of Siddhattha’s accomplishments. He might pursue the way of the world and become a great monarch, or he might forsake the world and follow the path of the spiritual pioneer. Determined to see his son follow in his own footsteps, King Suddhodana asked how he might ensure that his son would take the road to kingship. Again, the court sages were unanimous: At all costs, the boy must be shielded from any unpleasantness and raised in a wholly delightful environment. He must enjoy only the best food, wear the best clothes, and engage in constant diversions and entertainments. He must never be exposed to the brutal realities of existence until he firmly committed himself to being king.
Suddhodana followed the sages’ recommendations zealously and to the letter. The accounts offer various and differing details. Some say Siddhattha was never permitted to leave the palace; others suggest he made occasional excursions beyond the palace confines, but only after his father had arranged to have the young man’s route carefully planned and purged of potentially upsetting sights. Thus, beggars, old men and women, and the sick and disabled were rounded up and kept out of view until the prince’s entourage had passed. By all accounts, Siddhattha lived only the most pleasant sort of life, unaware that there was any other way to live. In a rare self-revelation in the Pali Canon, the Buddha describes his early years in a way that confirms the essence of the legend, although it does not verify all the details. Many years after his awakening, the Buddha tells his followers,
I was delicately brought up, O monks, highly delicate, exceedingly delicate was my upbringing. At my father’s house, lotus ponds were made: in one of them blue lotuses bloomed, in another white lotuses, and in a third red lotuses, just for my enjoyment. I used only sandal unguent from [the city of] Benares and my head dress, my jacket, my undergarment and my tunic were made of Benares muslin. By day and by night a white canopy was held over me, lest cold and heat, dust, chaff or dew should trouble me.[2]
At age sixteen, Siddhattha married his beautiful cousin, Yashodhara, who eventually gave birth to his son. Everything seemed right with the world. And so it was, for Siddhattha’s first twenty-nine years.
Again, whether historical or not, the story of his father’s royal status, wealth, power, and overprotectiveness is rich with meaning. It suggests that, without even lifting a finger, the individual who would become the Buddha had already received everything other people spend their lives trying to acquire. Simply by virtue of birth, he had riches, power, celebrity, and every imaginable creature comfort. Even according to the Pali accounts, Siddhattha was uncommonly handsome, athletically endowed, and blessed with deep blue eyes, robust health, the love of family, and a deeply compassionate nature. It is hard even to imagine what more could be added to such a life. This young Gotama epitomized the fulfillment of humanity’s greatest dreams, the embodiment of what almost all of us think we
want. Who could possibly desire more? But this is the very point of the legend of Siddhattha’s extravagant early life: having it all is still not enough.
In a crucial moment, at the age of twenty-nine, the young prince arrived at this insight. Whether by accident or design (various texts say different things), the shell of his sheltered existence was cracked, and Siddhattha came face-to-face with suffering for the very first time. In short order, he encountered a person in the throes of illness, another ravaged by age, and a corpse en route to the charnel ground. The narrative claims that up until that moment, the prince had never witnessed any of these things nor even heard of sickness, old age, and death. Learning about these realities of life and discovering that all beings were subject to them caused Siddhattha great distress. On his return home, he saw another impressive sight: a wandering shramana who had renounced everything and who nonetheless appeared happy in the midst of a suffering world. Distraught by the first three spectacles and intrigued by the fourth, the young man decided to give up the comforts of the privileged life to seek a way to soothe his now-troubled mind. The Buddhist traditions refer to this episode as The Four Sights.
Siddhattha took immediate action. In the dark of night, he quietly kissed his wife and young son good-bye and left palace life forever. With the help of a close friend, he slipped out of his father’s house, cut off his hair, and took up the robes and begging bowl of the shramanas.
Demythologizing the Narrative
Much in this story makes it difficult to accept as historically true, which is why most scholars assign it to the category of myth. It is hard to believe that, as zealous as his father was to shield Siddhattha from life’s harsh realities, he could have actually managed to do so for three decades. It is equally difficult to accept that, for so many years, the young man was totally oblivious to suffering, old age, and death. Clearly, the legend needs to be demythologized to uncover its real depth.
Rather than being the story of a father’s overprotectiveness, let us consider that the account is really about youthful naïveté. While obviously something of great significance happened to Siddhattha at age twenty-nine, one may seriously doubt that it was merely learning that people get sick, grow old, and die. Surely, he already knew these things. The real epiphany for Siddhattha came when he recognized that he himself, the one who had it all, and everyone he cared about were all subject to these realities of life. Until this moment, Siddhattha’s knowledge of these truths was merely abstract and conceptual. We all know from a fairly young age that living things die, yet for much of our lives, especially in our youth, we do not really believe death will come to us.
Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, is a disturbing study of the psychological mechanisms by which we prevent our own personal demise from coming into full consciousness. When word of Ivan Ilyich’s death reaches his associates, his close friend Pyotr Ivanovich momentarily lets the news upset him and then quickly, but only half-consciously, reasons it away:
Pyotr Ivanovich was overcome with horror as he thought of the suffering of someone he had known so well, first as a carefree boy, then as a schoolmate, later as a grown man, his colleague. . . . “Three days of terrible suffering and death. Why, the same thing could happen to me at any time now,” he thought and for a moment felt panic-stricken. But at once, he himself did not know how, he was rescued by the customary reflection that all this happened to Ivan Ilyich, not to him, that it could not and should not happen to him; and that if he were to grant such a possibility, he would succumb to depression. . . . With this line of reasoning, Pyotr Ivanovich set his mind at rest and began to press for details about Ivan Ilyich’s death, as though death were a chance experience that could only happen to Ivan Ilyich, never to himself.[3]
The kind of forgetfulness that overcame Pyotr Ivanovich like a narcotic was not possible for Siddhattha Gotama. At this critical moment, Siddhattha truly understood: “I, too, will die; I too will lose everything I hold dear.” His illusion had shattered, and there was simply no returning to life as if suffering and death were not real.
Significantly, this insight comes to Siddhattha near the age of thirty, the same age, we observed earlier, at which the lives of Jesus, Zoroaster, Ezekiel, Mahavira, and Guru Nanak took dramatic turns. Why thirty? I can only offer speculation based largely on my own experience. It was at thirty that I became personally acquainted with the aging of my body, and I suspect that this begins to happen to others around this age. I began seeing the little signs that my youth was becoming a thing of the past—a tiny wrinkle here, a little sagging there, more hair in the shower drain. It was not much that anyone else could detect, but to someone as self-absorbed as I am, these things caused me much anxiety. It took me a long time to come to terms with this fact of life. I simply did not believe these things were happening to me; like Pyotr Ivanovich, I assumed that an exception would be made in my case.
With these reflections, I am suggesting that that one way to read the story of “The Four Sights” is as Siddhattha’s complete acceptance that aging and death would indeed come to him, and not just to others. It hardly matters whether Siddhattha grasped this by stealthily observing his father’s kingdom or by looking in a mirror or just calmly contemplating the natural course of life. In whatever way it happened, this recognition, I believe, was the Buddha’s first awakening. Without this experience, there would have been no second awakening, no illumination while quietly sitting under a tree several years later. Unlike his subsequent and ultimate awakening, this first epiphany brought no serenity of mind, but profound agitation and restiveness. It meant dropping the pretense of uniqueness and accepting wholeheartedly his common share with everyone else. It was enough to cause him to walk away from his incomparable life of ease and comfort. Presumably, he might have stayed right within the walls of his prison of pleasure. He might have done what most of us do when the recognition of our frailties comes upon us—that is, denying and forgetting. We are constantly seeking new ways to put our vulnerabilities out of mind. As T. S. Eliot once said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”[4] But for the young Gotama, returning to naïveté was not an option. Reality was just too real.
Renunciation
So Gotama left and took up the homeless life of a wandering ascetic, as so many others had done. From his home in the Himalayan foothills, he traveled on foot toward the urban centers of the Ganges River basin and spent the rest of his life in this rapidly developing area. As a novice shramana, Gotama sought someone who could serve as a teacher, introducing him to the disciplines necessary to find the end to suffering and rebirth. His first teacher was Alara Kalama, a renowned master of yogic meditation. Gotama soon mastered his teacher’s doctrine and the meditative states on which they were based. Alara Kalama’s instruction was able to take the aspiring renunciant to what he called the state of “nothingness,” but no further.
Siddhattha found that this state did not bring him the freedom he sought, so he left in search of someone who could take him further. His second instructor, Uddaka Ramaputta, was also a famous practitioner of meditative yoga. Under his tutelage, Siddhattha was able to reach the level of “neither perception nor nonperception,” but this meditative state did not satisfy young Gotama either. So he left Ramaputta.
These practices brought extraordinary—but only temporary—experiences. As long as he was absorbed in meditation, Siddhattha’s experience was quite pleasant, but after the meditation ended, so did the pleasant state. Siddhattha wanted to attain permanent freedom from suffering and samsara. He continued to find value in meditation, but he rejected his teachers’ claims that their yogic states were the highest realization of the spiritual life.
The young shramananext took his quest to a more extreme level involving self-mortification. When he engaged in the practice of intense asceticism, Siddhattha did so with the same zeal that had characterized his work with his yoga teachers. He deprived his body of food and subsisted on a paltry diet of a few grains of rice or bea
ns. In the Pali Canon, he describes his appearance after many months of this kind of self-torture: “My body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little my limbs became like the jointed segments of vine stems or bamboo stems . . . my backside became like a camel’s hoof . . . the projections on my spine stood forth like corded beads . . . my ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old roofless barn . . . the gleam of my eyes sank far down in their sockets . . . my belly skin adhered to my backbone; thus if I touched my belly skin I encountered my backbone.”[5] To passers-by, the contemplative ascetic looked like a decaying corpse.
Gotama was so dedicated to his task and committed to this discipline that a small group of five disciples gathered around him, hoping to follow him to moksha. But eventually, Gotama concluded that this path was a dead end. Far from terminating suffering, self-mortification only intensified it, and its ultimate destination could only be death. Surely there had to be some other way to conquer samsara.
* * *
“Pali” refers to the language of the text. The Buddha probably did not speak Pali himself but a Sanskritic language close to it. Pali is also a Sanskritic language, but a vernacular spoken by ordinary people, not the formal Sanskrit used by the Brahmin priests.↵
Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: An Anthology of Suttas from theAnguttara Nikāya, 3:38, ed. and trans. Nyanaponika Thera and Bhikkhu Bodhi, (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1999), 53–54.↵
The Age of the Sages Page 13
