The Buddha’s Early Life and Enlightenment

There are a lot of legends surrounding the Buddha’s birth and early childhood. Many of those were collected in a long and charming verse narrative, the Buddhacarita, composed by the bhikkhu Ashaghosha sometime in the First Century CE, 400-500 years after the Buddha’s death. (There is a new and enjoyably readable translation of the Buddhacarita by Patrick Olivelle published as “Life of the Buddha” in NYU’s wonderful collection of translations from the Sanskrit, the Clay Sanskrit Library.) The stories in Ashvaghosha’s poem are almost all fables, somewhat breathless in their adoration of the Buddha, who had achieved semi-divine status by Ashvaghosha’s time; but many of the stories have a recognizable root in anecdotes that we have from the Buddha himself, as those were remembered by the sangha and recorded in the collection of the Buddha’s teachings that comprise the Pali canon. The following summary account is taken mostly from those canonical accounts, bolstered and contextualized by the results of the best historical scholarship of the past century. (In following this account, you might want to take a look at the map I’ve prepared of the Buddha’s India.)

Gotama Siddhatha was born in the early Fifth Century BCE in the southern foothills of the Himalayas, in what is now Nepal, and was raised in the market town of Kapilavatthu, on the western bank of the Rohini river. Siddhatha was his given name; Gotama was the family name. The Gotamas were a dominant family within the tribe, or clan, of the Sakyas. The Buddha is sometimes called Sakyamuni, which means “sage of the Sakya clan”. The Sakya people were an important clan in the growing nation of Kosalya. The method of government among the Kosalyan people was something like a republic, in which the various tribal leaders each contributed to the defense of the region and came together in regular councils to arrive at consensus regarding issues that affected the common welfare. That mode of governance probably affected the Buddha in setting the rules by which the sangha (the organized assembly of his followers) made decisions and carried those out.

Gotama’s father Suddhodana, while he was not, as later legend had it, a king, was probably an important leader among the Sakyans, and certainly had extensive wealth. Gotama’s mother Maya died just a week after the child’s birth, and Gotama was raised by her sister Pajapati. Pajapati was also a wife of Suddhodana, so she was the Buddha’s stepmother as well as his aunt.

The Buddha’s later description of his youth gave a picture of great wealth, power, and privilege.

But despite such great wealth, the young nobleman was not satisfied. Later legend tells the story of Gotama’s experience of the Three Messengers: the legend says that his father protected him from any exposure to sadness, illness, or poverty, but that one time, when Gotama took his chariot outside the palace walls, he was exposed to an aged man, who showed him a depiction of aging; to a leper, who showed him disease; and to a corpse, which showed him death. Those meetings, the legend has it, set Gotama on his course toward enlightenment.

The story that the Buddha tells in the Anguttara Nikaya is more prosaic, but of similar import:

The result of those realizations was Gotama’s decision to seek Enlightenment:

It’s clear, reading between the lines of this passage, that Gotama was following a course that others had followed before him; the shaving of the hair and beard, the assumption of a yellow robe, even the phrasing of the decision, “going forth from the home life into homelessness” – all that indicates that Gotama’s decision was not uncommon for that time and place. Indeed, the suttas are full of evidence that there were lots of sages and ascetics travelling around Northern India at the time, each following his own variant on a common path, that included renouncing the comforts of home, living a celibate life, subsisting on alms food, and wandering the land with no fixed abode.

Indeed, Gotama tried, at first, to pursue the paths followed by two of those sages, first Alara Kalama, and then Uddaka the son of Rama. With both teachers, the precocious young man found that he quickly mastered the techniques that were taught to him and got all that the teachers had to offer. And in neither case was it sufficient; Gotama realized that there were further insights to be experienced; a more profound enlightenment to be realized.

On his own again, he took up with five other wandering ascetics (the commentaries tell us that the five were Brahmins, from the Buddha’s home territory of Sakya) and traveled with them for several years. When the practices they pursued together did not get him closer to his goal, he decided to make a supremely determined effort and embarked on an ascetic regimen that left him in dreadful condition:

Gotama realized that the excessive asceticism wasn’t getting him anywhere. And he remembered an incident from his youth:

His traveling companions, the five ascetics who had been attending him while he was in the process of so mortifying his body, were disgusted with what they perceived as Gotama’s giving up, a surrender to sensual pleasures. And they abandoned him. But Gotama, after he had regained his strength with a little nourishment, made a decision to pursue the insight that had led him to abandon the extreme ascetic practice, and to see if he could recreate the state of meditative absorption that he had recalled experiencing as a child. He resolved to establish himself in meditation under a fig tree near the spot where he had accepted his meal of rice and porridge from a passing shepherdess, and to stay there until he had achieved the goal he sought.

And then one night, on the first full moon in the month of May, in happened. As he passed through a sequence of successively more rarified meditative states, Gotama felt, in the first such state, a feeling of intense pleasure; then, leaving pleasure behind, he experienced transporting joy; leaving that behind, he dwelt in a state of perfect contentment; then, abandoning contentment, he experienced utter peacefulness; next, he dwelt in awareness of the infinity of space, and, following that, at state of awareness of the infinity of consciousness. Leaving that state, he entered a state of neither being nor not being, and then of neither perceiving nor not perceiving. And finally, having attained perfect knowledge and vision of things as they are, all ties were severed to delusions of self, all craving ceased, and, unbound to any state of being, Gotama realized his destiny as the Buddha, the fully Enlightened one.

The newly awakened Buddha sat for a week under the bodhi tree, the tree of Enlightenment, savoring his newly realized freedom, and exploring the truths that he now understood: the nature of suffering and the way to end that; the nature of cause and effect; the chain of conditions that led from ignorance through consciousness, perception, desire, grasping, conception and birth to the pain of suffering, old age and death; and much, much more. Finally, the Buddha realized that he had a decision to make. He could continue in blissful contemplation of the truths of existence for the rest of his life, or, forgoing the bliss, he could undertake the hard task of showing others the way he had discovered to nibbana. At first, he was inclined toward the former course; after all, what he had learned was subtle and difficult—difficult truths to understand, and a difficult path to follow. There were few, if any, who could follow the way he had found.

It is said that god Brahma himself came down from his heaven to convince the Buddha to carry the Dharma to the world. Regardless of what influenced the decision, the Buddha finally realized that there were people “with little dust on their eyes”, who were ready to see what he had to reveal, and he made the momentous decision to spread the Dharma. The first people he thought about, to hear the Dharma, were his former teachers Alara Kalama and Uddaka son of Rama. But he came to realize that they had both died. And then he thought of the five ascetics who had left him when he abandoned his ascetic practice. They were accomplished meditators, subtle in their understanding, free of hatred, greed and delusion, and he realized that they would be able to understand the Dharma. So, knowing that they were now staying near the city of Varanasi, he set out to carry his truth to them.

Wandering by stages, he made his way to where they were, in the deer park at Isipatana, on the outskirts of the city. They saw him coming from a distance. Thinking, “Here comes Gotama, who surrendered to sensual pleasure”, they resolved to ignore him. But when he came near, the five ascetics, driven either by love for their former companion or by something in his bearing that told them that something had changed in him, they prepared a seat for him, invited him to sit, and brought water to wash the dust from his feet.

And this is the point at which he delivered his first discourse, setting in motion the wheel of the Dhamma, which presents the foundational ideas of every Buddhist tradition; I consider it the most important single teaching in human history.