Reading Notes: The Life of the Buddha, Part A - The Great Truths

Notes:

My junior year of high school, I ran across the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (a great read, by the way, highly recommend) in my local public library and decided to read it. The book, much like the stories I'm reading this week, described the life of Siddhartha Gautama and how he came to be the Buddha. The book and these stories are actually extremely similar. That is just some background as to why I chose to read this particular unit this week.

That being said, this story in particular, The Great Truths, was the most compelling one of today's readings. It is the turning point in Siddhartha's life, his "call to adventure" according to Campbell's template of the hero's journey. Siddhartha had lived his whole life surrounded by luxury and shielded from any kind of suffering. Once he was exposed to three of humanity's greatest ills: old age, sickness, and death, he lost his sense of contentedness. These things are unavoidable, and according to the beliefs of the time, men were destined to endure these things over and over, as every time they died, they were reborn. Siddhartha saw only endless suffering in his future, and felt a profound sense of distress.

A monk, sent by the Gods, appears to him and tells him about his life, free of passion and pleasures, sustained only by solitude and the charity of strangers. That life appealed to Siddhartha, and he went to tell his father he was leaving the palace to become a monk.

From what I know about Buddhism, the source of all suffering is desire. As such, the monk was showing Siddhartha a way to escape eternal suffering, by excluding pleasure and passion from his life. For someone who's sense of being and idea of the world has been completely destroyed, of course this seems attractive. It's an attractive idea, honestly.

Siddhartha Leaves the Palace (Source: Buddhist Studies)

Source: The Life of Buddha by Andre Ferdinand Herold (1922)