Understanding the teachings of Buddhism starts with becoming familiar with the Buddha’s life story. This isn’t because he is believed to have been divine, or even a prophet. Instead, his story is important because it serves as an archetype for the Buddhist vision of spiritual seeking and development. There are many teachings embedded in the story of the Buddha, who is regarded as having been a remarkable human being – but just a human being, like you or me.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Relating to the Buddha’s Life Story
Buddha’s Life Story Part 1: The Arising of Samvega and Embarking on a Spiritual Search
Part 2: The Quest for Liberation and Settling on the Middle Way
Part 3: Facing the Armies of Mara and Attainment of Complete Liberation
Part 4: A Lifetime of Teaching
Part 5: Final Instructions to the Sangha and Death
Relating to the Buddha’s Life Story
I’ve covered the Buddha’s life story in detail on the podcast already. Episodes 11 and 12 relate the story of his life from conception to death, including his awakening and the creation of the Buddhist Sangha. Episode 17 describes in more detail the Buddha’s teaching career and what life was like within the early Buddhist community. In this episode I want to discuss the important Buddhist teachings communicated through the Shakyamuni Buddha’s life story.
Buddha means “awakened one,” and “Shakyamuni” means “sage of the Shakya clan.” Before enlightenment, Shakyamuni Buddha was known as Siddhartha Gautama. He was born in northern India between 578 and 447 BCE. We have no physical evidence of the Buddha’s life, except that certain locations where he lived in India have been revered as significant through the millennia. These include his birthplace, the place where he was supposed to have attained enlightenment, various teaching locations, and where he died. (See Episode 11 for more information.)
The story I will relate today, like that I told in earlier episodes, is based on Buddhist texts. Some of these texts are from the Pali canon, the official canon of the Theravadin school of Buddhism. Another source are the Jataka tales, some of which are at least as old as the Pali Canon. The historical accuracy of these texts is clearly open to question, especially when they include supernatural activities and imagery. However, as we consider the Buddha’s story as archetype and teaching, this does not matter. There may well be aspects of the story which are more or less factual, but if we regard the story as a cherished Buddhist myth, the parts which are embellishments or creations added by subsequent generations of Buddhists are valuable as well. As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, myths of [humankind] have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation…
The wonder is that [the] characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale — as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.[i]
In other words, the story Buddhists have been telling themselves about the Buddha over the last 2,500 years is at least as important as what actually happened over the course of Siddhartha Gautama’s life.
Buddha’s Life Story Part 1: The Arising of Samvega and Embarking on a Spiritual Search
I am going to skip over the parts of the myth that have to do with Siddhartha’s mother’s pregnancy and the circumstances of his birth. Those parts of the story are fascinating, but I believe they serve less as teaching for the spiritual practitioner and more as positive publicity for a new religion (think miraculous virgin birth).
So, we pick up the story shortly after Siddhartha Gautama is born, when a seer predicts the boy will grow up to “touch the ultimate self-awakening” [ii] and become a great spiritual teacher. Siddhartha’s father, Suddhodana, was a wealthy member of the ruling class, and this was not at all his plan for his firstborn son. To prevent Siddhartha from leaving the worldly life to pursue spiritual awakening, Suddhodana surrounds him with luxury and pleasure. Siddhartha is kept carefully occupied within the family’s various palaces so he is insulated from any suffering, impermanence, or ugliness that might spark spiritual questions in him.
Nonetheless, as he becomes a young man, Siddhartha grows curious about the wider world. He asks his charioteer, Channa, to take him on trips through the city surrounding the palace. On his first trip, Siddhartha sees a very old person. He asks Channa what strange condition has afflicted this person, and Channa replies that the person was old, and that all human beings were subject to aging. On a subsequent trip, the same shock and explanation unfold when the privileged young man sees a sick person, and then a corpse. In a fourth trip, Siddhartha sees a spiritual renunciate meditating peacefully. [iii]
Great spiritual distress arises in the young man as he recognizes ignorant people are “horrified, humiliated, and disgusted” [iv] when they encounter old age, disease, and death, as if they themselves weren’t also subject to them. Siddhartha’s intoxication with youth, health, and life drop away, and he sees the path of renunciation as “rest.”[v] He wonders how beings might be able to find true peace when life is so fleeting, and the anguish of old age, disease, loss, pain, and death are inevitable.
Not long after this, Siddhartha decides to leave home on a spiritual quest. He sneaks out in the dead of night with the assistance of Channa. At a safe distance from the palace, the young man cuts off his hair and exchanges his fine robes with the simple garments of someone who was passing by. He sends Channa back to the palace and sets out looking for a spiritual teacher.
The Teaching: Spiritual dissatisfaction, restlessness, or angst can arise even if we are very fortunate, surrounded by pleasant circumstances. There is a Buddhist term for the spiritual urgency that caused Siddhartha to leave home: samvega. It’s not a commonly used word even in Buddhism, but it describes an experience that is common to almost anyone on the Buddhist path. This is a description by Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
[Samvega] is a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range—at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that comes with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complicity, complacency, and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle.[vi]
In response to samvega, some of us become depressed or anxious, or try to distract ourselves or numb out. We may not understand why we feel this way, especially if are living a relatively comfortable life. Others around us may not understand at all, and we may feel pressure to suppress our samvega and just accept life as we understand it.
In response to samvega, though, a determination to find a better way to live may arise in us, especially if we encounter something inspiring like Siddhartha did when he saw the spiritual renunciate meditating. In Mahayana Buddhism, we call this bodhicitta, or the Way-Seeking Mind. It is deeply valued and viewed as the essential prerequisite to spiritual practice. You can’t make it arise in someone, and it’s a mystery that it has arisen in us. Our bodhicitta causes us to seek and then to follow a spiritual path.
Siddhartha’s actions in leaving home to become a forest-dwelling renunciate (he also leaves behind a wife and son) are severe. Very few Buddhists emulate him literally by becoming monastics, but Siddhartha’s choice speaks to how intensely samvega can manifest, and to the profound importance of spiritual questioning and practice. Our practice is a life-or-death matter.
Part 2: The Quest for Liberation and Settling on the Middle Way
After leaving home, Siddartha embarks on an intense, full-time spiritual quest that lasts six years. First, he studies with holy man and meditation teacher Alara Kalama. After some time, Siddhartha masters the teachings and practices, and Kalama accepts him as his equal and invites him to teach. Despite this, Siddhartha thinks to himself, “This Dhamma [teaching] leads not to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to stilling, to direct knowledge, to Awakening, nor to Unbinding (nibbana), but only to reappearance in the dimension of nothingness.”[vii]
Dissatisfied, Siddhartha leaves Kalama and ends up studying with Uddaka Ramaputta. The young man masters Ramaputta’s teaching as well, and is accepted as his equal and invited to teach, but again Siddhartha decides what he has learned doesn’t lead to the Awakening he seeks, but “only to reappearance in the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception.” Siddhartha leaves Ramaputta as well.
Next, Siddhartha seeks liberation through the practice of extreme asceticism. He experiments with supreme tests of mental and physical discipline. Later, he describes this effort:
I beat down, constrained, & crushed my mind with my awareness. As I did so, sweat poured from my armpits. And although tireless persistence was aroused in me, and unmuddled mindfulness established, my body was aroused & uncalm because of the painful exertion. [viii]
The young spiritual aspirant then tries the practice of “non-breathing,” and when that doesn’t work, he goes without food. The deities beg him not to kill himself, saying they will infuse his body with nutriments through supernatural means if he keeps starving himself, so Siddhartha eats only the bare minimum to keep him alive. Finally, reduced to a skeleton covered with leathery skin, he reflects that no one has ever practiced ascetism to this extent before, yet he still hasn’t “attained any superior human state, any distinction in knowledge or vision worthy of the noble ones.” [ix] “Could there be another path to Awakening?” he wonders.
Then Siddhartha recalls a time when he was a child, sitting in the shade of a tree while his father was working. The young boy had spontaneously entered a very calm and natural meditative state. The adult Siddhartha decides to try this approach and accepts a modest meal from a donor in order to regain enough strength for the purpose. He then settles into meditation, and it is not long before he attains the liberation and understanding he was seeking.
The Teaching: The Buddha is revered in a large part because of his vision and determination. He was guided by his own mind, heart, and direct experience, not by the culture that surrounded him – whether that was the culture of his early life of material wealth and comfort, or the spiritual cultures of his time. Despite being surrounded by people who told him he already had everything worth seeking, he kept up his search.
What was Siddhartha Gautama looking for? What drove him to nearly starve himself to death? This is difficult to put into words. Our seeking is like his seeking, if we are courageous enough to admit we are not yet satisfied, if we are bold enough to keep searching even if we can’t yet identify what it is we’re looking for. As we search, we may feel somewhat crazy or extreme, like the skeletal Siddhartha practicing asceticism in the forest. If we didn’t have the example of the Buddha to reassure us that we really can find a resolution to our spiritual angst, we might stop seeking and resign ourselves to living with it.
The Buddha was not satisfied even after he mastered the most rigorous meditative practices of his day. This suggests that he was not simply seeking a temporary means to quell his existential angst. Presumably he could retreat into “nothingness” or the realm of “neither perception nor non-perception” at any time and be untroubled by the conundrum of human suffering. Siddhartha was looking for a way out of suffering that would be transformative and lasting. And – most importantly for us – he was looking for a way that anyone could take. It’s like the Buddha was a physician seeking a definitive cure for a disease, rather than being satisfied with treating symptoms or subscribing pain killers.
The story of the Buddha’s spiritual search and struggle also says a lot about what the Buddhist path is not. It is not an effort to escape into a rarified meditative state where we feel nothing. It is not a battle to subdue the flesh. Nor is it relaxing comfortably at home and simply enjoying the pleasures life brings our way. So, what is it? Whatever it is, it requires us to walk what the Buddha would later call the “Middle Way,” or the dynamic path between the extremes of indulgence and asceticism.
The Buddhist Middle Way applies to all aspects of our life, not just to the strictness of our practice. Whenever we are faced with a dualistic choice – where at least one of the options is undesirable, but the opposite is also not ideal – we refuse to get caught in either extreme and instead seek another way. Effective practice, for example, involves neither emotional suppression nor indulgence of all emotions; neither stinginess nor giving indiscriminately without regard to our own well-being; neither mindless submission to authority nor clinging to our own opinions. Walking the Middle Way requires attentiveness and care as we adjust our behavior based on what is most beneficial at any given time.
Part 3: Facing the Armies of Mara and Attainment of Complete Liberation
Once Siddhartha decides to try the form of meditation he had spontaneously discovered as a child, he settles down to meditate under a tree. Doing so, he vows, “Let my skin, and sinews, and bones become dry, and welcome! And let all the flesh and blood in my body dry up! but never from this seat will I stir, until I have attained the supreme and absolute wisdom!”[x] (He may have given up extreme, life-threatening asceticism, but he was still pretty hard core compared to most of us.)
Siddhartha’s audacity provokes the god Mara, who wants sentient beings to remain stuck in his realm of desire through the cycle of rebirth. He wants to prevent the Buddha from finding and teaching a path of liberation from the desire realm that will forever undermine Mara’s power. Therefore, Mara summons his unimaginably large army and wages a battle against Siddhartha as the young man sits in meditation. The army includes an elephant 150 leagues high, named “Girded-with-mountains.”[xi] When Siddhartha is unfazed, Mara attacks in other ways, including with a torrential rainstorm, gale-force winds, a shower of rocks, and dense darkness.
All such attacks prove fruitless, so Mara challenges Siddhartha, asking him to present someone able to bear witness to the young man’s worthiness to claim the seat of enlightenment. Siddhartha replies that the earth itself will bear him witness. He reaches down with his right hand to touch the earth and it cries, “I am witness.” [xii] This causes Girded-with-Mountains to kneel before the Buddha, and Mara’s army flees in all directions. Mara is defeated.
Finally able to concentrate undisturbed, Siddhartha goes deeply into meditation and has a series of pivotal insights. (I explain these at length in Episode 9 – Shakyamuni Buddha’s Enlightenment: What Did He Realize?) He resolves his doubts and conceives of the path of practice that leads to complete liberation from stress and suffering. He then follows each of the steps on that path himself, confirming its efficacy. Later, the Buddha describes what went through his mind at this moment:
My heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, was released from the fermentation of sensuality, released from the fermentation of becoming, released from the fermentation of ignorance. With release, there was the knowledge, ‘Released.’ I discerned that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done…’[xiii]
The Teaching: Ultimately, the Buddha pushes through the final challenges of his spiritual search through the power of vow. Vow is very central in Buddhism, whether we are making a vow to behave ethically, to attain spiritual insight, or to manifest compassion toward all beings. No Buddhist vows are ever forced on us; rather, they are choices we make in order to identify our own deepest aspirations, and to shape our lives in accordance with them. Vows aren’t a panacea for laziness or doubt, but we also rarely accomplish anything significant without setting a strong intention to do so. (See Episode 124 – The Buddhist Practice of Vow: Giving Shape to Our Lives.)
The Buddha’s story illustrates the power of vow, but also the difficulty of fulfilling vows. He no sooner settles down for his final meditation, and Mara starts to wage war on him. As soon as we set an intention, we face challenges. Because we have chosen a direction to take, we will inevitably encounter obstacles. If we had no direction, we would just change course when we encountered an obstacle and it probably wouldn’t even seem like an obstacle to us.
Mara’s threats and confrontations suggest that Siddhartha did not find the ultimate push to enlightenment easy. Although the story places the challenges outside the Buddha, in the person of Mara, it is clear the Buddha experienced physical discomfort, fear, and doubt. These trials are familiar to anyone who has meditated and questioned their own fundamental views of themselves and the world. It is encouraging that the Buddha, too, faced these challenges, and succeeded, nonetheless.
The way in which Siddhartha defeated Mara is also deeply significant. The young man did not debate Mara or summon his own armies. While the devas – heavenly beings – were watching the drama, they could not intervene on Siddhartha’s behalf; he had to fight his own battle, just as we do. In response to the challenges, the Buddha remained steadfastly in meditation. When he needed support, he found it by reaching down and touching the earth. Similarly, those of us on the Buddhist path do not seek escape or supernatural answers, but find strength in our direct, personal, grounded experience. Although our practice is our own, we are also supported by the great Earth and by so much more.
Part 4: A Lifetime of Teaching
After his awakening, the Buddha thinks,
This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation [of people] delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment.[xiv]
The Buddha doubts whether it would be worth trying to teach the path he has discovered to others. The god Brahma Sahampati, is able to perceive the Buddha’s thoughts, laments that the world will be lost because the Self-Awakened One doesn’t want to teach. He appears before Shakyamuni and begs him to share the Dharma (his teachings), promising him “there will be those who understand.” [xv]
The Buddha then finds a group of ascetics he used to practice with, and teaches them about the Middle Way, the Eightfold Noble Path, and the Four Noble Truths. Given how much spiritual practice they have already done, the ascetics quickly understand and attain awakening and liberation. Then the Buddha spends the next 45 years teaching anyone who requests it – male and female monastics, lay men and lay women, rich and poor. He turned away no one, teaching skeptics, practitioners of other religions, and people of any social caste. Eventually Shakyamuni even converted a number of his relatives, including his aunt and step-mother Mahapajapati and his son Rahula.
The Teaching: The Buddha’s initial reticence to teach illustrates two things. First, the Dharma (the teaching and practice) is difficult for us to understand and accept. While the way is open to everyone and each of us is capable of awakening in the same way Shakyamuni did, our culture, conditioning, and naturally self-centered state makes the practice challenging. Buddhism is not a religion that promises ease and redemption simply through acceptance of a creed or belief in something. It requires effort. When we find the path arduous, frustrating, demanding, or bewildering, we can remind ourselves that the Buddha was well aware it wasn’t easy, but he promised us it was worth it.
The Buddha’s teaching career demonstrates that the way of practice he laid out for us is open to anyone. He didn’t reserve it only for spiritual adepts, renunciates, men, or young people. He didn’t exclude kings, skeptics, or businessmen. Practice is beneficial to us all, no matter whether we end up achieving perfect enlightenment in this lifetime or not. It is said Shakyamuni was never alone from the beginning of his teaching until he died, illustrating how the goal of Buddhist practice is a liberation that results in great compassion and generosity toward others.
Buddha’s Life Story Part 5: Final Instructions to the Sangha and Death
Around the age of 80, Shakyamuni Buddha felt the physical effects of aging like anyone. As he felt death approaching, he tells his disciple Ananda that he has no further teachings to give, that the Buddhist community has everything it needs to continue, saying:
…the Tathagata [the Buddha] has no such idea as that it is he who should lead the community of [monks], or that the community depends upon him… Now I am frail, Ananda, old, aged, far gone in years. This is my eightieth year, and my life is spent. Even as an old cart, Ananda, is held together with much difficulty, so the body of the Tathagata is kept going only with supports… Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge. [xvi]
The Buddha then passes away, surrounded by many loving disciples. After his death, the community establishes a canon of his teachings and instructions. The community subsequently maintains the Dharma and Sangha for over 2,500 years. Generation after generation of Buddhist practitioners experience awakening themselves, and then teach others.
The Teaching: While Shakyamuni Buddha is revered as an amazing spiritual master and as a skilled, compassionate teacher, Buddhism is not dependent on his existence except as the person who discovered and taught our path of practice. He is not a savior to be prayed to; even if you believe he continues to exist in some sense, in some realm, he cannot do our practice for us. He left us the teachings we need to liberate ourselves. The Buddha’s success lies not in his own liberation, but in his creation of a path that allows others to awaken as well.
Being “islands” or “refuges” unto ourselves does not mean we avoid the advice of wise people and cling to our own opinions, it means we ultimately have to trust our own, direct experience. The Buddha and our spiritual teachers tell us what to look for, but we have to realize it for ourselves. The “Dhamma” or “Dharma” refers to the Buddhist teachings but also to truth. Making the Dharma our refuge and seeking no other refuge doesn’t mean we practice Buddhism in a fundamentalist or exclusive way, but that we seek liberation through facing, accepting, and manifesting the truth no matter what. Seeking a refuge other than the truth is comforting ourselves with delusions or temporarily relieving our suffering with distraction or intoxication.
Finally, the Buddha’s life story conveys the fact that Buddhism does not allow us to escape aging and death, but it does allow us to make full use of this life, and to gracefully accept the end when it comes.
I’m sure there are other lessons we can take from the Buddha’s life story, but these are some of the main ones. I hope this has helped you appreciate how a study of basic Buddhist teachings ought to begin with the story of the Buddha’s life.
Endnotes
[i] Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (pp. 23-24). Joseph Campbell Foundation. Kindle Edition. (Original edition copyright © 1949 by Bollingen Foundation and published by Pantheon Books)
[ii] “Nalaka Sutta: To Nalaka” (Sn 3.11), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.3.11.than.html.
[iii] From the “Introduction to the Jataka” in Warren 1896
[iv] “Sukhamala Sutta: Refinement” (AN 3.38), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 1 December 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.038.than.html.
[v] “Sukhamala Sutta: Refinement” (AN 3.38), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 1 December 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.038.than.html.
[vi] Thanissaro, “Affirming the Truths of the Heart: The Buddhist Teachings on Samvega & Pasada” (https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/NobleStrategy/Section0004.html)
[vii] “Maha-Saccaka Sutta: The Longer Discourse to Saccaka” (MN 36), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.036.than.html.
[viii] Ibid
[ix] Ibid
[x] From the “Introduction to the Jataka” in Rhys Davids 1878
[xi] Ibid
[xii] Ibid
[xiii] “Maha-Saccaka Sutta: The Longer Discourse to Saccaka” (MN 36), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.036.than.html.
[xiv] “Ayacana Sutta: The Request” (SN 6.1), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn06/sn06.001.than.html.
[xv] “Ayacana Sutta: The Request” (SN 6.1), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn06/sn06.001.than.html.
[xvi] Ibid
