In this four-part series, a Christian seminary professor and scholar of Buddhism explains how the Buddha’s teaching has made him a keener observer of the human condition, particularly the aging process. The four posts of this blog series move through (1) the author’s academic study of Buddhism and love of basketball, (2) the story of Prince Siddhartha becoming the Buddha, (3) the Buddha’s teaching, and (4) what the author has learned from the Buddha about the human condition.
Post #2: From Prince to Buddha
Buddhist tradition has it that Prince Siddhartha was born into royalty in northern India. His family’s status is probably exaggerated, but the underlying point is crucial—he was raised in privileged circumstances.
The story of Prince Siddhartha’s transformation into the Buddha is a classic in the history of religions. He had everything one could wish: “I lived in refinement, utmost refinement, total refinement.” (Sukhamala Sutta, transl. Thanissaro Bhikkhu) His father built him three palaces, one for each season of the Indian year, surrounded him with lotus ponds, dressed him in the finest clothes, fed him the finest food, and commanded the servants to hold a shade over his head 24/7 to shield him from the elements.
Yet Siddhartha felt unfulfilled. We might think he was simply experiencing what many young adults do when nearing age 30, but the tradition sees his restlessness as part of a larger existential dilemma. So, he left his palaces and took a few tours to see what normal living was like. He encountered Four Passing Sights through which he confronted the human condition.
Illustration from “The Four Sights in Lockdown,” by Vishvapani, May 7, 2020, Thought for the Day. Source: https://www.wiseattention.org/blog/2020/05/07/the-four-sights-in-lockdown/.
The first sight was an elderly man. Siddhartha had never seen anyone grow old. His father could certainly fill the palace with young servants, but did he not himself age in ways obvious to his son? We must allow for the dramatic license of sacred texts. Charles Prebish and Damien Keown suggest that the Four Passing Sights “is probably best read as a parable rather than a narrative of historical events.”
The visage of the old man shocked the young prince, who asked his charioteer Channa to explain the man’s appearance. The Buddhacarita reports Channa’s reply: “That is old age by which he is broken down, the ravisher of beauty, the ruin of vigour, the cause of sorrow, the destruction of delights, the bane of memories, the enemy of the senses.” The text continues: “Being thus addressed, the prince, starting a little, spoke these words to the charioteer, ‘What! will this evil come to me also?’” “It will come without doubt by the force of time through multitude of years even to my long-lived lord.” Siddhartha “was deeply agitated when he heard of old age,” and said to Channa, “Since such is our condition, O charioteer, turn back the horses,—go quickly home; how can I rejoice in the pleasure-garden, when the thoughts arising from old age overpower me?” (transl. Edward B. Cowell)
Pretty much the same scenario is replicated in the next two Passing Sights, a sick man and a funeral procession. Siddhartha had never experienced illness (again allowing for the dramatic license of sacred texts) and his father had hidden death from him. What! will these evils come to me also? Yes, O Prince, not even royalty can escape the human condition, the suffering or existential stress of which is epitomized by aging, illness, and death.
Reflecting later on these three sights in the Sukhamala Sutta, the Buddha identified three kinds of intoxication that fool most people: intoxication with youth, under which people think they will not grow old; intoxication with health, under which people think they will not fall ill; and intoxication with life, under which people think they will not die (I rely on the translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu for the term “intoxication”). The notion of intoxication is significant—intoxicated individuals have impaired perception and judgment.
But Prince Siddhartha is a long way from coming to this realization in the story. There is an interlude in the Buddhacarita in which numerous women try to seduce him in creative ways, but “he, having his senses guarded by self-control, neither rejoiced nor smiled, thinking anxiously, ‘One must die.’” On his next sally forth from the palace, the prince encountered a fourth sight, one of the many renunciants who sought spiritual liberation in that era. “Tell me, who art thou?” he asks the renunciant, who replies, “Oh bull of men, I, being terrified at birth and death, have become an ascetic for the sake of liberation.” Siddhartha knew immediately the direction he must take to liberate himself from the dire realities of the human condition, so “he set his mind on the manner of the accomplishment of deliverance.”
His father the king was not pleased, as we might imagine. The Buddhacarita says he “shook like a tree struck by an elephant” when his son informed him of his intention to become a renunciant. But despite his father’s orders confining him to the palace, Siddhartha mounted his horse and, with the help of divine beings and miraculously hurtling through roadblocks, left the city to begin his Six Year Quest for deliverance.
The Ariyapariyesana Sutta has the Buddha saying, “while still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessings of youth in the first stage of life—and while my parents, unwilling, were crying with tears streaming down their faces—I shaved off my hair & beard, put on the ochre robe and went forth from the home life into homelessness.” (transl. Thanissaro Bhikkhu) The notion of “homelessness” here is specifically religious—renunciants left home and family life in order to pursue spiritual liberation without the distractions of worldly attachments. In his six years of homeless wandering, Siddhartha studied meditation and followed an ascetic lifestyle, two popular spiritual paths of the day. Although he equaled his meditation teachers in gaining higher states of consciousness, he concluded that this would not lead to the goal he sought, so he left them “dissatisfied.” And although he excelled in his asceticism—he recalls that his spine “stood out like a string of beads” and his ribs “jutted out like the jutting rafters of an old, run-down barn”—he found that path lacking as well: “But with this racking practice of austerities I haven’t attained any superior human state, any distinction in knowledge or vision worthy of the noble ones. Could there be another path to Awakening?” (Maha-Saccaka Sutta, transl. Thanissaro Bhikkhu)
Siddhartha decided that the best way to reach his goal would be through his own sheer determination, so he sat down beneath what later came to be called the Bodhi (“Awakening”) Tree and passed through progressively deeper levels of consciousness until he realized enlightenment or Nirvana. One of the texts has him say, “I reached the aging-less, illness-less, deathless [alluding to the first three Passing Sights], sorrow-less, unexcelled rest from the yoke: Unbinding. Knowledge & vision arose in me: ‘Unprovoked is my release. This is the last birth. There is now no further becoming.’” (Ariyapariyesana Sutta, transl. Thanissaro Bhikkhu) He was now the Buddha, now “Awakened” (a common translation of “Buddha,” from the same root as “Bodhi” Tree) to the truth of the human condition and no longer bound to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth known in Indian religions as saṃsāra.
Buddhists believe that enlightenment/Nirvana is impossible to explain “because human language is too poor to express the real nature of the Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality which is Nirvāṇa,” to quote Walpola Rahula. As the well-known Buddhist metaphor has it, an enlightened one has crossed over to the further shore, which those on this side of the river cannot fully fathom. Trying to explain Nirvana to the unenlightened is like a turtle trying to explain “dry land” to a fish which has no experiential framework for understanding the concept. What, then, can be said about Nirvana? It is the end or cessation (nirodha) of unenlightened human consciousness and all that is bound up with it.
In my next blog post, I will elaborate on elements of the Buddha’s teaching that have made me a keener observer of the human condition.
Contributed by Paul David Numrich. Numrich is Professor in the Snowden Chair for the Study of Religion and Interreligious Relations, Methodist Theological School in Ohio. His publications include Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples (University of Tennessee Press, 1996), Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in America: A Short History (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2008), and North American Buddhists in Social Context (editor and contributor, Brill and the Association for the Sociology of Religion, 2008).