Siddhattha - Life as a Prince and Renunciation - with meditation teachers -
Practice of severe austerities - his meditation before Enlightenment - the Three
Knowledges - inspired verses after Enlightenment - who to teach? The five
ascetics - Añña Kondaññā, the
first Arahant.
Prince Siddhattha, heir to
the throne of the Sākiyan kingdom, saw, in spite of his father’s endeavours, old
age, disease and death; and also a religious wanderer in yellow robes who was
calm and peaceful. When he had seen these things, withheld from him until his
early manhood, he was shocked by the sight of the first three realising that he
also must suffer them, but he was inspired by the fourth and understood that
this was the way to go beyond the troubles, and sufferings of existence. Though
his beautiful wife, Yasodharā
presented him with a son who was called Rāhula, he was no longer attracted to
worldly life. His mind was set upon renunciation of the sense pleasures and
uprooting the desires, which underlay them.
So at night he left behind
his luxurious life and going off with a single retainer, reached the Sākiyan
frontiers. There he dismounted from his horse, took off his princely ornaments
and cut off his hair and beard with his sword. Then he changed into
yellowish-brown patched robes and so transformed himself into a Bhikkhu or
wandering monk. The horse and valuables he told his retainer to take back with
the news that he had renounced pleasures and gone forth from home to
homelessness.
At first he went to
various meditation teachers but he was not satisfied with their teachings when
he became aware that they could not show him the way out of all suffering. Their
attainments, which he equalled, were like temporary halts on a long journey,
they were not its end. They led only to birth in some heaven where life, however
long, was nevertheless impermanent. So he decided to find his own way by bodily
mortification. This he practised for six years in every conceivable way, going
to extremes, which other ascetics would be fearful to try. Finally, on the edge
of life and death, he perceived the futility of bodily torment and remembered
from boyhood a meditation experience of great peace and joy. Thinking that this
was the way, he gave up troubling his body, and took food again to restore his
strength. So in his life he had known two extremes, one of luxury and pleasure
when a prince, the second of fearful austerity, but both he advised his first
Bhikkhu disciples, should be avoided.[1]
Having restored his
strength, he sat down to meditate under a great pipal tree, later known as the
Bodhi (Enlightenment) Tree. His mind passed quickly into four states of deep
meditation called jhāna. In these, the
mind is perfectly one-pointed and there is no disturbance or distraction. No
words, no thoughts and no pictures, only steady and brilliant mindfulness. Some
mental application and inspection is present at first along with physical
rapture and mental bliss. But these factors disappear in the process of
refinement until in the fourth jhāna only equanimity, mindfulness and great
purity are left. On the bases of these profound meditation states certain
knowledge arose in his mind.
These knowledge, which
when they appear to a meditator are quite different from things which are learnt
or thought about, were described by him in various ways. It is as though a
person standing at various points on a track, which is roughly circular, should
describe different views of the same landscape; in the same way the Buddha
described his Bodhi or awakening experience. Some parts of this experience would
be of little or no use to others in their training so these facts he did not
teach. What he did teach was about dukkha or suffering, how it arises and how to get beyond it. One of
the most frequent views into this ‘landscape of Enlightenment’ is the Three
Knowledges: of past lives, of kamma and its results, and of the destruction of
the mental pollution.
The wisdom of knowing his
own past lives, hundreds of thousands of them, an infinite number of them,
having no beginning - all in detail with his names and occupations, the human,
super-human and sub-human ones, showed him the futility of searching for
sense-pleasures again and again. He saw as well that the wheel of birth and
death kept in motion by desires for pleasure and existence would go on spinning
for ever producing more and more of existence bound up with unsatisfactory
conditions. Contemplating this stream of lives he passed the first watch of the
night under the Bodhi Tree.
The wisdom pertaining to
kamma[2]
and its results means that he surveyed with the divine interior eye all sorts of
beings, human and otherwise and saw how their past kammas gave rise to present
results and how their present kammas will fruit in future results. Wholesome
kammas, developing one’s mind and leading to the happiness of others, fruit for
their doer as happiness of body and mind, while unwholesome kammas which lead to
deterioration in one’s own mind and suffering for others, result for the doer of
them in mental and physical suffering. The second watch of the night passed
contemplating this wisdom.
In the last watch he saw
how the pollution, the deepest layer of defilement and distortion, arise and
pass away conditionally. With craving and ignorance present, the whole mass of
sufferings, gross and subtle, physical and mental - all that is called
dukkha, come into existence; but when
they are abandoned then this burden of dukkha, which weighs down all beings and causes them to drag through
myriad lives, is cut off and can never arise again. This is called the knowledge
of the destruction of the pollutions: desires and pleasures, existence and
ignorance, so that craving connected with these things is extinct.
When he penetrated to this
profound truth, the arising and passing away conditionally of all experience and
thus of all dukkha, he was the Buddha,
Enlightened, Awakened. Dukkha he had
known thoroughly in all its most subtle forms and he discerned the causes for
it’s arising - principally - craving. Then he experienced its cessation when its
roots of craving had been abandoned, this cessation of
dukkha also called Nibbāna, the Bliss
Supreme. And he investigated and developed the Way leading to the cessation of
dukkha, which is called the Noble
Eightfold Path. This Path is divided into three parts: of wisdom - Right View
and Right Thought; of moral conduct - Right Speech, Right Action and Right
Livelihood; of mind development - Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right
Collectedness. It has been described many times in detail.[3]
We are told that to the
Buddha experiencing the bliss supreme of Enlightenment the following two verses
occurred:
Now that he had come to
the end of craving and desire, a thing, so difficult to do, and after reviewing
his freedom from the round of birth and death, he concluded that no one in the
world would understand this teaching. Men are blinded by their desires, he
thought and his mind inclined towards not teaching the Dhamma. Then with the
divine eye he saw that there were a few beings „with little dust in their eyes“
and who would understand. First he thought of the two teachers he had gone to
and then left dissatisfied but both had died and been reborn in the planes of
the formless deities having immense life spans. They would not be able to
understand about ‘arising and passing away’. Then he considered the whereabouts
of the five ascetics who had served him while he practised severe bodily
austerities. The knowledge came to him that they were near Benares, in the
Deer-sanctuary at Isipatana; so he walked there by slow stages. So he began the
life of a travelling Bhikkhu, the hard life that he was to lead out of
compassion for suffering beings for the next forty-five years.
When the Buddha taught
these five ascetics he addressed them as ‘Bhikkhus’. This is the word now used
only for Buddhist monks but at that time applied to other religious wanderers.
Literally, it means ‘one who begs’ (though Bhikkhus are not allowed to beg from
people, they accept silently whatever is given. See Chapter VI). At the end of
the Buddha’s first discourse[4],
Kondaññā[5]
the leader of those Bhikkhus, penetrated to the truth of the Dhamma. Knowing
that he had experienced a moment of Enlightenment - Stream-winning as it is
called, the Buddha was inspired to say, „Kondaññā truly knows indeed Kondaññā
truly knows!“ Thus he came to be known as Añña-Kondaññā - Kondaññā who knows as
it really is.
[continued]
[1]See Appendix I, Discourse on Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma.
[2]Meaning, ‘intentional action’. This word, in Sanskrit spelt ‘karma’ never means fate in a Buddhist context.
[3]See, „The Word of the Buddha“ Nyanatiloka Mahathera (B.P.S. Kandy). „The Eightfold Path and Its Factors Explained“ Mahathera Ledi Sayadaw; Wheel, (B.P.S.); „The Buddha’s Ancient Path“ Piyadassi Mahathera (B.P.S.)
[4]See Appendix I, „Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma“.
[5]Pronounce Kondanya, Anya Kondanya.