The Story Of The Original Buddha (continued)
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Siddhartha saw clearly that pain was an unavoidable part of life, and he became determined to find a way to put an end to it. He left his family and tried, for a while, the life of an ascetic—the most extreme opposite to his previous life of comfort and wealth. As an ascetic, he sat in extremely uncomfortable postures meditating for long periods of time. He slept very little. He ate very little. He even tried breathing very little. He thought that, since material comfort hadn’t brought about an end to suffering, maybe the opposite of material comfort would. But it didn’t. Pushed to the brink of death, Siddhartha abandoned the idea of extreme asceticism and instead chose what he came to call “the middle path.”

Siddhartha realized that both the extremes of pleasure and denial of pleasure had gotten him nowhere nearer to liberation. Neither extreme had given relief from his suffering. So he set off on his own to meditate. Sitting beneath a Bodhi tree, he meditated deeply and discovered the path that leads to the end of suffering. He looked within himself for his own liberation, and he found it.

What Siddhartha found meditating under the Bodhi tree is what we refer to as the Dharma, or the “Truth.” It’s what the path of Buddhism is based on. Central to this path are the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, which will be explained in the next chapter.

Siddhartha was called the Buddha, or “The One Who Woke Up,” because the way most people go through life was thought to be like dreaming or being in a trance. The Buddha spent the rest of his life developing the Dharma into a simple but sophisticated system. He shared it with anyone who would listen, dedicating himself to a life of service to free everybody from suffering. He bucked the trends of his time by letting women and the poorest class of citizens become monastics. Everybody was welcome in his Sangha, his spiritual community. Central to his teachings was that liberation is available to all—to the most broken and oppressed among us, to the sick, to the powerless, to those who have lost everything, to those who have nothing left to lose. All of us, even the most addicted, the most lost, can find our way to awakening.