The Life of the Buddha

One night, a young man left his palace. He took no gold or silver, and no silk robes. He took only a question that the whole splendid palace could not answer: why people must grow old, fall ill and die, and how they might escape that suffering.

The young man's name was Siddhartha. He is better known by the name he carried later: Shakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.

He really was born a prince, the son of King Suddhodana and Queen Maya. He was born in the Lumbini garden, a place that now lies in Nepal. His father was king of the Shakya clan, in the capital city of Kapilavastu.

His father loved him beyond measure. The king built the most beautiful palaces, with gardens full of fragrant flowers, ponds full of blooming lotus, and servants playing music and singing all day long. The king wished for only one thing: to keep his son from ever seeing the sorrow of the world. But some questions cannot stay hidden forever behind a city wall.

The Buddhist scriptures tell how one day the prince asked to go out for a walk. At the first city gate, he met an old man with a bent back and trembling legs. At the second gate, he met a man who was ill, his body worn out. At the third gate, he met a man who had died, and whose family was quietly taking him on his last journey. For the first time in his life, the young prince understood that all the gold of the palace could not shield anyone from old age, illness and death.

Then, at the fourth gate, he met a monk. The man walked barefoot in a plain cloth robe, but his face was strangely calm, as if he had set down every burden in his heart. The prince watched him go for a long time, and a thought rose in his mind. Perhaps there was a path that could free people from suffering.

So one night, he quietly left the palace. By tradition, he was 29 years old. He took off his princely clothes, cut his hair, and began the life of a seeker of the truth. He had no home and no throne, only a heart set on finding the answer.

For the next six years, he followed a very strict path of self-denial. He ate very little and made himself endure every kind of hardship, believing that the harder he was on his body, the sooner he would reach awakening. His body grew thin, and he came close to exhaustion. Five companions practiced alongside him: Kondanna and his four fellow seekers.

Then a moment came when he stopped and asked himself a question. Had pushing his body this far taught him anything more? The answer was no. He realized something important: punishing the body is not the path. What he was looking for did not lie in hurting his body. It lay in understanding his own mind clearly.

So he accepted a bowl of milk porridge and ate to regain his strength. Then he went to sit beneath a great tree, called the Bodhi tree, at a place later named Bodhgaya. He sat there, back straight and mind at peace. He told himself he would not get up until he understood the truth.

Tradition holds that he sat like that for 49 days and nights. He quietly watched each thought that arose in his mind, like someone sitting on a riverbank, watching the water flow by. And as the first light of dawn broke on the horizon, he woke to full understanding. He was 35 years old. From that moment, people called him the Buddha, which means the awakened one.

What he understood was not a miracle. It was a truth both simple and deep. Suffering is real, but suffering has a cause, and once people understand that cause, they can step out of it. He set it out as the Four Noble Truths.

He carried that first lesson back to his five old companions. In a garden called the Deer Park, he sat down among Kondanna and the others and taught them these four truths. It was the first teaching of a long life of teaching. That life of teaching lasted many decades and took him across the lands along the great river of ancient India.

The story sounds far away, yet it is close to Vietnam. Buddhism came to Vietnam around the beginning of the Common Era, with monks who crossed the sea. In those days, Luy Lâu in Bắc Ninh was a flourishing center of Buddhism. Ever since, the sound of pagoda bells has been part of village life in Vietnam. Every year, on the full moon of the fourth lunar month, people across the country celebrate the Buddha's birthday.

A pagoda bell ringing out in the evening still recalls the young prince who left his golden palace to search for an answer. He found it not in some distant place, but beneath a tree, at a quiet dawn, when at last he looked clearly into his own heart.