India, Cont.

We can imagine the pressures mounting against him - his wife's tears, his father's questions and advice, his friends' taunts. Finally, in their tenth year of marriage, Yasodhara delivered a son. Free at last to pursue his spiritual journey, he got up in the middle of the night, entered his wife's bedroom, kissed her and the baby good-bye, and walked out for good. He was twenty-nine.

Mounted on his favorite stallion, Kantaka, and accompanied by his faithful servant, Channa, he rode to the edge of the forest, stripped himself of his jewelry and regal garb and, instructing Channa to return his horse and the last of his material possessions to the palace, walked alone into the darkness.

He entered an ashram and spent several years mastering Samkhya philosophy and the techniques of Raja Yoga; but, still intellectually and spiritually unsatisfied, he departed. He then encountered a group of ascetics whose austerities exactly balanced his former life of luxury and, being impressed by their simplicity and zeal, decided to join them. He began a series of dangerously long fasts. When he nearly died of starvation, he decided that deprivation was as senseless as surfeit and pledged himself to a code of moderation. He abandoned asceticism and began to eat, in amount and variety, all the food he needed. And when his strength had fully returned and savior-history continued to repeat itself, he sat down under a fig tree saying that he would not get up until he had found a solution to the human dilemma.

While watching Venus rise as the morning star, he experienced satori and at last understood the cause and cure of human strife. Though devils naturally appeared to tempt him and the earth of course shook, he remained absolutely unmoved. He got up, named his way and his truth the Aryan Path, the Noble Middle Way, and began his forty-five year ministry. He was at the time thirty-five.

We can see him clearly... an Apollonian figure strolling barefoot through the marketplaces... a prince in homespun clothes, sleeping in the grass.

In 483 B.C., at the age of eighty, he died. His death was caused by eating either poisoned mushrooms or tainted pork. The record is unclear and no one now knows for certain which it was.

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