Siddhartha Gautama's Four Passing Sights

Buddhism is a religion that originated in India and was founded around the late 6th century B.C.E. The religion was founded by a renouncer by the name of Siddhartha Gautama, later to be recognized by the title of Buddha, meaning enlightened one. Buddha’s long journey to enlightenment included many accounts that helped shape this religion that held dominance for several centuries. Siddhartha Gautama was born into a kshatriya family around 560 B.C.E where upon his birth, it was predicted that he would become a great king unless he saw the Four Passing Sights (a sick person, an elderly person, a corpse, and a holy man). Through the efforts of his father, Siddhartha was shielded from the idea of pain and suffering and lived a privileged childhood full of luxuries. As he began to mature, Siddhartha gradually witnessed the Four Passing Sights. These Four Passing Sights, which his father tried so hard to protect him from, opened Buddha’s eyes to
the realization that the world is not as simple as living a life of privilege, but it is instead full of suffering and pain. From this point on, he began receiving revelations which showed happy, young, and healthy people transitioning into old people who were living in pain. This lead Siddhartha to make the life-altering decision to leave his family and his life of luxury and instead live a life of simplicity while searching for answers to the miseries of life. In Buddhas’ search for answers to the miseries of life, he first thought he would find these answers in philosophical schools taught by Gurus, but he soon realized this was not a satisfactory way to answer the troublesome questions.
After his first attempt was not successful in finding answers, he tried a new second idea which was for him to become an ascetic. Joined by five other monks, Gautama began a long six years of practicing severe asceticism in which he searched for any means that were unpleasant or caused him harm to fully understand his question of the miseries of life. Despite this six-year process of some of the most severely recorded asceticism in history which included sitting in awkward and painful positions for hours and starvation that led him to being so thin that he could feel his backbone when he touched his stomach, Gautama did not find the answers and enlightenment that he was searching for and had to find another way in which he could truly understand the reasons for suffering and misery in the human
life. After the failure of asceticism, Siddhartha Gautama understood that even though he was successful at asceticism, he was never able to find satisfaction in those long six years of being an ascetic. After this realization he famously made the decision to have a meal from a nearby food stall provided by a lady known as Sujata. Coincidentally, at this moment, his five monk friends who practiced severe asceticism with him for the six years, happened to walk by and witness Siddhartha’s enjoyment of a meal and they therefore rejected him as a traitor. After gaining back energy from the meal he received, Gautama decide to gain enlightenment, he would to meditate until he received the answers he was tirelessly searching for. It was this final attempt to search for answers he so desperately wanted that led him to gaining enlightenment into the reason for life’s miseries. From that point on he received the title of Buddha or “enlightened one”. While in deep meditation for a long period of time, Buddha realized that people are stuck in an endless cycle of birth and death known as karma because of their desires. Through Buddha’s attempt to receive enlightenment through philosophical knowledge and asceticism he realized that he had desire. He was only able to attain enlightenment when he lost his desire and decided to meditate instead. His loss of desire allowed him to successfully find enlightenment on the questions he wanted answered.