Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.109

c8.109

We can very readily understand how, in the oppressive monotony of idle ease and satiated enjoyment, there may have come directly over an earnest and vigorous nature a mood of restlessness, the thirst for a career and a struggle for the highest aims, and the despair at the same time to find anything to assuage that thirst in the empty world of transitory pleasure. Who knows anything of the form which these thoughts may have assumed in the mind of the youth, and how far the impulse which pervaded that age, and led men and women to leave home for an ascetic life, acting from without upon these inner pre-dispositions, may have influenced him also?