Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.143

c8.143

We can scarcely doubt that such a mode of viewing things prevailed among religious inquirers at Buddha’s time. Whoever left his home and became a mendicant did so looking for the coveted fruit of enlightenment. May we not also surmise that similar expectations filled the heart of the Sakya youth, when he left his native town? That he then experienced within himself those struggles, those combats between hope and doubt, of which the history of those who have paved new paths for religious feeling and thought have so much to say? That after periods of intense mental, and why not also bodily, anguish there arose in him at a particular moment the feeling of clearer rest and internal certainty, and he laid hold on this as the longed-for illumination, as a token of deliverance come? That he thenceforward felt himself to be the Buddha, the one called by a universal law to be a follower of the Buddhas of bygone ages, and determined to bring to others the blessing which had been imparted to him?