Before entering into the heart of the matter, namely what is the content of the Buddha's awakening, the way he sees the world, the difference with our own way of perceiving the various phenomena and the reason why this vision makes us suffer and prevents us from seeing the reality of things and how we can nevertheless also become Buddha, It is appropriate to consider why Prince Gautama, who had a golden future, power, youth, health and glory ahead of him, who had lived his whole life in an atmosphere of joy, gave up everything to become a wandering monk, begging for food.

Chapter 2: Gautama's motivation

At the foot of the Himalayan range, on the southern slope and on the banks of the Rohini River, was Kapilavastu, the capital of the Śâkyas clan.

The king Śuddhodhana Gautama had built a great castle and ruled wisely, winning the joyful sympathy of his subjects.

The queen's name was Mâya. She was the daughter of the king's uncle, who ruled a neighboring district of the same Śâkya clan.

For twenty years the royal couple had no children. After a strange dream, in which she saw a white elephant enter her womb from the right side, Queen Mâya became pregnant. The king and his people joyfully prepared for the birth of the royal child. According to tradition, the queen returned to her parents for the birth. On her way, under a wonderful spring sun, she rested in the garden of Lumbini.

She was surrounded by Aśoka flowers, and as she stretched out her right hand to pick a branch, the prince was born. Heaven, earth and the world rejoiced heartily at the glory of the queen and her royal child. This memorable day was the 8th day of April.

The king's joy was extreme and he named his son Siddhartha, which means: "Fulfillment of all desires".

However, in the royal palace, sadness soon followed the joy, because a few days later, the beloved queen Mâya died suddenly. Her younger sister, Mahâprajapati, took her mother's place with the child and raised her with love.

At that time, a hermit named Asita, who lived in the mountains not far from the palace, noticed a luminous radiance surrounding the royal residence; he interpreted it as a favorable omen and went down to the palace to see the child. He announced: "If this prince stays in the palace, he will become a great king and rule the whole world. But if he abandons the court life and embraces the religious life, he will become Buddha, the liberator of the world."

The king was at first very happy to hear this prophecy. But soon after, he began to worry that his only son would leave the palace to become a homeless hermit.

At the age of seven, the Prince began to study the civil and military arts, but his thoughts were more naturally turned to other things. One spring day, he went out of the palace with his father and together they watched a farmer plowing. The Prince noticed a bird descending from the sky and grabbing a small worm that the plow had uncovered while turning the soil. The Prince sat down at the foot of a tree and began to reflect on this, saying to himself: "Alas! Do all living things come to kill each other?"

Then the Prince, who had lost his mother immediately after his birth, became deeply saddened by the tragedy of these two little beings.

His spiritual wound deepened day by day as he grew older. Like the little scar on a young tree, the suffering of human life took root ever more deeply in his heart.

The king became more and more tormented by the hermit's prophecy, and he tried in every possible way to cheer the Prince up and make him think of something else. When the Prince was nineteen years old, the king arranged his marriage with Princess Yaśodhara. She was the daughter of Suprabuddha, the Lord of Devadaha Castle and a brother of the late Queen Mâya.

For ten years, in the various Pavilions of Spring, Autumn, and Rainy Season, the Prince was immersed in a whirlwind of music, dance, and pleasure, but his thoughts kept returning to the problem of suffering, and he strove to understand the true meaning of human life.

The sutras tell of Gautama's famous awakening to the reality of things through the parable of the four doors.

One day, leaving his father's palace through the eastern gate, he met an old man. Another day, going through the southern gate, he saw a sick man. On another occasion, passing through the western gate, he saw a procession carrying a corpse. These encounters led him to reflect on the condition of the human being, inescapably confronted with the four sufferings: birth, old age, illness and death. The thought of having to face these sufferings one day must have been for him an even more intolerable suffering. From then on, he never stopped trying to find a solution to these sufferings.

"The luxuries of the palace, the health of the body, the joys of youth, what does it all mean to me?" he thought. "One day, perhaps I will be ill, and then I will become old and cannot escape death! The pride of youth, the pride of health, the pride of existence, all sensible people should leave them aside! "

"A man who is struggling for his life naturally seeks help. Now, there are two ways of seeking help: one is right and one is wrong. The wrong way is this: when one finds that sickness, old age and death are inevitable, one seeks help among things that are equally empty, equally transitory.

The right way to seek help is this: when one discovers the true nature of sickness, old age and death, one seeks help in that which is beyond all human suffering. In this life of palace pleasure, it seems to me that I seek help in the wrong way."

Gautama glimpsed the way to this solution when at last, coming out of the northern gate, he met an ascetic seeking the way.

And so the spiritual struggle arose in the Prince's heart until the age of 29 (19 according to another theory), when his only child, Rahula, was born. This event seems to have brought things to a head, for it was then that the Prince decided to leave his palace and seek the solution to his inner turmoil in the homeless life of a beggar. He left the palace at night with only his coachman Chandaka and rode Kanthaka, his favorite snow-white horse.