Buddha’s Ways towards Enlightenment

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Buddha’s Ways towards Enlightenment

Buddha, Gotama Siddhartha, was born as a son of a king in Nepal.  As a prince, he was surrounded with materialistic and less-moral environment such as luxury goods, expensive foods, servants, and young women.  However, he had not felt happiness in such environment at all.  Instead of simply enjoying his life as the prince, he began noticing various sufferings in human life through everyday life.  Especially, what he was particularly concerned were physical suffering or pain associated with giving birth, growing old, physical illness, and the process of dying.   He started looking for reasons why these sufferings exist and eventually decided to leave his family, fame, and financial comfort to find not only causes of sufferings but also ways to eliminate the sufferings.   

Even after 6 years of torturing-style practices, he still could not attain his goal.  Instead, his body, mind, and consciousness were completely exhausted and damaged.  One day, he started questioning to effectiveness of his ways of practice.  After deep consideration, he noticed that his ways were completely wrong and ineffective.  This is because the ways did not maintain the optimum balance of the three subjects (body, mind, and consciousness) which is the definite condition for true enlightenment.  Therefore, his practice must be able to optimize the balance and maintain it instead of destroying the balance.  In other words, he noticed that his torturing-style practice had brought him nothing but the very condition that kept him from enlightenment.   

He decided to give up the wrong practice and went back to a small village where he tried to recover from the exhaustion.  Then, he tried to develop the best approach for enlightenment.  He was immediately convinced that the right practice is to optimize and maintain the balance of the three subjects by doing right actions in everyday life.  According to him, the right actions included not only acting and thinking ethically and correctly but also learning, noticing, and experiencing the truths.  This was how he started developing the right practice for real enlightenment.