The Four Sights and the Great Renunciation

Long ago, in the foothills of the Himalayas, a prince named Siddhartha was born into the royal family of the Shakya clan. His father, King Shuddhodana, ruled the kingdom of Kapilavastu, and from his son's birth he was determined to shield him from the world's harsh realities. A seer had predicted that Siddhartha would become either a great king or a great spiritual teacher, and the king, hoping for the former, surrounded the prince with every luxury imaginable. Siddhartha grew up in palaces of exquisite beauty, attended by servants who anticipated his every need, given the finest clothes and food, and married to a princess named Yasodhara, with whom he had a son, Rahula. Within the palace walls there was no sickness, no old age, and no death, only youth, health, and endless pleasure. The king even ordered the city cleaned and decorated whenever the prince wished to venture out, so that he would never see anything unpleasant.

Ashvaghosha's Buddhacarita (an epic poetic biography of the Buddha), Canto 4 (the fourth section of the poem), records what happened when Siddhartha, now a grown man, finally insisted on riding beyond the palace grounds with his charioteer Chandaka. On four separate outings, despite the king's precautions, Siddhartha encountered sights the palace had kept from him his entire life. First he saw an old man, bent and frail, and asked Chandaka what had happened to him; Chandaka explained that old age comes to everyone who lives long enough, prince and commoner alike. On a later outing, Siddhartha saw a man wracked with sickness, and Chandaka explained that illness, too, spares no one. On a third outing, he saw a corpse being carried to cremation, and learned for the first time that every living being eventually dies. Each sight left Siddhartha shaken, since he had never before considered that his own youth, health, and life would not last forever. Chandaka's plain, honest answers to each question mattered as much as the sights themselves, tradition notes, since a charioteer less willing to speak truthfully to his prince might have left Siddhartha's illusions undisturbed a while longer.

On a fourth outing, Siddhartha saw a wandering ascetic, a man who had renounced ordinary life and possessions to seek release from suffering through spiritual discipline. Unlike the first three sights, which had troubled Siddhartha, this fourth sight offered him something else: the ascetic's calm bearing, despite owning nothing, suggested that a path existed beyond the suffering old age, sickness, and death had just revealed to him. Where the first three sights showed Siddhartha the problem, tradition holds, the fourth showed him that a search for its answer was itself possible, and it was this fourth sight that turned his growing unease into a settled resolve to leave the palace and seek that answer directly.

Siddhartha returned to the palace changed. The luxuries that had once surrounded him now seemed to mean little against the certainty that everyone he loved, and he himself, would grow old, fall sick, and die. He continued to live within the palace for a time, but the question the four sights had opened would not close again. Tradition holds that on the very night his son Rahula was born, Siddhartha made his final decision: rather than settle into the comfortable life of a husband, father, and future king that now lay open before him, he resolved to leave everything behind in search of an answer to suffering itself. It was a decision he did not share aloud with anyone in the palace beforehand, knowing that any farewell spoken openly in the palace would only invite arguments he had no wish to have, and no strength left to win.

The Buddhacarita's Canto 5, titled Abhinishkramana, "The Flight," describes what followed. In the depth of night, Siddhartha rose quietly, looked once more at his sleeping wife and newborn son without waking them, and called for Chandaka to saddle his horse, Kanthaka. Tradition holds that the gods muffled the horse's hooves and lulled the palace guards into a deep sleep so the prince could pass through the gates unseen. Siddhartha rode through the night with Chandaka at his side, covering a great distance until they reached the banks of the Anoma River at daybreak. There, beyond his father's kingdom, Siddhartha dismounted, cut off his own long hair with his sword as a sign of his renunciation, exchanged his royal garments for the simple robe of an ascetic, and sent Chandaka back to Kapilavastu with Kanthaka and the news of his departure. The Buddhacarita records that Kanthaka, grief-stricken at the separation from his master, died of a broken heart shortly after being led home.

From the banks of the Anoma River, Siddhartha began the search that would eventually lead him, after years of study under different teachers and a period of extreme asceticism he would ultimately reject, to the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, where the very questions raised by the four sights, of old age, sickness, and death, would finally be answered in his enlightenment. Buddhist tradition returns to the four sights again and again as the hinge on which the entire life of the Buddha turns: not a sudden, unexplained decision to abandon a comfortable life, but the direct, human response of a man who could no longer un-see what those four encounters outside his palace gates had shown him.