THE BASIC TEACHINGS OF BUDDHISM

Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 or 466-386 BC), also called Shâkyamuni (the Sage of the Shakya Clan), the Gautama Buddha (the "Enlightened One," from budh, "to wake up"), and the Tathâgata (the "Thus Come"), was born to a royal Ks.atriya family. At his birth there was a prophecy that either he would become a world conqueror, or he would "conquer" the world by renouncing it and becoming a Buddha. His father preferred the more tangible kind of conquest and tried to shield Siddhartha from all the evils of life that might tempt him into spiritual reflection. This strategy backfired; for when, about age thirty, Siddhartha finally did experience evils, by encountering a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a wandering ascetic, he determined immediately to renounce the world and seek enlightenment like the ascetic, This violated Siddhartha's duty as a householder, since his wife had just given birth to their first child, but Vedic duties and the traditional four stages of life were no longer of interest to him.
After years of fasting and other ascetic practices, during which he supposedly subsisted on as little as one grain of rice a day, Siddhartha felt that he had achieved nothing. He ceased his fasting, but then sat down under a tree with the determination not to arise until he had achieved enlightenment. The tree became the Bodhi ("Enlightenment") Tree; for under it Siddhartha, resisting the attacks and temptations of Mâra, the king of the demons, became the Buddha, the one who "Woke Up." That was in about 527. The Buddha proceeded to Sarnath, near Benares, and delivered his first sermon in a place called the Deer Park. That set the "Wheel of the Law," the Dharmacakra, in motion. The form of the Dharmacakra at right is identical to the one on the flag of India and is copied from a pillar set up at Sarnath by the great King Ashoka. The sermon consisted of the Four Noble (Ârya) Truths: