The Bodhisattva was twenty-nine before he saw an old man. Then he saw a sick man. Then he saw a dead man. Three separate occasions, one soon after the other, in three corners of the park. Another day, in the fourth corner of the park, he saw a renouncer begging. He hurried back to the palace. He was nearly there with his escort, when he realized that Kṛśā Gautamī, his playmate of old, was watching him from the roof. She shouted something, but the words were muddled when they reached him, a slight, mad vibration. Then, as he came nearer, he understood: “Happy the mother, happy the father, happy the wife who has such a husband.” Why was Kṛśā speaking like this? The Bodhisattva was fascinated, almost stunned — and only one word, “happy,” sank in to his mind. He had the impression that for the first time its meaning flashed alight for him, precise and distinct as any object. Then he took off a magnificent necklace and told a servant to take it to Kṛśā Gautamī as a gift.
Kṛśā’s hands trembled: she looked at the necklace, moved. “Finally,” she thought, “a message of love. Perhaps I won’t have to waste away just looking at his almost violet hair.” Her friend hadn’t been paying her any attention for quite some time. She wept for joy, not realizing that the necklace was a gift of farewell.
That night the Bodhisattva woke alone in his high bed. Moonlight bathed the summer palace pavilion. It lay on the bodies of the minstrels huddled on the floor, as though on a landscape of low hills. Carafes, cushions, shawls, sandalwood. Arms clasping lutes and drums like lovers. The Bodhisattva went on gazing into the half dark. Suddenly he saw reality ablaze.
As he had been returning to the palace, an excited messenger had come toward him to tell him that Gopā had given birth to a son. “Rāhula is born, a tie is born,” murmured the Bodhisattva. He hadn’t wanted to see the child. He had immediately withdrawn to the most remote part of the palace, a place open to the breeze. Now, in the silence of the night, he thought that before leaving he would like to see his son this once. He gently pushed the door of the room where Ráhula’s mother lay sleeping. A perfumed oil lamp spread a faint light. One of Gopā’s hands was covering the little Rāhula’s forehead. “If I move Gopā’s hand, she will wake up, and that will make it difficult for me to go.” Thus the Bodhisattva left the haunts of his childhood and youth in silence. His horse’s hooves didn’t touch the ground, because every time they came down a large and loyal Yakṣa slipped his back beneath.
Śuddhodana was not surprised by his son’s sudden departure. Behind every other, life offered but two possibilities: to be sovereign over the world — or to free oneself from it. Siddhārtha Gautama had already savored the first. There were numerous — and much admired — examples of those who, from the earliest times, had chosen the second. There were men, often powerful men, who one day disappeared. One said of them that “he has gone into the forest.” From that day on no one ever saw them again, except by chance perhaps. They were called saṃnyāsins, “renouncers.” They renounced what had made up their lives before that day. And having spent their lives celebrating the rites with impeccable propriety, they now practiced them no more, or at least not visibly. Having parceled out their days in obligations and precepts, they now had no habits at all. Having provided the wherewithal for huge families, they now kept no provisions. Having sought to attain herds, children, and long life, they now made no plans. For years they had built themselves up in an architecture of actions cemented one upon another. Now they sought immobility, because that way they could at least escape from every visible gesture. But the more subtle masters soon discovered that action, karman, went on accumulating, even in silence and immobility. They would have to go right down to the secret chamber of the mind and flush it out. But how could they get in there? And how could one act to extinguish whatever it is that acts? “Many have tried…,” murmured Śuddhodana, his thoughts turning nostalgically to his son. “Many have tried…,” said Siddhārtha, already wandering through the forest. “This will be my achievement,” he added, in the silence.
There were sixty-two schools of thought when the Bodhisattva left his father’s house. And six eminent masters. Pūraṇa Kāśyapa claimed that actions do not give rise to retribution. Maskarin Gośālīputra claimed that the course of existence is already established and that effort of any kind is pointless. Ajita Keśakambalin claimed that a human being is made up of your elements, which come apart at death. Kakuda Kātyāyana claimed that the human being is made up of seven permanent elements and that, when someone is murdered, there is no murder or murderer or murder victim. Saṃjayin Vairaṭīputra claimed that there is no definitive answer to any metaphysical inquiry — and thus they called him “the eel.” Jina Mahāvīra claimed that in each life one must do severe penance to expiate the crimes committed in previous lives.
The Bodhisattva sought out, followed, then left two masters. He realized they would turn him into a charred log, while one ought to be a leafy tree. He wandered around alone for a long time. He thought: “The life of those who live without a home is rubbed smooth as a seashell.” He found his locus amoenus in Uruvilvā. “Then I thought: ‘Truly this is a delightful spot, a fine forest; clear and pleasant runs the river, with pretty places to bathe; there are villages round about where one can go; this is a good place for a noble man in search of salvation.’” Two thousand, four hundred years later, when Hermann Oldenberg visited, Uruvilvā still looked “delightful,” and, even if it was less densely wooded, there was still a scattering of majestic trees. It was winter, the river almost dry in its wide, sandy bed. Another scholar, Karl Eugen Neumann, had compared the place with the lower regions of the Main. Oldenberg did not agree.
How did Buddha behave in Uruvilvā? He was like a gazelle in the forest, an antelope, a fawn. “When I saw a cowherd or a goatherd or someone going to cut wood or to gather grass or to work in the forest, I would run from thicket to thicket, bush to bush, valley to valley, peak to peak. Why so? So that they wouldn’t see me and so that I wouldn’t see them.”
The turning point in the Buddha’s life did not come when he left his father’s house. From Annapūrṇā to Cape Comorin, from the thickest forests to the promontory’s ocean plunge, the country was crawling with renouncers. To don the ocher robe and set off along the road, begging bowl in hand, was considered an entirely normal thing to do, scarcely less so than living as the father of a family celebrating the rites around the domestic hearth. It was the way of the forest. And “forest” had never referred merely to the place that surrounds — how far? — the place where men live, but to the secret doctrine. To understand the world of men, and indeed every other world, one’s point of observation must be out there in that harsh, dense realm where only animal voices were to be heard. It was the metaphysical place par excellence. He who thinks out in the forest is left entirely to himself: there he touches bottom, the baseline otherwise hidden beneath human chatter, there he goes back to being like a wild animal, which is the closest approximation to pure thought.
No, the turning point in the Buddha’s life came six years later. It was then that Śuddhodana’s son, a Śākya from Kapilavastu, provincial noble, renouncer, disciple of various masters, began to consider himself with an uneasy smile. He had felt his breathing come like the bellows of a furnace. He remembered the time well. Then the ferocious headaches that followed, the hot flushes that overwhelmed him. Then there were long periods of fasting, his scalp turned wrinkly as a wind-dried pumpkin. Two masters had attracted and then disappointed him. None of this had helped him to see what is as it is. Why not? He didn’t know, but an image came to his mind. Two sticks of green wood. He tried to rub them together to start a fire. Nothing happened. Then he took two other sticks: they weren’t damp but were still full of sap inside. He tried to start a fire. Nothing happened. Then, excited, he thought: “It takes two dry twigs…” Those childish words brought him an odd happiness, somehow allusive, though to what he couldn’t say. He wasn’t thinking of his life as a wandering monk now. But another, more distant memory came to him.