Siddhatta Gotama lived in luxury, not lacking anything. He looked for satisfaction and fulfillment in things subject to birth, aging, sickness, death, sorrow and defilement. But being himself subject to these things he shaved his beard and hair, still young, leaving mother and father with tearful faces and he left seeking the unageing, unailing, deathless, sorrowless and undefiled security from bondage, Nibbana.
He put on the yellow robe. He didn't ask anybody for permission or refuge.
He visited two teachers and learned from them to enter and abide in the realm of nothingness and in the realm of neither perception nor non-perception. Then, seeing that this would not lead him to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana, he left.
Then he undertook the path of austerities: he went naked, rejecting conventions; or he pulled out hair and beard; or stood continuously; or used a mattress of spikes; or fed on the dong of young calves; and so on.
He clenched his teeth until sweat ran from his armpits and he was exhausted by the painful striving. He practice breathingless meditation, stopping in- and out-breaths and he was exhausted by the painful striving. He stopped eating, consuming himself, turning black or brown in color, bones exposed through the thin skin, falling over his own urine and feces, hair falling off by itself.
He took pride in his austerities; he was sure nobody had endured what he did, nobody had experienced the painful feelings as he did.
And yet he did not attain any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones.
And there, alone, he asked himself: 'Could there be another path to awakening?' Then he recalled once, being young, he was sitting in the shade of a tree, he was secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states and entered upon and remained in the first jhana, which is accompanied by applied and sustained thought, with rapture and pleasure born of seclusion.
And then he asked himself again: 'Could that be the path to wakening?' Then following on that memory came the realization: 'That is the path to Awakening.' He thought: 'So why am I afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities?' He thought: 'I am no longer afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality, nothing to do with unskillful mental qualities'.
He realised that to attain that pleasure was very difficult with a body so weak so he ate some food to regain his strength and the five recluses that were with him practicing austerities left him.
