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The Life of the Buddha
The central Buddhist image is the seated Buddha, which appears on millions of shrines and provides the focal point for temples across the Buddhist world. These images are famous for the sense of peace they exude. For Buddhists, they express all the qualities of Enlightenment, and are a focus of Buddhist devotional rituals.
But a story goes along with the image that explains how the Buddha came to be enlightened. This is the story of the Buddha’s spiritual path, and Buddhists keep telling it because it provides a symbolic map that shapes how we live and practice.
Like all great myths, the stories of the Buddha’s life are rich in meaning. Some may well be based on historical events, and in the discourses of early Buddhism we find many accounts of the Buddha’s activities that are easily recognisable descriptions of a human being. Other elements concern supernatural events and we could call them ‘legendary’, but they all carry a meaning for anyone wanting to follow the Buddha’s path. Here are some episodes that are particularly rich in this symbolic or archetypal meaning.
Traditional accounts of the Buddha’s biography start with his previous lives as a ‘bodhisattva’ – a being destined for Enlightenment – who developed the qualities that enabled him to make a decisive breakthrough by acting with compassion and selflessness.
The Four Sights
The story of this life starts with his birth in a wealthy family (some versions say he was a prince), in the city of Kapilavastu, somewhere around the border between India and Nepal, with the name Siddhartha Gautama. Following a privileged upbringing, Siddhartha left the palace and witnessed the Four Sights. The first three were an old man, a sick man and a dead man, and seeing them Siddhartha knew he could not continue to live as he had. A life that pushed the fundamental problems of existence to one side was not worth living, and according to one ancient version of the Buddha’s life he said to himself, ‘This is the end appointed to all creatures, and yet the world throws off all fear and is infatuated. Hard indeed must be the hearts of men who can be so self composed.’
Siddhartha recognised that he was living within the deeply unsatisfactory realm of samsara, and the attitude of seeing through and renouncing the false promises made by the world is an important part of the Buddhist outlook. Then came a fourth sight: a wandering holy man (shramana), who undertook spiritual practices such as yoga, and Siddhartha knew that he must leave the palace and become a shramana himself. The description of this episode is particularly beautiful.
"There he sat down on the ground covered with leaves and young grass bright with lapis lazuli; and, meditating on the origin and destruction of the world, he laid hold of the path that leads to firmness of mind." The Buddhacarita
The young prince left the palace in the middle of the night, cut off his hair, exchanged his fine clothes for the simple robes of a monk, and took up a new life.
Mara and Awakening
Siddhartha lived as a wanderer for a number of years, first mastering meditation and then pushing the limits of his physical endurance through ascetic religious practices designed to test his resolve. Realising that these were not leading him towards the understanding he sought, he decided instead to turn towards his mind and direct it, through mindfulness and meditation, in a more helpful direction. The results were dramatic and soon he was on the verge of decisive breakthrough.
Here we come to an event that occurs on a different level from ordinary life and benefits from a mythic image to help us understand it. The story goes that as Siddhartha entered deeply into meditation a demonic figure named Mara appears before him and urges him to turn back. Mara challenges Siddhartha, taunts him, sends his daughters to seduce him and finally orders his demonic followers to attack. Sangharakshita comments on this episode as follows:
"All this represents, we may say, the forces of the unconscious in their crude, unsublimated form. The demons, all those terrible misshapen figures, represent anger, aversion, and Mara himself, the Evil One, represents primordial ignorance or unawareness, on account of which we take birth and rebirth again and again and again." Sangharakshita, 'Archetypal Symbolism in the Biography of the Buddha'
Siddhartha remain impassive throughout and finally calls on the Earth Goddess to attest to the virtues he has developed in the course of his lives. Defeated, Mara slinks away.
That is the myth, and in all the versions of the story Siddhartha breaks through to Enlightenment or Nirvana and becomes the Buddha.
Teaching and Parinirvana
Once Siddhartha reaches Awakening the main pattern of the Buddhist myth has been completed as his life up to this point already represents the journey from samsara to nirvana that other Buddhists must make. However, every element of the Buddha’s life from this point on is a teaching in its own right. Other important episodes in the Buddha’s life include his decision to teach and his first communication to the five former companions with whom he had practised austerities. This first teaching takes the form of The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path. He continued teaching for forty-five years and a monastic community developed around him. In this way, the Buddha’s life embodied compassionate concern for others, not just a desire to escape the world.
"Just as in a pond of blue or red or white lotuses, some lotuses might flourish while immersed in the water, without rising up from the water; some might stand at an even level with the water; while some might rise up from the water and stand without being smeared by the water — so too, I saw beings with little dust in their eyes and those with much, those with keen faculties and those with dull, those with good attributes and those with bad, those easy to teach and those hard, some of them seeing disgrace and danger in the other world." The Buddha, Ariyapariyesena Sutta
The story ends with the Buddha’s passing away, aged eighty, which Buddhists refer to as the Parinirvana, or complete Awakening. At the verge of death he urged his disciples to continue practising, saying:
