Buddha Begins his Journey
After much struggle, with his mind made up, Prince Siddhartha awoke one night and, casting one last regretful look at his wife and child, mounted his horse and rode off. At the city gates he gave up his horse and his sumptuous robes, cut off his hair, and entered a hermitage where the Brahmans accepted him as a disciple. Siddhartha had now and forever disappeared. He became the monk Gautama, or as he is still called, Sakyamuni, the ascetic of the Sakyas.
Austerity and renunciation
For many years Gautama studied until he felt the need to learn more elsewhere. He began to travel. His two teachers had showed him how to reach very deep states of meditation (samadhi).
During his travels the Buddha also began a life of extreme asceticism which he shared with five companions who believed that if they put their bodies through terrible physical hardship, they would understand the truth. After five or six years of extreme self-mortification, Siddhartha felt he had failed to achieve true insight and rejected such practices as dangerous and useless.
Birth of the Buddha | Buddha Begins His Journey| The Bodhi Tree |Defeating the Mara's | Enlightenment
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