Tricycle | Awake in the World

TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED YEARS ago, a prince was born in the Sakya kingdom, in the southern Nepal foothills of the Himalayas. This prince, Siddhartha Gautama, would become the historic Buddha ("the Enlightened One"). Mysterious stories surround his birth: His mother, Queen Mahamaya, dreamed that her side was pierced by the six tusks of a white elephant and understood the apparition to mean that she had conceived a child. When she told her husband, King Shuddhodana, of the dream, he consulted an astrologer, who foresaw that the child would become either a universal ruler or a fully enlightened being, a buddha.

A week after the prince's birth, his mother died, and he was given for care to her sister, Mahaprajapati Gautami, who was also married to Shuddhodana, a known custom of the time. Although all the events leading up to the birth of Siddhartha had been joyful, after Mahamaya's death Shuddhodana feared that he would he heirless if Siddhartha turned to the religious rather than the political life foretold by the seer. From then on, the king did everything in his power to make Siddhartha's life one of pleasure, confined mostly to the palace. The young man-who was said to be physically, intellectually, and spiritually beautiful-was surrounded by luxury. When he was sixteen, he was married to a beautiful and generous-spirited young noblewoman named Yashodara.

Outwardly, little changed for Siddhartha during the next dozen years. On the few occasions when he left the palace, his father tried to control the pleasantness of his experience, to the extent, so the stories say, of having the streets swept and flowers placed along his route and removing anything that might offend Siddhartha's eye. But on these rare outings, Siddhartha had four experiences that would alter his life-and history. It is told that he encountered four heavenly messengers who appeared to him in different guises. On one trip, Siddhartha saw, for the first time, a very old man. His chariot driver, Chandaka, explained that the effects of aging happened to all people. On another, Siddhartha saw, again for the first time, a man suffering horrible ravages of disease, and again Chandaka explained the phenomenon to him. Another time, Siddhartha saw a corpse, surrounded by grief-stricken mourners, and learned from Chandaka that death is the fate awaiting all living beings. So protected had Siddhartha been that he was shocked by the revelation, on each occasion, of common experiences of suffering: illness, old age, and death. The trauma of seeing these sufferings and realizing that he himself was subject to them caused him great despondency. On a fourth excursion, Siddhartha encountered a wandering holy man, an ascetic who had given up all earthly possessions yet somehow seemed greatly at peace. Siddhartha's mind struggled with the contrast between the artificiality of his life of pleasure and the reality of the suffering that surrounded him in the world. According to legend, one night, as he sat alone in a garden, a deep peace came over him and he resolved to become a buddha, an enlightened one, to find a way to the end of the suffering he saw. Filled with grief and at the same time with resolve, the twenty-nine-year-old Siddhartha left his parents, his wife, and his infant son, Rahula, renouncing his kingdom and all worldly tics. Siddhartha took his best horse and, accompanied by his charioteer, Chandaka, rode as far from the palace as he could in a night. The next morning, after crossing a small river, he exchanged clothes with a poor hunter, cut off all his hair, and sent Chandaka back to his father's palace with his horse, jewelry, and other belongings. He spent the next six years as a wandering mendicant, spending time with first one then another of the notable teachers in the valley of the Ganges. He mastered their lessons and meditation techniques readily, but still he felt far from his goal of enlightenment. He left these teachers to travel with five other ascetics, living a life of the most severe austerities. Finally, Siddhartha, weak from hunger, realized that the way to enlightenment was not through such extreme deprivation, and he separated from the other ascetics. After taking some nourishment and regaining his strength, Siddhartha sat down in meditation beneath a pipal tree by the river Neranjara, near the town now known as Bodhgaya, and vowed not to arise until he had achieved enlightenment. There he spent the night of the full moon in May - his thirty-fifth birthday - battling Mara, the manifestation of all the demons of his mind. At dawn, reaching down with his right hand and touching the earth as his witness, he understood the nature of suffering and was liberated.

The Buddha walked to Deer Park near Sarnath, where he encountered the five ascetics with whom he had traveled when his search began. It was this group who heard his first sermon and became his first disciples. Liberated from the endless suffering of the wheel of life, samsara, he set in motion the great wheel of the Dharma, his teachings on suffering and the end of suffering. For the next forty-five years, the Buddha traveled with bands of disciples, his sangha, teaching the Dharma to those who gathered around him, regardless of their social background or caste. He died at the age of eighty, near the village of Kushinagara.