Buddha’s Early Life as an Indian Model for Indians and others

Still drawing on the common/canonical traditions, I’ll now outline Siddhartha’s early life in a little more detail (to the extent it is relevant to Buddhist philosophy). The truth of the stories may, of course, be a matter of belief but their main historical claims are that they are derived from sources that claim to be direct teachings or discourses (sutras) of the enlightened Siddhartha, himself, including the rules for the religious orders (vinaya) he personally laid down for his monks and nuns. Their actual truth as individual historical facts is regarded as ultimately subordinate to the underlying truth they are hoped to enable a Buddhist to realise:

He had already had many births and they had much in common with the earlier lives of other Buddhas. He had been a Bodhisattva in all his other lives which meant that he had always been somewhat enlightened and in the process of perfecting himself in those lives (and seeking to teach others, in the Mahayana view - for more on which, see later posts).

He descended from heavenly realms into his mother’s womb this time to be born painlessly through his mother’s (Maya’s) side as a prince with a perfect pedigree. Maya is also Sanskrit for illusion and some form of symbolism may be intended.

He was handsome in the extreme, stately, talented and brilliant. He was, in fact, perfect in every way as a human and had at least three great personal palaces: one for winter, one for summer and one for the wet season. He also had a perfect wife and son. The portents were clearly good.

A soothsayer had predicted at his birth that he would either be a great king or a renunciate so from a narrative point of view this introduces a dramatic tension lacking in the story of the perfect human above and his earlier lives also seem to have similarly had conflicts in them. His father sought that he should follow the first path and set about making sure the painful realities of life, suffering and death that might lead one to become a renunciate were completely hidden from him and in his youth the strategy appeared to have worked. In some ways, his father can be seen as a symbol for the values of society (similar to today’s consumerism and youth culture, etc.)

In his 20s, though, he happened to meet or see on four consecutive outings a decrepit old man, a sick man, a corpse and a mendicant/renunciate (some of the accounts suggest that devas were involved in arranging these ‘chance’ meetings or had even taken these forms themselves). As a result it was explained to him in turn that people grow old and decrepit, people get sick, people die and that some people choose to seek to escape from these things by becoming renunciates. This was a shock to his perfect but over-protected system. The over-protection then produced an over-reaction and he became a renunciate. He would go from over-protection to under-protection. He now despised and could not enjoy the society that had so utterly deceived him for so long.

At around the age of 29 he cut off his beautiful hair (classic renunciate chic), snuck away to the forest, changed clothes with a servant, whom he then sent home, and became a renunciate. He chose renunciation for six years seeking liberation in this way. He had renunciate companions and he took it to the extreme. He ate a single grain of rice each day for some time and at one point was on the verge of death. The story goes that some women offered him something like yoghurt which he accepted, earning the disapprobation of his companions, but of course saving his life. In the context in which these stories were disseminated, among the misogynist and extreme world of ascetics, accepting food in this way from women was seen as shocking and not at all the action of a true renunciate.

The story then leads us to a further search for the truth from two renowned master renunciates so we are led to understand that the sage is able to objectively absorb what they teach while being, in a sense, a renunciate of renunciation. The story goes that he learned all they were able to teach and came to see that their approach (of stopping the mind) was counter-productive.

So, on a full moon night one May, he sat down under a tree determined not to get up until he had learned how to realise the truth (remember that his mind had been primed beforehand by many auspicious earlier lives so this course may not be open to everyone). The rest is Buddhist history. He was tempted by the forces of delusion and temptation in the form of Mara, a deva or demon of some kind, but he found the way. He resisted its temptations and was now a Buddha.

His new way (between shutting the mind off and overstimulating it) was to enliven the mind and he came to view this approach (really living mindfully) as a middle way between the reproving, tormenting and denying asceticism and the numbing luxury of his earlier life. His key idea was that the mind should be focused by deep meditation rather than denied by it and that the focus needed to be on the reality of existence and even (or, really, especially) of the mind’s workings themselves.

After this (and after some hesitation that I'll discuss in a later post) he goes to his erstwhile renunciate ‘chums’, who had shunned him, as he realises that they will understand he now has something to teach them. They do immediate realise this and become his first monks (and the beginnings of the first Buddhist religious community that came to be called the sangha: one of the three so-called 'jewels' of Buddhism, along with the dharma itself and Buddha himself).