As the tale is told, Siddhartha was an isolated, protected prince whose father wanted to keep him from seeing the downside of life. But it’s tough to keep the downside a secret. The harshness of the world isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Siddhartha’s father must have done a good job at hiding human suffering, however, because it wasn’t until Sidd turned 29 that he encountered age, disease, and death, supposedly seeing all three during outings along the kingdom’s roads. Of course, your question and mine is “How could anyone escape human suffering for 29 years?”
Certainly, Nepalese courtiers caught the flu and the common cold 2,500 years ago, and some servant had to drop a vase on or stub a toe. Possibly some courtesan suffered a rocky relationship in the palace. Nevertheless, let’s stick to the story that only after he left the palace, an almost 30-year-old guy suddenly discovered suffering and death.
Seeing the old man, the sick man, and the dead man was a turning point in Sidd’s life. One can envision his look of surprise as he peered from some curtained palanquin and suddenly understood his slow destiny in the wrinkles of an old man or his final destiny in the dead man. He had come to a turning point in his life; and upon seeing an ascetic, realized he needed to go “find himself.”
Twenty-nine seems to be about right for finding oneself if neuroscientists are correct about the brain’s not maturing fully until it passes the early twenties. Need some anecdotal proofs? Follow the Spring Break crowd to beach towns. Watch people of excess turn toward moderation as they acquire the responsibilities of adulthood. Read sobering regrets from those who turned from aimlessness to productivity or from crime to service.
Obviously, some have turning points sooner than others. Some are born into harshness from which they emerge through their own or others’ efforts or through chance. I suppose not all turning points are 180-degree turns, but many are. Think of optical illusions and art. You can stare for a while without seeing the effect, and then, for whatever reason the brain had for keeping the image from you, it suddenly frees the mystery. “Ah! Now I see it,” you say.
That turning point has various descriptors. Is it the “Aha!” moment? The “epiphany”? Regardless of his name, we have no way of knowing how the moment arrives. It is simply Zenlike in its appearance, and it comes in all forms of experience. Apparently, such turning points are often associated with new places and circumstances or even with boredom and fatigue in the same place or circumstance. Some people might even rely on drugs to induce a different perspective and insight—though one might argue that such perspectives and insights are usually hallucinatory and rarely of lasting or useful nature. The history of physics gives us many examples of moments of enlightenment derived from both a change of place and/or boredom. Freeman Dyson took a bus from Berkeley to the East Coast in 1948. After two days of the trip, as he wrote to his parents, he went into “a semi stupor,” and “a remarkable thing happened.” “I had solved the problem that had been in the back of my mind all this year, which was to prove the equivalence of…two theories.”* The theories are irrelevant. The point is that Dyson underwent one of those “Aha!” moments, and it just “came to him” during his Siddhartha moment along the road.
Siddhartha came to his moment, his turning point, and from that he became the Buddha. Do we all have such turning points? Have you had one or even more than one? A couple of thousand years after Sidd took his ride, such moments still come unexpectedly to us. Dhyana, or liberating insight, is usually a surprise. Until it comes to us unexpectedly, however, we are all hidden behind the walls of an imposed palace, happy in our ignorance of what is to come and what we can become.
*Feeman Dyson’s letter to his parents on September 18, 1948, in Schweber, Silvan S., QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Swinger, Tomonaga, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 505.
Certainly, Nepalese courtiers caught the flu and the common cold 2,500 years ago, and some servant had to drop a vase on or stub a toe. Possibly some courtesan suffered a rocky relationship in the palace. Nevertheless, let’s stick to the story that only after he left the palace, an almost 30-year-old guy suddenly discovered suffering and death.
Seeing the old man, the sick man, and the dead man was a turning point in Sidd’s life. One can envision his look of surprise as he peered from some curtained palanquin and suddenly understood his slow destiny in the wrinkles of an old man or his final destiny in the dead man. He had come to a turning point in his life; and upon seeing an ascetic, realized he needed to go “find himself.”
Twenty-nine seems to be about right for finding oneself if neuroscientists are correct about the brain’s not maturing fully until it passes the early twenties. Need some anecdotal proofs? Follow the Spring Break crowd to beach towns. Watch people of excess turn toward moderation as they acquire the responsibilities of adulthood. Read sobering regrets from those who turned from aimlessness to productivity or from crime to service.
Obviously, some have turning points sooner than others. Some are born into harshness from which they emerge through their own or others’ efforts or through chance. I suppose not all turning points are 180-degree turns, but many are. Think of optical illusions and art. You can stare for a while without seeing the effect, and then, for whatever reason the brain had for keeping the image from you, it suddenly frees the mystery. “Ah! Now I see it,” you say.
That turning point has various descriptors. Is it the “Aha!” moment? The “epiphany”? Regardless of his name, we have no way of knowing how the moment arrives. It is simply Zenlike in its appearance, and it comes in all forms of experience. Apparently, such turning points are often associated with new places and circumstances or even with boredom and fatigue in the same place or circumstance. Some people might even rely on drugs to induce a different perspective and insight—though one might argue that such perspectives and insights are usually hallucinatory and rarely of lasting or useful nature. The history of physics gives us many examples of moments of enlightenment derived from both a change of place and/or boredom. Freeman Dyson took a bus from Berkeley to the East Coast in 1948. After two days of the trip, as he wrote to his parents, he went into “a semi stupor,” and “a remarkable thing happened.” “I had solved the problem that had been in the back of my mind all this year, which was to prove the equivalence of…two theories.”* The theories are irrelevant. The point is that Dyson underwent one of those “Aha!” moments, and it just “came to him” during his Siddhartha moment along the road.
Siddhartha came to his moment, his turning point, and from that he became the Buddha. Do we all have such turning points? Have you had one or even more than one? A couple of thousand years after Sidd took his ride, such moments still come unexpectedly to us. Dhyana, or liberating insight, is usually a surprise. Until it comes to us unexpectedly, however, we are all hidden behind the walls of an imposed palace, happy in our ignorance of what is to come and what we can become.
*Feeman Dyson’s letter to his parents on September 18, 1948, in Schweber, Silvan S., QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Swinger, Tomonaga, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 505.
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