Shakyamuni mantra

The Buddha’s biography: Spiritual Quest and Awakening (cont.)

At Uruvela on the bank of the Nerañjara River, having broken his fast and having regained his strength, Siddhartha once more began exploring the path of meditation, and developed an extraordinary degree of mental concentration, accompanied by great bliss. Neither of these things in themselves bring spiritual awakening, so the key point here is that he had gained the tools for developing penetrating insight.

He had developed a state of equanimity in which he responded to pleasure and pain without either pushing them away or clinging to them. He had clung to pleasure and pushed away an awareness of suffering in his early life and in his meditation training with his two teachers, and he had clung to suffering and seen pleasure as a dangerous distraction during his ascetic phase. These approaches had caused suffering rather than dispelling it. In this new phase of his spiritual path he had found a middle way, accepting both pain and suffering without craving or aversion.

He had also developed great stability of mind — onepointedness — that allowed him to reflect deeply. With onepointed attention, Siddhartha examined the nature of suffering, and realized that all suffering comes from craving. He also saw that all of the things that we try to cling to in life are impermanent and insubstantial; there is no being, only becoming; there are no things, only processes.

Because all things are impermanent, there is in reality nothing to cling to. Penetrating deeply into the reality of this, Siddhartha let go of the very basis of craving, and attained spiritual awakening, free from suffering. He had become the Buddha, the Awakened One.

This spiritual realization did not come easily. On the eve of his awakening (or shortly afterwards, according to some traditions) the Buddha was assailed by the demon, Mara, who is a personification of the forces of delusion. In the simplest and least mythological account of this confrontation, the Buddha describes sensual desire, hunger and thirst, and various other distractions as being Mara’s tenfold army.

In other accounts the confrontation is teased out and expanded. In one tale, Mara sends his daughters to distract the Buddha. In another he sends his sons in the form of a ferocious army — literal this time rather than figurative — to create fear and distraction. When both of these approaches fail to divert the Buddha from his quest, Mara turns to the sneakiest trick of all, adopting the guise of a lawyer (thanks for Dharmacari Saramati for this witty observation) and questions Siddhartha’s right to sit on the diamond throne.

The Buddha dismisses this last attack by calling the earth goddess, Drdha, to witness his lifetimes of spiritual practice.

We can take these accounts to indicate that the Buddha’s enlightenment was not a pleasant journey through mental states of ever-ascending sublimity, but involved a deep and prolonged encounter with the darker forces in his psyche.

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