Siddhartha Gotama, Prince of the Shakyas, awakened to Buddhahood more than twenty-five hundred years ago. What does that extraordinary event mean for us now, all these centuries later? Does his life and enlightenment have relevance for our own lives, for our own spiritual journeys? In hearing the story of Prince Siddhartha, of how he became a Buddha, we can consider different levels of meaning and significance.
The most familiar level is the Buddha as a particular person in history. He lived in a small kingdom near what is now the border of Nepal and India in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. At the age of thirty-five he had a remarkable spiritual awakening. When we know the elements of his life story, we relate in a very human way, under¬standing his struggles, his quest, and his enlightenment from the perspective of one human being to another.
At Siddhartha’s birth, a sage predicted that either he would become a world monarch or he would renounce the world and become a Buddha, an Awakened One. The Bodhisattva’s father (Bodhisattva is the word for a being destined for perfect enlightenment; this is how the Buddha is referred to prior to his awakening), wishing for his son to become a worldly ruler like himself, surrounded Siddhar¬tha with all the pleasures of the senses, occupying him entirely with the delights of the world. The king provided the young prince with different palaces for each of the seasons, with musicians, dancers, and beautiful companions to entertain him. The king did everything within his power to banish all unpleasantness from Siddhartha’s life.
At the age of twenty-nine, the prince decided to leave the palace grounds and explore the life of the city around him. Remembering the early prophecy, the king worried that Siddhartha might encounter something disturbing and thus be prompted to question his life of luxury, so he ordered all unpleasant sights to be removed. He had the buildings freshly painted, flowers and incense placed all about, and everyone who was suffering hidden away. But the Bodhisattva’s calling was not so easily denied.
It is said that heavenly messengers, celestial beings, appeared to him as he rode throughout the city. The first of these messengers appeared as an old person, stricken with infirmities. The second messenger appeared as a person suffering greatly with disease. The third appeared as a corpse. The prince was startled at each encounter, because in his protected young life he had never come into con¬tact with old age, sickness, or death. Seeing these aspects of life for the first time touched him deeply. He questioned his charioteer about what he was seeing and whether everyone was subject to this fate. The charioteer replied that it is inevitable for all who take birth to grow older, to get sick, and to die. The last of the heavenly messengers appeared to the prince as a wandering monk. Questioned again, the charioteer answered that this was someone who had renounced the world in order to seek enlightenment and liberation.
These four heavenly messengers awakened within the Bodhisattva the energy of countless lifetimes of practice; they awakened within him both the deep sense of inquiry about the sufferings of life and the recognition that freedom is possible. Siddhartha reflected, “Why should I, who am subject to decay and death, also seek that which is subject to decay and death? What is it that’s born? What is it that dies?”
After encountering the four heavenly messengers, the Bodhisattva left the palace with all its pleasures and comforts in order to seek liberation. Siddhartha first went to different teachers of concentra¬tion meditation and mastered all the levels of meditative absorption. Yet even after attaining the highest levels of concentration, he real¬ized he was still not free. He saw that even the highest of these states was not the Unconditioned, that which is beyond birth and death.
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