The Journey of Siddhartha: From Suffering to Enlightenment : หน้า 76/115

The arrangement miscarried, however, for on the first three visits that Siddhatha made to the village he saw things that had a deeply traumatic effect on his over-protected consciousness. He was initiated into the reality of suffering in three of its most poignant forms: old age, sickness and death. Then on the fourth drive to the village, Prince Siddhatha encountered an ascetic who had renounced the worldly possessions. The air of serenity and nobility of bearing from this ascetic suggested that he had come to terms with life and freedom from the influence of the world. At the age of 29 the Prince renounced worldly life and left the palace to find an answer to the problem of suffering and a path to liberation from the painful rounds of cyclic existence. *Spiritual Quest* Prince Siddhatha spent the next six years on an intensive spiritual quest in jungle retreats. He studied with the best yogic teachers of the time and learned everything they knew, but soon realized that their knowledge would not lead him to complete liberation. So, he left them and decided to try his own way. Initially he experimented with extreme ascetic practices of self-mortification: living in graveyards, sleeping on beds of thorns, frying in the noonday heat and freezing beneath the moon at night. He starved and punished his body in hope that in that way he could root out all desire. He brought himself to the verge of death and realized that he would probably die and still not find what he was looking for. He finally gave up the practice of self-mortification and turned instead to the experimentation of pure meditation practice. *The Enlightenment* He sat himself under a Bodhi Tree and was determined to sit on that ‘immovable spot’ until he found an answer to his problem … or die in the attempt. Persisting in concentration his mind became as calm and bright as a mirror, so that he was able to have clear insight into the basic mechanisms that create and sustain Samsara, the cycle of births and rebirths. He relived his own innumerable past births in the different ages of the world. Then, turning his attention to others, he saw how they circulated through the cycle of births and deaths, and that the way in which they passed on was determined by the moral quality of their actions (kamma). He then considered how the ‘defilements’ (sensual desire, greed, anger, ignorance) that cause suffering could be eradicated, and seeing that it was indeed possible to do so, he