Sometime in the late spring of 528
BCE, the earnest young seeker of life’s
truths was walking through a wide, lush
meadow and noticed a lone banyan
tree. Beneath its branches he sat down
to rest and meditate. He had no way of
knowing that it would later become fa-
mous and revered as the Bodhi Tree, or
“Tree of Wisdom.”
Siddhartha now meditated so intently that he entered into a
trancelike state in which he was able to clear his mind of all thoughts
unrelated to his special intellectual quest. While in this state, he
closely examined concepts like unhappiness, illness, old age, and
death and their meaning to humanity. “I saw beings passing away
and being reborn, low and high,” he later recalled. Some of those
beings were happy, while others dwelled in abject misery. He said
that his intellectual journey was guided by an abiding belief in the
“universal law by which every act of good or evil will be rewarded
or punished in this life or in some later incarnation of the soul.”
10
At about age thirty- ve,
Siddhartha sat down
under a banyan tree
to rest and meditate.
When he emerged from
his meditation, he had
realized the reasons
for human suffering,
thereby becoming
the Buddha, or the
Enlightened One.
“I saw beings
passing away
and being
reborn, low
and high.”
10
—The Buddha
