After the prince, Siddhartha, left the palace where he had grown up, he became a spiritual seeker, following the example of the man he had seen on his trip with his chariot driver: the man who had radiated peace and joy.
He sought out the best spiritual teachers. As many such seekers did at that time, and still do in India, he relied on the generosity of people who would fill his begging bowl on his daily rounds. He ate what he was given, and he owned little more than his begging bowl and his robes. He learned how to meditate and to perform various ascetic disciplines. The prince was a very good student, and he quickly mastered the techniques he was taught. "What else?" he would ask. "What else is there to learn?" When he was told by each successive teacher that he had already learned the most advanced practices, he would say, "No, there is more," and seek another mentor. He intuitively knew that he hadn't reached his ultimate goal of discovering the truth about how suffering arose and could be relieved.
After a number of years of spiritual seeking, practicing meditations, and performing a variety of ascetic disciplines, he still hadn't found the truth that he sought. Then he remembered the incident from his childhood when he had sat under the rose apple tree. He recalled the simple and direct experience of alert wakefulness, the glimpse of brilliant sanity. He realized that he was going about things in the wrong way. Instead of starving himself, treating his body harshly, and trying to manipulate his state of mind, he realized that what he needed to do was simply to sit down with himself and see what he discovered.
He accepted an offering of a sort of sweet yogurt drink and made himself a seat of kusha grass. Both the delicious drink and the soft grass were in contrast with the strict disciplines he'd been practicing. Then, he sat down and vowed to stay there until he saw what was true for himself. The story goes on to describe how he was tempted by various "demons" who represented the habitual patterns of distracted mind. Finally, though, he realized his brilliant sanity for himself. In addition, he saw how he and others lose touch with the truth of that inherent natural wisdom and create suffering for ourselves and others.
At that point, the prince became "the Buddha," "the awakened one." He had woken up to the brilliant sanity that he had always had. The Buddha began a long life of teaching what he had discovered. He taught the poor and the rich, men and women. He taught that we have to look into ourselves to discover the truth of who we are and how to relieve our suffering. All of us, he taught, have the same awakened nature; all of us are potential Buddhas.
Having lived in the luxury of the palace and in the harsh extremes of asceticism he was able to say, from his own experience, that neither extreme leads to "waking up" from the dream of our confusion about who and what we are. His teaching became known as the "middle way."
Contemplative Psychotherapists follow the example of the Buddha by beginning our training with looking into our own experience before we try to help others look into their own. In our work with ourselves and also with our clients, we follow the idea of the middle way: instead of falling either into the extreme of indulging in distraction and entertainment or the extreme of self-aggression or unkindness, we look for a path that is characterized by curiosity, gentleness, and finding out for ourselves. In that way, we may the discover brilliant sanity that is already ours.
