Here’s the link. Just click it to stream the audio; right-click it (control-click on the Mac) to download the Mp4 file.

He was born, the legend tells us, the son of a great king. The omens at his birth were marvelous and auspicious, and the King called a seer to interpret those. The seer told the king that the newborn boy was indeed destined to be great. He would either be a world-conquering monarch or a great teacher, with a Dhamma that could change the course of civilization. “Enough with teaching,” cried the King. “What can we do to insure that he becomes a world-conquering monarch?” “He must never know suffering,” the seer answered. “He must never know of aging, illness, sorrow or death – those things that cause our human lives to be filled with pain and anguish.”

So the King raised the young Siddhatha in complete protection from all contact with a suffering world; he grew up on the second floor of the palace, surrounded by friends, all of them in perfect health, and servants, all of them beautiful, skillful, and ready to do the young Prince’s every bidding.

But the young Prince grew curious about the world beyond the palace walls, and one day he convinced his charioteer to take him out into the village beyond those walls. In that first outing, Siddhata saw an old man walking with a cane. “What is wrong with that man?” he asked the charioteer. “That man is old,” the charioteer replied. “Does everyone grow old?” Siddhata asked. “Yes.” “Even I?” “Yes.”

On the next outing, Siddhata saw a leper and learned of the inevitability of disease. Next time out, they encountered a family carrying the body of their beloved father to the burning ghats, weeping and wailing with grief. “Will even I die?” “Yes.”

Finally, on a fourth outing, Siddhata experienced what seemed the strangest sight of all—a man walking barefoot, wearing nothing but a simple yellow robe, with a look on his face of extraordinary happiness and peace. “Who is that,” he asked the charioteer, “walking so confidently and with such peace amidst all this suffering?” “That”, he was told, “is a sramana; he has renounced the comforts of home and family and spends his time in meditation, developing his ability to be kind and compassionate and to remain in equanimity despite the violent changes in the world.” The young Prince was thoughtful on the journey back to the palace.

The existential angst aroused by the encounter with suffering grew in Prince Siddhata until, one night, while his beautiful young wife and beloved newborn son slept, he crept outside the palace walls, shaved his beautiful black hair and beard, discarded his fine royal clothing, and put on the simple yellow robe of a sramana. After wandering for six years, undergoing a variety of austere disciplines, he attained Enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree in the village of Bodh Gaya on the full moon night in May. He achieved bodhi, wisdom, and became the Buddha.

He was just 35 years old when he Awakened to the truth, and he went on to teach for the next 45 years; he died at the age of 80 in the village of Kusinara, near the village where he grew up.

Except for the last paragraph, all that is legend, based partly on material from the canonical texts, more on older legends that were current at the time, and written down several hundred years after the Buddha’s death.

No one can be certain of historical truth, especially at a remove of 2500 years and with respect to a man who lived who lived in a society in which literacy was just beginning to develop and which had, in any event, almost no interest at all in what we would today regard as history. Nevertheless, the study of early Buddhism has flourished over the past 50 years or so, and scholars have come to a remarkable level of agreement regarding certain facts about the culture into which Siddhata Gotama, the man who became the Buddha, was born, about the history of Northern India through his lifetime, and about the probable course of his life.

We’ll look at that story throughout the course of our study of the Buddha’s teachings. Our primary source material will be the teachings included in what’s come to be known as the Pali Canon; most scholars agree that those texts are the oldest and most probably authentic record of the teachings that the Buddha actually delivered, although there are few who would argue that they are his exact words.

We’ll begin with a look at one of the earliest teachings from that canon, called the Ariyaparisena Sutta. Sutta is a Pali word derived from the word that means “thread” (our word “suture” is a cognate term) and it’s usually translated as “Discourse”. (Sometimes, and to my mind unfortunately, it’s translated as “sermon”.) Ariyapariyesana is a compound term, composed of the word ariya, meaning “noble”, and “pariyesana“, derived from terms meaning, basically, “looking around”, and usually translated as “quest” or “search”. In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Buddha tells his community of followers about the circumstances of his decision to search for an end to suffering, how that search resulted in the experience of Enlightenment, and why he made a decision to embark on the difficult task of teaching the world about the difficult truth he had discovered.

There are certainly legendary elements in the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, but they are in the nature of metaphor rather than myth, and in no way central to the message of the teaching. For the most part, the Buddha tells his story in a straightforward way, without much in the way of decoration.

I’ve posted a rendition of the sutta on our Dharma Study website, with links to several other more complete and accurate web-based translations of the text. I also wrote, a while ago, an essay on the Buddha’s early life and enlightenment which contains passages from several other suttas dealing with those same events; we’ll be referring to those other suttas in our discussion on Tuesday.

I look forward to seeing you then.

Six years after he’d left home, and shortly after having achieved the goal for which he set out on the homeless live and become the Buddha, he returned to Kapilavatthu, where he was received with honor and respect. It is said that his wife, Rahula’s mother, told the boy to go to his father and ask for his inheritance. Rahula did so, and the Buddha, in response, told Sariputta to give Rahula ordination as a member of the Sangha.

In the Vinaya, we’re told that the Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, was very upset by this: “First, we lost our son, and if that weren’t bad enough, now we’ve lost our beloved grandson Rahula to the holy life. It is not right that you should allow the ordination of young children without their parents’ consent.” The Buddha saw the justice in his father’s complaint, gathered the monks together, and pronounced a new rule for the Sangha: no one under 16 should be accepted as a novice, and no one under 20 should receive full ordination without his parents’ consent.

That rule, of course, was too late for Rahula, who entered the Sangha as an ordained bhikkhu, under the special protection and tutelage of Sariputta, the Buddha’s favorite disciple. We are told that Rahula was a model monk, constantly working on his practice, “the foremost of those seeking guidance in his practice.” There are several stories in the canon in which either the Buddha or Rahula seek one another out for special teaching. The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is the first.

The commentaries, as far as I am aware, give no back story to the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta, but, having been the father of a seven-year-old boy, it’s not difficult for me to imagine that word reached the Buddha that Rahula had been telling some tall tales, and that report occasioned the Buddha’s visit to the young monk.

Whatever might have occasioned it, it is a beautiful story, in which the Buddha shows himself, once again, as someone gentle, compassionate, and imaginative. This is not preaching, it is instruction, and it is, moreover, instruction that we all need at some point in our lives. And seven years old is probably not a bad point to receive it.

I hope that you have a chance, not only to read Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s exceptionally graceful translation of this sutta, but also to listen to his reading of it on the SuddaReadings.net website (click to listen; right-click or control-click to download as an MP3 file that you can import into iTunes). Thanissaro has a rich and resonant voice, and one can imagine that one is listening to the Buddha himself. The Sutta Readings website, while it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while, has a rich variety of material on it. (One other reading you might want to listen to when you visit the site is Sally Clough’s reading of the Satipatthana Sutta (click to read; right-click or control-click to download the MP3 file), the discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness; that is the sutta we will be discussing next week, and Sally Clough does a particularly wonderful job of reading it.)

Finally, here’s a link to a website that has collected, it seems, just about every legend concerning Rahula that is recorded in the Pali texts. Despite the miraculous nature of some of these, and despite the fact that the very idea of a 7-year-old boy entering the life of an ascetic contemplative is foreign to our current notions of proper child-rearing, the accumulation of detail in the legends presented here give us a picture of a young man who was, while rather more serious than most, was still what we’d call today “well-adjusted” and successful in the pursuit of his goals in life.