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value on the pleasures of the eye, is not in practice disdainful of beauty, as witness the many allusions to the
Buddha's personal appearance, the persistent love of art, and the equally persistent love of nature which is
found in such early poems as the Theragatha and still inspires those who select the sites of monasteries
throughout the Buddhist world from Burma to Japan. The example of the Buddha, if we may believe the story,
shows that he felt the importance of scenery and climate in the struggle before him and his followers still hold
that a holy life is led most easily in beautiful and peaceful landscapes.
2
Hitherto we have found allusions to the events of the Buddha's life rather than consecutive statements and
narratives but for the next period, comprising his struggle for enlightenment, its attainment and the
commencement of his career as a teacher, we have several accounts, both discourses put into his own mouth
and narratives in the third person like the beginning of the Mahavagga. It evidently was felt that this was the
most interesting and critical period of his life and for it, as for the period immediately preceding his death, the
Pitakas provide the elements of a biography. The accounts vary as to the amount of detail and supernatural
events which they contain, but though the simplest is perhaps the oldest, it does not follow that events
consistent with it but only found in other versions are untrue. One cannot argue that anyone recounting his
spiritual experiences is bound to give a biographically complete picture. He may recount only what is relevant
to the purpose of his discourse.
CHAPTER VIII. LIFE OF THE BUDDHA 104
Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I.
Gotama's ascetic life at Uruvela is known as the wrestling or struggle for truth. The story, as he tells it in the
Pitakas, gives no dates, but is impressive in its intensity and insistent iteration[318]. Fire, he thought to
himself, cannot be produced from damp wood by friction, but it can from dry wood. Even so must the body be
purged of its humours to make it a fit receptacle for illumination and knowledge. So he began a series of
terrible fasts and sat "with set teeth and tongue pressed against the palate" until in this spiritual wrestling the
sweat poured down from his arm pits. Then he applied himself to meditation accompanied by complete
cessation of breathing, and, as he persevered and went from stage to stage of this painful exercise, he heard
the blood rushing in his head and felt as if his skull was being split, as if his belly were being cut open with a
butcher's knife, and finally as if he were thrown into a pit of burning coals. Elsewhere[319] he gives further
details of the horrible penances which he inflicted on himself. He gradually reduced his food to a grain of rice
each day. He lived on seeds and grass, and for one period literally on dung. He wore haircloth or other
irritating clothes: he plucked out his hair and beard: he stood continuously: he lay upon thorns. He let the dust
and dirt accumulate till his body looked like an old tree. He frequented a cemetery--that is a place where
corpses were thrown to decay or be eaten by birds and beasts--and lay among the rotting bodies.
But no enlightenment, no glimpse into the riddle of the world came of all this, so, although he was nearly at
death's door, he determined to abstain from food altogether. But spirits appeared and dissuaded him, saying
that if he attempted thus to kill himself they would nourish him by infusing a celestial elixir through his skin
and he reflected that he might as well take a little food[320]. So he took a palmful or two of bean soup. He
was worn almost to a shadow, he says. "When I touched my belly, I felt my backbone through it and when I
touched my back, I felt my belly--so near had my back and my belly come together through this fasting. And
when I rubbed my limbs to refresh them the hair fell off[321]." Then he reflected that he had reached the limit
of self-mortification and yet attained no enlightenment. There must be another way to knowledge. And he
remembered how once in his youth he had sat in the shade of a rose apple tree and entered into the stage of
contemplation known as the first rapture. That, he now thought, must be the way to enlightenment: why be
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