Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Last time we followed Prince Siddhartha’s renunciation after he saw the trap beneath worldly splendor. This episode explains how practice led him to awakening.

Leaving Kapilavastu, Siddhartha first went to nearby Magadha. Many independent śramaṇas meditated alone in forests and attained profound concentration. One was Āḷāra Kālāma, who recognized the prince and taught him everything he knew; Siddhartha soon reached very deep meditative states.

Siddhartha had experienced meditation as a child. During an outing with King Śuddhodana, he dismissed his attendants, sat cross-legged beneath a rose-apple tree, contemplated the suffering he had seen, and felt intense compassion. Extreme concentration carried him into meditation and unprecedented calm joy.

Meditation stabilizes the mind upon an object. Unified and powerful attention produces awareness unlike ordinary distraction. This early Indian discipline was not what later became Chan or modern meditation; its familiar name is yoga, mentioned briefly in earlier episodes and worth explaining here.

The word yoga first appeared in the Upanishads as a path to awakening. The Yogaśikhā Upanishad says:‘Though reborn a thousand times, sins do not disappear; through yogic insight alone, the cycle of rebirth ends.’The verse says only yoga can end harmful karma and rebirth. It began India’s long yogic tradition, now global. Among religious and philosophical systems describing transcendence, Indian yoga is unusually active and technical, sharply unlike traditions that passively await revelation.

Yogic techniques were popular but still developing in Siddhartha’s time. Texts described mantra yoga, laya yoga, chanting, concentrating between the brows, and regulating body and mind through breath. Xu Fancheng later translated Sri Aurobindo’s The Synthesis of Yoga, a modern continuation of that ancient tradition.

Siddhartha’s teachers, including Āḷāra Kālāma, had reached advanced meditative states. He quickly matched them, but discovered meditation had not finally ended his troubles, becausethe rare experience lasted only during meditation and did not continue into daily life. When he emerged, life’s suffering returned.In other words,beautiful as it was, the experience was not permanent liberation.