The Prince And The Pipal

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 ...)