Leaving the Palace, Seeking the Way

The Real pierces through the afterglow of baby Rahula’s birth as Siddhartha's young family returns home in a carriage one day. A man the same age as Siddhartha, but suffering from an incurable and contagious illness, stumbles into the road. Against advice from his aides, Siddhartha holds the man’s hand as he dies. Some transfer happens here, which intensifies later that night, as Yasodhara has a series of dreams where she hears voices—loud, angelic, celestial choir, bellowing, urgent—indicating repeatedly that “the time has come” for Siddhartha to leave the palace walls and seek the Way (Enlightenment). She tells him, immediately, about the prophetic dream sequence. He decides to leave that night, vowing that he will return, whether or not he’s successful in finding the Way. I appreciate this quiet display of ethics—failure is acknowledged as a possible outcome, and return is not contingent on success. This also strikes me as a helpful shame-deactivation engine: I can return (to myself, to my work, to my literal home, etc) without having to figure everything out first, without achieving perfection, or even my stated goal. Success, failure, or somewhere in between are different tributaries leading me down the same river, all in flow, heading in the right direction. That feels like real relief, a long exhale, especially given my perfectionist Virgo tendencies.

Next chapter: Siddhartha finds his first learning center and studies meditation with the help of a Teacher. He learns about, and quickly attains, “the realm of limitless consciousness,” where he comes to understand “that his own mind was present in every phenomenon in the universe” (92). This sense of the mind being PRESENT in all things deepens in the next teaching, which involves “the realm of no materiality,” where “our consciousness is like an artist, painting every phenomenon into being… the state in which we see that no phenomenon exists outside our own mind” (93). In this second, even more profound meditative state, Siddhartha goes beyond experiencing diffuse presence; he is ontologically implicated in, bound by, vibrating within, every material thing/phenomena/entity. One way I initially translate this is in terms of the difference between witnessing and witHnessing: not just, I am present as an ethical observer, but I am living inside every aspect of this scene, there’s more of a co-creation feel to it. 

Still, Siddhartha departs the first school, wanting to go deeper. As he puts it, “to seek the Way is to find a solution to life’s sufferings, not to escape life” (95). Life’s key sufferings involve the trauma and pain of birth and death: in other words, encounters with the REAL. We learn that three years have passed since he left Yasodhara and baby Rahula, which came as a shock to me, since it had only been about 5 pages. I guess the Buddha had a long, long life! After kindly refusing a fanboy King’s offer to live in a palace and be his personal teacher, Siddhartha heads down the mountain, where he won’t be recognized by the King or any of his subjects, toward the spiritual center of Uddaka Ramaputta, “a great teacher who was said to have attained very deep levels of understanding” (99). Suspense! Excited to meet him. 

Tomorrow I descend the mountain with a closer analysis of Chapter 15: Forest Ascetic (a longer chapter, meriting its own post, and sadly, I’m a little sleepy). 

More soon.