Shakyamuni mantra

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The Buddha’s biography: Spiritual Quest and Awakening

The Buddha found two principle teachers in his quest for Awakening: Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta (Uddaka was the disciple of Rama, his father, whose teachings he promulgated). These teachers seem to have been adept meditators who explored mystical states of mind. The Buddha is said to have excelled at exploring these altered states of consciousness, but was convinced that true insight continued to elude him.

Exalted states of mind may be blissfully enjoyable, but they inevitably end, they can be seen as escapist or even selfish, and they bring no answer to the problem of death itself. Pleasant meditation experiences also do not provide life with a sense of meaning.

Siddhartha seems to have considered even at that time in his life that a major problem in life is dealing with desire, which is the source of much of our suffering. While the meditations on no-thingness and non-perception that he was practicing brought an attenuation of desire, and therefore reduced his suffering, desire still remained, albeit as a quasi-dormant force.

Siddhartha then experimented with extreme asceticism, which at that time was seen as a powerful spiritual practice. The idea behind ascetic practice was that the body, with its appetites and instincts, was the source of desire and therefore of suffering. If the desires of the body could be mastered through fasting, holding the breath, and exposure of the body to pain, then the spirit would be liberated from desire and would be free to experience unending bliss.

The Buddha, however, found that these ascetic practices brought no genuine spiritual benefits and in fact, being based on self-hatred, that they were counterproductive and that the logical outcome of their practice was that he would die of starvation. He therefore decided to give up these practices and was rejected by the small gathering of followers that had gathered around him.

The Buddha-to-be during his ascetic phase.

He is said then to have recalled sitting quietly under a Rose-apple tree in his youth, watching his father plowing a field, and slipping effortlessly into a natural absorption calle the first dhyana, and decided that this was a more promising path to the spiritual Awakening that he sought.

I thought: “I recall once, when my father the Sakyan was working, and I was sitting in the cool shade of a rose-apple tree, then — quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful mental qualities — I entered and remained in the first jhana: rapture and pleasure born from withdrawal, accompanied by directed thought and evaluation. Could that be the path to Awakening?” Then, following on that memory, came the realization: “That is the path to Awakening.”

The significance of this can, however, appear to be puzzling, given that Siddhartha had subsequently experienced even more exalted states of mind during his time with Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta. It’s possible that the essential difference was that the childhood experience was free from striving, although that’s not entirely convincing. It seems likely, from the Pali account, that the Buddha had realized that his ascetic practice had made him afraid of experiencing pleasure, and convinced that awakening could only be found through painful means:

So why am I afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities?

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