Homeless

Author: * Ningyo Minamoto - 3 Posts on this thread out of 640 Posts sitewide.
Date: Sep 22, 2006 - 02:45

The King was increasingly worried as he recalled the hermit’s prophecy and tried in every possible way to cheer the Prince and to turn his thoughts in other directions. The King arranged the marriage of the Prince at the age of nineteen to the Princess Yashodhara. She was the daughter of Suprabuddha, the Lord of Devadaha Castle and a brother of the late Queen Maya.

For ten years, in the different Pavilions of Spring, Autumn and the Rainy Season, the Prince was immersed in rounds of music, dancing and pleasure, but always his thoughts returned to the problem of suffering of human life. “The luxuries of the palace, this healthy body, this rejoicing youth! What do they mean to me?” he thought. “Some day we may be sick, we shall become aged; from death there is no escape. Pride of youth, pride of health, pride of existence – all thoughtful people should cast they aside. If he looks in the right way he recognizes the true nature of sickness, old age and death, and he searches for meaning in that which transcends all human sufferings. In my life of pleasures I seem to be looking in the wrong way.”

Thus the spiritual struggle went on in the mind of the Prince until his only child, Rahula, was born when he was 29. This seemed to bring things to a climax, for he then decided to leave the palace and look for the solution of his spiritual unrest in the homeless life of a mendicant.

He left the castle one night with only his charioteer, Chandaka, and his favorite horse, the snow-white Kanthaka. His anguish did not end and many devils tempted him saying: “You would do better to return to the castle for the whole world would soon be yours.” But he told the devil that he did not want the whole world. So he shaved his head and turned his steps toward the south, carrying a begging bowl in his hand.

The Prince first visited the hermit Bhagava and watched the ascetic practices. He then went to Arada Kalama and Udraka Ramaputra to learn their methods of attaining Enlightenment through meditation; but after practicing them for a time he became convinced that they would not lead him to Enlightenment. Finally, he went to the land of Magadha and practiced asceticism in the forest of Uruvilva on the banks of the Nairanjana River, which flows by the Gaya Village. The methods of his practice where unbelievably rigorous. He spurred himself on with the though that “no ascetic in the past, none in the present, and none in the future, ever has practiced or ever will practice more earnestly than I do.” Still the prince could not realize his goal.

~~adapted from The Teaching of Buddha, ed. Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, Tokyo~~
images from: www.cambodianbuddhist.org and www.dzogchen.org