For our purposes it is most important to look at the traditional stories about the life of the Buddha in order to understand some basic teachings of Buddhist tradition. As in Christianity and Islam, which also give special prominence to historical individuals who gave shape and substance to the traditions that follow them, how Buddhists understand the life of their founder tells a great deal about how they understand the ideals of their tradition. Both in lecture and in what is written here, I hope to touch on some important points that will give perspective to how Buddhists perceive the most fundamental problems of existence and how these problems can be overcome through a mastery of Buddhist teachings and practice. (To see a traditional Buddhist summary of the Buddha's early life from the "Great Retirement" to the attainment of Buddhahood, refer to Henry Clarke Warren's (1896) classic translation. This text is available on-line through the RELIGIO website.)
The Four Passing Sights. Sickness, Old Age, Death, and Renunciation.
The Buddha (as he came to be called -- the term, like Christ, is honorific, and means "the enlightened one" or "he who is awake") was born to a father who was a highly ranked noble during a period when the state and empire were beginning to emerge as dominant political forces in India. It is said that his conception was miraculous (it involved a white elephant coming to his mother in a miraculous fashion), and a seer prophesied before he was born that he would either become a great king (a "world conqueror") or a great religious teacher (a "world renouncer"). His father was concerned, as fathers frequently are, that this new son follow in his own footsteps and become a king. So, after Siddhartha's birth (in which the Buddha is traditionally portrayed as leaping forth from his mother's side, taking several steps, and proclaiming the importance of his destiny), his father decreed that the boy was to be secluded in a royal pleasure palace, so that he would neither develop an aversion to the world nor the desire to leave it behind in pursuit of religious and philosophical understanding. During the first decades of his life Siddhartha remained a sort of prisoner in this palace of earthly delights, where he ate the finest foods, wore the finest silks, practiced the arts of war as befitted his social rank, and eventually married a beautiful woman who bore him a fine son.
Tradition tells that eventually Siddhartha yearned to know more than what he had experienced on the inside of those walls, and he took rides with his charioteer to the outside on four successive days. On these four trips he saw things that opened his eyes to the fundamental problems of human existence and prompted him to pursue a life of philosophical questing, to acheive enlightenment, and to formulate principles and practices that have defined Buddhism ever since. The first three sights that he saw were a sick man, an old man, and a dead man. These were sights that he had never seen before, since his father had assiduously kept such troublesome things out of view, for fear that Siddhartha would renounce the world and his life as future king. But once Siddhartha had seen them, he realized the fleeting, impermanent, and unsatisfying nature of the pleasures with which he had been surrounded in his palace, since every person without regard for rank or status, will eventually suffer from sickness, old age, and death. There is nothing that a person can do to avoid these. Hence, if a person is not prepared to deal with them when they come, then any life of pleasure can devolve into horror. Siddhartha knew that there must be more to life than pleasure, power, marriage, and position.
The sight that passed before Siddhartha on his fourth and final chariot ride was that of the mendicant seeker, the renunciant, one of the class of those who have since ancient times in India left normal social life behind in order to find wisdom and truth that offer to sustain a person in good times and in bad. Siddhartha had never seen such a person before. When his charioteer gave him a brief description of who such people were, Siddhartha had a model that he could follow to solve the riddle that these Four Passing Sights had posed to him. Shortly thereafter, in the middle of the night, Siddhartha left the palace, his family, his status, and his future in the world behind him. He rode his horse to the top of a hill, cut his hair, and donned the traditional orange-yellow robes of a seeker. He began six years of questing that resulted in his enlightenment.
Years of Quest Leading to the Great Enlightenment.
It is said that during those six years the Buddha studied with every great spiritual teacher in India. He would quickly master the system that each had to offer, would be acknowledged by the teacher as having realized the truth of his system, but would then reject what he had learned as insufficient, since it did not answer his questions satisfactorily. (In later tradition this aspect of the story is used to illustrate the superior quality of Buddhist teachings to all others that derived from Indian tradition, such as those of the Hindus and Jains.) Since there was great diversity among the religious systems in India at this time, this implied that Siddhartha had explored every avenue that there was to explore in religious tradition, but he realized in the end that he had to take an additional step beyond those that had been taken by other teachers who went before him.
It is said that at this final stage he was very advanced in ascetic practice, where one tries to overcome the problem of desire and suffering through deprivation. That is, since the human condition is characterized by a longing for things we cannnot have, ascetics try to kill desire by never gratifying it. There is a long history of people in India and elsewhere who not only deprive themselves of comfort, but even intentionally afflict themselves with pain, so that they may overcome their attachment to particular physical and emotional states. During this time Siddhartha is said to have been the greatest master of this method. He was so emaciated from lack of food that he was able to grasp his spine with thumb and forefinger from the front and around his belly. But, in the midst of this disciplined practice, Siddhartha realized that it was like all the others he had tried: it would not give him the profound realization he sought. He decided to leave this path in order to embark upon one more profound. When he announced this to four other ascetics, who were his companions and followers, they believed him to be a backslider, and left him to continue their ascetic practice.
It is said that the Siddhartha then nursed himself gradually back to strength, because he realized that profound spiritual realization is not best achieved through a weak body. (The path that he would follow would be a "Middle Path", midway between the paths of pleasure seeking and the renunciation of all pleasure. This designation of Buddhism as the "Middle Way" is applied to many aspects of Buddhist teaching and practice until this day.) Eventually after he was strong again, Siddhartha sat down under a tree in a meditative posture with the resolve not to rise again until he had achieved enlightenment. During the final night of this sit, Siddhartha endured a kind of Walpurgisnacht, when he was beset with temptations of every sort. According to Buddhist tradition, evil demons were profoundly concerned that if Siddhartha achieved the enlightenment he sought, their own position in the cosmos would be threatened, because he would be a formidable adversary against the cosmic forces of evil. So (not unlike Jesus who endured temptations from Satan in the wilderness) Siddhartha was confronted with temptations of power, and money, and sexual delight, and fear, and death. But he saw all of these to be ephemeral pleasures that would not last. The impermanent nature of all these temptations is exemplified in two sumptuous love goddesses who were presented to Siddhartha as voluptuous, supple, and satisfying, but who appeared to Siddhartha (in virtue of his penetrating critical insight) to degenerate into wrinkled, stiff, and diseased old hags, who eventually disappeared in a pile of dust blown into the wind. Nearing dawn Siddhartha's realization was complete. He had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One, He Who is Awake. He reached down with the fingers of his right hand to touch the Earth. In response to this touch, the Earth thundered in recognition of his achievement, and Mara, the demon of Death who had mounted one final effort to intimidate the Buddha with fear, fled. This moment of enlightenment is portrayed in Buddhist iconography through the posture known as "Calling the Earth to Witness". It symbolizes the moment of the Buddha's Enlightenment.
Having achieved this realization, the Buddha understood as never before a great freedom. He had been released from the cycles of birth and death, and from all their attendant sorrows. He knew that he was no longer bound by the problems of desire and suffering, by sickness, old age, and death. His quest was ended. He was now realized. But, he also knew that other beings were still bound by ignorance and desire, and that he could teach them a way out. From his great wisdom (called prajña in Sanskrit) came great compassion (karuna). And thus he sought out his four former companions, those who had left him earlier when he rejected the path of asceticism, to teach them what he had learned.
He sought them out in a "Deer Park", a tract of wilderness preserved by the royalty of the time for the game they loved to hunt, but which was commonly used by renunciants for the seclusion that it offered them for their spiritual practices. As the Buddha approached them, their first response was to reject him, since they had regarded him as one who abandoned their quest. But, when they saw him more closely, it was clear from his countenance that he had achieved a special realization, and they were compelled to follow him once again. What he told them is now preserved in tradition as "The Deer Park Sermon". In this teaching, the Buddha defines the core problem of life as suffering (dukka), lays out the relationship between desire and suffering, describes how extinguishing desire eliminates suffering, and defines the path that leads to the extinction of desire. In this teaching lies the core of Buddhism, and comprises one of the most profound statements about the nature of human experience to arise within the world's religions.
The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path.
The substance of the Deer Park Sermon can be understood most simply in terms of the Four Noble Truths and The Noble 8-Fold Path. The Four Noble Truths are four simple propositions about the nature of desire and suffering, and the fourth of these truths contains the Noble 8-Fold Path, which describes in very short form the path that one should follow in order to achieve an enlightened state of awareness and the cessation of suffering. There is implied within these simple statements a huge reservoir of wisdom, but once this reservoir is understood, the simple and direct nature of the Truths themselves is overpowering. In what follows, I hope to unfold a few of the auxilliary truths that are impled in the 4 Noble truths themselves. (See also Smith, 99-112; also on-line through RELIGIO):
The Four Noble Truths can be summarized as follows in this traditional form:
(1) The Noble Truth of Suffering.
(2) The Noble Truth of the Cause of Suffering.
(3) The Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering.
(4)The Noble Truth of the Path That Leads to the Cessation of Suffering (The Noble Eightfold Path).
A simple way of describing the contents of these truths is as follows: