REsources for Living
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What does it take to become enlightened? What is required in order to awaken to the truth of the universe? How do you go from your ordinary “I wonder if we’re out of milk?” frame of mind into a higher consciousness? The world’s most famous story of awakening is the story of how Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha.
Siddhartha was born in India around 566 BC, to King Suddhodana and Queen Maya. Soon after Prince Siddhartha was born, a wise man prophesied that he would become either a great king or a great spiritual leader. The King had no doubt about the life he wanted for his beloved son: he would be a great ruler, an emperor, even! But how to prevent his son from being drawn to the religious life? He told Queen Maya, “I will make life in the palace so wonderful that our son will never want to leave. Everything he sees will be perfect, and he will never have cause to long for more.”
Eventually, however, Siddhartha became bored with the sheltered luxury of palace life and wanted to see the outside world. In spite of his father’s best efforts as the ultimate helicopter parent, on four trips outside the palace Siddhartha saw four things that changed his life. On the first three trips, he saw sickness, old age and death. The very existence of suffering came as a complete shock. He asked himself, “How can I enjoy a life of pleasure when there is so much suffering in the world?”
On his fourth trip, he saw a wandering monk who had given up everything he owned to seek an end to suffering. “I shall be like him.” Siddhartha thought.
Leaving his kingdom and loved ones behind, Siddhartha became a wandering monk. He cut off his hair to show that he had renounced the worldly lifestyle, wore ragged robes, and wandered from place to place. In his search for truth, he studied with the wisest teachers of his day. Alas, none of them knew how to end suffering, so he continued the search on his own.
For six years he sat in meditation and ate only roots, leaves and fruit. At times he ate nothing. But a life of extreme hardship got him no closer to enlightenment. Neither luxury of his early life nor the deprivation of his life as a monk gave him a path to enlightenment.
On a full-moon day in May, he sat under the Bodhi tree in deep meditation, and he decided that he would not leave that spot until he found an end to suffering. Considering that he had already devoted years to seeking the end of suffering, without much of anything to show for his pains, it might have been a reckless decision. Nonetheless, it was in meditation under the tree that Siddhartha finally came to understand the cause and the cure for suffering. Siddhartha became the Buddha, The Awakened One.
It seems to me that this story has a few things to say about the process of becoming awakened. For starters, it requires being willing to see the world as it really is. This can be a pretty scary process. It’s no fun to deal with the ever-present reality of sickness, aging and death, knowing that these things will happen to us and every one we know eventually. It’s also hard to live with the knowledge of climate change, massive poverty and the extinction of species. If you have the choice to stay in the palace, it can be a lot more pleasant. But enlightenment, awakening, the possibility of change, only comes when you are willing and able to see things as they truly are.
The story also implies that awakening requires not only commitment and courage, but also a readiness to try new things. If luxury didn’t bring Siddhartha understanding, neither did the extremes of poverty and starvation. Some people come into liberal religion determined to shed every aspect of a religion that left them feeling locked behind the palace walls. And sometimes those same people find that they have locked themselves away in a different palace that they built as a reaction to the first—just as restrictive, but with a different set of rules. Awakening is a process that requires us to keep looking, to keep opening doors, and, ultimately, to be willing to sit with ourselves and our lack of knowing.
In the end, I suppose awakening comes from the ability to hold on to both sides of the paradox: to understand, like the Buddha, that release from suffering comes from accepting that suffering is inevitable and not trying to hold on to the things we desire. Perhaps it also means understanding that there is nothing so important as our individual rights and personal gifts, other than our connection and responsibility to our communities. Or that there is no God, because God is everywhere. Or, perhaps, that there is no path to enlightenment, other than being on the path.
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