Buddhism - The Four Sights

•       Prophecy that Siddhartha would become a great leader like his father or a wandering holy man.

•       The prophesy disturbed Suddhodana greatly because, as a Kshatriya, Siddhartha would be expected to follow in his father’s footsteps.

•       As a result, Suddhodana took steps to ensure that he was not exposed to any influence that would encourage him to reflect on the meaning of life in a religious way. He was effectively imprisoned in paradise! – All needs and wants met, shielded from the sadder side of life. Surrounded by healthy beautiful people.

•       Married a princess at 16. Had a son ‘Rahula’ meaning ‘chains.’

•       At 29 he becomes restless of life in the palace and sought to know what life was like outside the palace. Here he saw four sights – Buddhists feel that these are crucial to understanding what Buddhism is about.

·         Old, dead, sick and Holy man (had nothing but happy).

·       What struck Siddhartha most forcibly was the lack of control and direction people ultimately have over their own life and destiny.

·       Fourth sight = poor man, seemed calm, self-possessed and free from malice. That this was a Sramana (shramana), a wandering ascetic who had renounced the attachments of society and had gone into the world to live alone, a homeless existence, in search of spiritual fulfilment. He carried an alms bowl. A relatively common sight in Indian life. Such a person is understood as a mendicant, one who has given up wealth and material gain.  The belief – the riddle of existence and human destiny cannot be resolved simply by perusing ones social duties.

Impact of the four sights on Siddhartha:

•       Siddhartha awakes to the true nature of being in this world, the state of samsara, characterised by old age, sickness, death and continual becoming (rebirth).

•       Siddhartha's reaction to the first three sights exemplifies the Buddhist starting point: seeing to the heart of the matter (dukkha). What happens after that, in terms of the decisions one makes and the life ones leads, is rooted in the understanding that this is the fundamental problem that must be addressed

          Similarly, therefore, we can appreciate that to see that life is characterised by suffering, but not to act upon that awareness, is wholly ‘un Buddhist’ attitude. Once the problem has been identified, one is immediately committed to doing something about it.

          What is told as four brief excursions into  a matter of fact and everyday world, highlights the significance, for Buddhists, of waking up to the reality that the world we take as given and ordinary is really a strange state of affairs.

Dukkha ‘suffering’

Often translated as ‘suffering’ but some Buddhist scholars remind us that this is not the only meaning. Walpola Rahula describes this translation as ‘highly unsatisfactory and misleading. It is because, he says, of this ‘limited, free, easy translation, and its superficial interpretation, that many people have been misled into regarding Buddhism as pessimistic.’  John Snelling in his Buddhist handbook alerts us to the fact that the term has a ‘wide spectrum’ of meanings: ‘at one extreme’ he says, ‘it takes in the most dire forms of mental and physical pain: the agonies of cancer, for instance, and the anguish of someone who falls prey to total despair. It covers our everyday aches and pains our petty dislikes and frustrations too; and it extended to very subtle feelings of malaise; that life is never quite right.’

Dukkha is in fact a description of the human condition. The Buddha never denied that it was impossible to be happy in this life, he just denied that happiness was eternal. No happiness is permanent and is therefore ‘tainted.’ A more appropriate definition therefore might be ‘unsatisfactoriness.’ The moral of the tale of the Buddha’s early life in Kapilavastu (near Lumbini) in Nepal is echoed here – even with everything one could possible wish for, he had not found true happiness as long as those dearest to him were prey to disease, old age, and death. This is the actuality of Dukkha.

Anicca – Impermanence

The second of things that according to Buddhists we can be sure is true.

All things; beings, objects, states of mind, relationships, qualities etc. are dependent on causes and conditions, and are therefore constantly changing. Nothing remains forever. Things are in flux or constant change. This change and decay.

Anatta – no permanent self

Everything, including the self is impermanent. The ‘self’ he argued was the coming together of five ‘skandhas’ or bundles, which are all changing. These skandhas are:

Form (the body), Sensations, Perceptions, Mental Formations (impulses and habits) and Consciousness.

None of these could be described as the soul or the essence of the person, not even consciousness, because there is no consciousness unless it is consciousness of something (i.e. consciousness is by no means permanent or unchanging, so therefore could not be considered to be the soul). Because the self is dependent on these five changing skandhas, it is itself in flux, dependent and impermanent.

Left home on his 29^th birthday

Belief in rebirth prevalent at the time – not Siddhartha found the idea of endless rebirths with suffering repulsive.

Left home to become a shramana

Cut hair to show his as evidence of his renunciation.

This is referred to as Siddhartha’s ‘going forth’