He was 29 years old, married, with an infant son, and he had never seen anyone suffer.
This is the part of the story most people miss. Before Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, he was a prince of the Shakya clan in what is now southern Nepal, and his father had built a kind of elaborate cage around his life. Three palaces. One for the cool season, one for the hot, one for the rainy. Dancers and musicians who appeared never to age. Servants instructed to remove anyone old, anyone ill, anyone dying, from his line of sight before he could notice them. The king had heard a prophecy when his son was born. The boy would either become a great king or a great spiritual teacher. The father wanted the king. He thought that if Siddhartha never saw suffering, he would never wonder what to do about it.
This worked for almost three decades.
Then one afternoon, the prince ordered his charioteer Channa to take him outside the palace walls. The story, as it has come down to us through the Pali Canon and a thousand retellings since, describes what happened on four short rides over four consecutive days.
The first day, Siddhartha saw an old man for the first time in his life. Bent, slow, his face deeply lined. He asked what was wrong with the man. Channa answered honestly. Nothing is wrong with him. He has simply lived a long time. This is what happens to everyone.
The second day, Siddhartha saw a sick man, racked with fever. Same question. Same answer. This happens to everyone.
The third day, he saw a corpse being carried to a funeral. Same question. Same answer.
The fourth day, he saw a wandering ascetic. A shaved head, a simple robe, walking down the road with nothing but a bowl. Channa explained who he was. A man who had walked away from the world to discover something the world could not give him.
Siddhartha returned to the palace that night and lay awake in a bed of silk next to his sleeping wife. He had every pleasure available to a human being in 6th century India, and he had just discovered that none of it would save him from old age, sickness, or death. The dancers would age. The musicians would die. His son would die. His wife would die. He would die. The palace was not a sanctuary. It had only been a curtain.
That night, in the version most often told, he stood at the door of his wife's bedroom, looked at her and his newborn son sleeping, and walked out. He took no servants, no money, no possessions beyond what he was wearing. He cut off his long hair with his sword and traded his royal robes for the simple cloth of a wanderer. He was leaving everything that everyone he had ever known wanted.
The next chapter of his life is the one almost no one tells correctly. He did not go straight from prince to Buddha. He spent the next six years swinging to the opposite extreme. He found the most rigorous ascetics in the forests of northern India and trained with them. He ate, at one point, a single grain of rice a day. He slept on thorns. He held his breath until his ears rang. He starved himself until, in his own description, when he touched his belly he could feel his spine.
And he discovered something almost as important as the lesson of the palace. Self-denial, taken to extremes, was not the answer either. The body, ruined, could not host an awakened mind any better than the body, indulged, could. Suffering deliberately produced was still suffering.
Somewhere on the bank of the Niranjana river, weakened nearly to death, he accepted a bowl of rice and milk from a young woman named Sujata. His fellow ascetics were disgusted with him. They thought he had given up. He let them go. He sat down under a fig tree at a place now called Bodh Gaya and resolved not to move until he understood what no palace and no forest had been able to teach him.
What he understood, when he finally stood up, can be stated more simply than the centuries of commentary suggest. Suffering is what you feel when you are attached to a version of reality that is not happening. The peasant suffers because he wants more. The prince suffers because he is terrified of having less. The ascetic suffers because he is fighting his own body. Every form of suffering, when you trace it backward, terminates in the same root, which is craving. Wanting things to be other than they are. Wanting more of what feels good. Wanting less of what feels bad. Wanting the moment that is here to be the moment that is not here.
The freedom he had been looking for was not in the palace, because the palace was made of things he could lose. It was not in the forest, because the forest was a war against his own body. It was in the simple, almost unbelievable practice of wanting less.
This is the part where modern research enters the conversation and confirms, in the dry language of social science, what Siddhartha figured out under a tree 2,500 years ago.
In 1978, three psychologists at Northwestern University published a study now considered a classic in the field. They tracked two groups of people. The first had recently won large lottery prizes, life-changing sums of money. The second had recently been paralyzed in accidents. They measured each group's reported happiness. The result was the kind of finding that should have rearranged how humans understand themselves and largely did not. The lottery winners, despite their windfall, reported themselves no happier on average than ordinary people, and they reported finding less pleasure in everyday activities than the control group did. The intensity of the lottery had recalibrated their entire sense of what counted as good. The accident victims, after grieving what they lost, had built their happiness around what remained, and reported expecting to return to nearly the same baseline as everyone else.
The phenomenon has a name now. The hedonic treadmill. Whatever you get used to having, you stop appreciating, and then you start wanting the next thing. The promotion you imagined would change your life becomes the new normal in three months. The car you saved for becomes the car you drive to work. The relationship you ached to be in becomes the relationship you forget to be grateful for. The treadmill never stops, and almost no one notices they are on it, because the next thing is always almost in reach.
The Buddha's insight was not that wanting is bad. It was that wanting, unexamined, is the source of nearly every form of misery we generate for ourselves. The prince in the palace and the lottery winner in the suburbs are suffering from the same disease. They are paying attention to what is not yet theirs instead of what already is.
True freedom is not the absence of desire. It is the absence of being ruled by desire. It is being able to want something without needing it. To enjoy what is here without being haunted by what is not. To lose what you love without losing yourself.
You cannot leave your palace, and you probably should not try. But you can do the small daily work the prince eventually came back to, which is to notice, again and again, that what you already have is more than enough, and that the next thing you are convinced will fix it almost certainly will not.
Start small. Drink your coffee without checking your phone. Walk somewhere familiar and look at it as if you had never seen it before. Notice the people in your life as the temporary, miraculous arrangements they actually are. Each time you do this, you take one small step off the treadmill the Buddha tried to warn us about. And you discover what he discovered.
The freedom you have been looking for was never out ahead of you. It was always underneath the wanting.
Until next time,
Justin W.