Legend of the Buddha
Leaving the Palace
Young Siddhartha was forbidden to leave his fathers palace.
When he had been born, a holy man predicted he would become either a great king like his father, or a great spiritual leader. His father was determined he would follow in his footsteps and become a king. So he kept him in the walls of his palace, distracted by luxury, dancing girls, and nice food…
But Siddhartha became bored, and curious as to what lay beyond the walls of this palace. When he secretly left the palace, he came upon the realities of old age, sickness and death for the first time…these sights shocked him to the core.
Then one day he saw a forth sight- a holy man – one who had renounced the worldly life- who seemed to carry himself with an air of peace.
He decided that he too would leave home and search for an answer to the riddle of existence:
"Suppose I, being subject to birth, seek the unborn, being subject to sorrow; seek the sorrowless, being subject to death; seek the Deathless!"
To become fulfilled, we may not need to literally leave home, but to live life fully, to find truth; to grow, we too need to leave the confines of the familiar, to leave behind distractions, whatever is holding us back, to be open to something new.
To do this we need to see as Siddhartha, the Buddha to be, saw, that we will one day grow old, get sick and die. Time is running out.
It is fascinating to me, that 2500 years or so later- with all our science and medicine, with all our accumulated knowledge, we are still basically in the same existential position as Siddhartha - we still haven’t come to terms with old age, sickness and death- we’re still doing all we can to ignore these realities.
If we were really fully awake to these ‘inconvenient truths’ we would live life more vividly, less prone to pettiness, banality and hostility.
The Buddha:
“Others do not realise that we are all heading for death. Those who do realize will compose their quarrels.” *
For my first post, where better place to start than the Legend of the Buddha?
It is after all the wellspring of the Buddhist Tradition.
I made this animated video about the Life of the Buddha- up to the point his gains enlightenment- which you can see here: