I turned away from Kamthaka’s corpse and glanced over at Chandaka. “In time, friend charioteer, my leaving the palace this night will come to be known as the ‘Great Going Forth.’”
“Excellent, my lord.”
“It is now time for me to begin attaining immortality, Chandaka. Farewell!” With that, feeling full of confidence and vigor, I strode manfully into the forest. “I look like the peak of a golden mountain,” I remember thinking to myself as I walked. “Or maybe more like a cross between a cloud and an elephant. Or possibly a lion and the moon—or some mix of those things in any case.” (ASV 5:26)
It was a dark night; consequently, it was quite helpful when some gods appeared and lit torches for me—a lot of torches, actually—a quarter of a million, to be precise. Less helpful but still nice was the way millions of musical instruments floated around me, playing songs in my honor as I walked. (NK) Not helpful in the least, frankly, was the way some bird-like gods sprinkled perfume and powder down on me. These bird-gods dumped so much perfume and powder on me that before long the trail was nothing but a thick, gloppy mess. Still, the bird-gods wouldn’t stop. I finally decided the only way to get them to quit what they were doing was to stop walking, which I did. “What I have done this night is the single boldest step any human has ever taken,” I announced loudly. “I do it not for my own sake but for the sake of all humanity, so that they might not suffer! HEAR ME NOW, UNIVERSE, OH HEAR ME, I WILL NOW BEGIN TO CURE YOU!”
6
Somewhat strangely, it took me six years to actually discover the cure. Even in hindsight, I’m still not quite sure why things took so long. I already knew that life was suffering. I’d known that since the awful “Four Sights” day with Chandaka, when I’d first grasped that sickness, old age and death were parts of human existence. I also already knew by this time that all suffering stemmed from desire; that was the reason I had left Father’s palace and renounced all of my worldly goods. I further knew that the only way to escape suffering was to escape desire. What I did not yet know was how to escape desire. Could one escape desire, I sometimes wondered to myself? It seemed “built-in” to human nature. Could it actually be overcome? Years passed with no answer to this question.
It’s not that I wasn’t searching for the answer; I definitely was. I became a “shamana,” a seeker of the truth. I wandered far and wide across the Ganges Plain, searching for wise men who I felt could help me find the truth. The gurus Alara Kalama and Ramaputta, between them, taught me to meditate. I was instantly gifted at meditation; literally no one had ever been as good at meditation as me before; people would come from miles around just to watch me meditate, dazzled by the extremely rarefied states of “jhana” (concentration) which I regularly achieved. (AP 1:160–167) Again, I say this not out of “ego,” because, again, I have no “ego;” it is simply the case that I was a meditation “prodigy.”
Alara Kalama and Ramaputta each asked me to continue on with them. “You are a meditating genius, Siddhartha,” they both said to me. “Won’t you please take over for me?” In both cases I demurred; I was not yet ready to be a teacher because I had not yet found the answer. “Life is pain,” my mind repeated over and over again. “But how to escape the pain?”
After leaving my two teachers, I went back to the forest and spent the next several years living with five other ascetics, Kondanna being the oldest and wisest of them. (Kondanna had actually been one of the seers who my father had brought in to predict my future when I was a baby—the only one who had predicted correctly, in fact.) (NK) The six of us spent our time trying to burn off bad “karma.” More on karma later, but the gist of it is this: You get what you deserve in this world. If you are sick, poor, crippled, ugly, stupid—well, you deserve that. If, on the other hand, you are a rich, handsome genius-prince—well, you deserve that too. (SK; SAL)
The five ascetics and I all believed that the way to eliminate bad karma was to suffer as much as possible in this lifetime so that we might suffer less in the next lifetime. An annoying question did occur to me once or twice during this difficult stretch: “If I am suffering this badly, does that mean that I ‘deserve’ it?” The answer to this question, however, was obvious: I was choosing to suffer and that was totally different.
The five ascetics and I practiced extreme self-denial. Our goal was to overcome our physical body, to free ourselves from hunger, from “appetites” of all kinds, in fact. Sometimes I ate nothing but rocks for days; other times I ate air, yet other times I ate cow manure. A few times I ate my own feces. (ASV 7:15–16; MJ 12) I remember thinking at one point, “What if I stopped eating entirely?” Immediately afterwards, however, some gods appeared before me and said, “Please, sir, do not cut off your food intake. If you do, we will have no choice but to inject food directly into your pores.” “Into my pores?” I replied. “How is that even possible? My pores aren’t the size of little mouths!”
