The History of Buddhist Thought c17.49

c17.49

These practices and other frightful kinds of self-mortification are also discussed from the point of view of their value in the training of mind and body. The Mahā-Saccaka-sutta (Majjh., i, 237) represents austerities as being practised by Gotama during his six years’ search for the right method. A man is trained in body when, if pleasant feelings arise, they do not overpower his mind, and he is trained in mind when his mind is not overpowered by painful feelings. Since the time when Gotama left his home and donned the yellow dress, on no occasion did pleasant or painful feeling overpower his mind. He found that only those ascetics and brahmins in whom sensual passions are calmed are capable of knowledge and highest enlightenment. Without his mind being once overcome by painful feeling he practised stoppage of breathing until the gods thought he was dead; he took less and less food until he was reduced to a skeleton; but he found that with the sharpest austerities he could not reach superhuman truly noble knowledge and insight. Then he remembered how once when his father was working he sat under the shade of a rose-apple tree and attained the first trance.¹ Perhaps that was the way to enlightenment. Thinking that there was no danger in the pleasure that was without sensual desires and without evil ideas he took solid food again. His five followers then left him, but he went on to practise the four trances, and found that the pleasant feeling which arose did not overpower his mind. The rest of the sutta is the description of attaining enlightenment in the same words as are used of every disciple who attains it, as described above (p. 47). The only difference is that Buddha was the discoverer of the method.