Buddhist Romanticism

search, he kept referring to it not only as a search for the deathless, but also
as a search for what was skillful (MN 26). And he noted that his ultimate
success was due to two qualities: discontent with regard to skillful qualities
—i.e., he never let himself rest content with his attainments as long as they
did not reach the deathless—and unrelenting exertion (AN 2:5). Although
he described his feelings leading up to his decision to go forth, he claimed
that from that point forward he never let the pains or pleasures he gained
from his practice or from his career as a teacher invade or overcome his
mind (MN 36; MN 137).
At first, he studied with two meditation teachers, but after mastering
their techniques and realizing that the highest attainments they yielded
were not deathless, he set out on his own. Most of his six years were spent
engaged in austerities—inducing trances by crushing his thoughts with his
will or by suppressing his breath, going on such small amounts of food that
he would faint when urinating or defecating. When finally realizing that,
although he had pursued these austerities as far as humanly possible, they
gave no superior knowledge or attainment, he asked himself if there might
be another way to the deathless. After asking this question, he remembered
a time when, as a young man, he had spontaneously entered the first jhāna,
a pleasant mental absorption, while sitting under a tree. Convincing himself
that there was nothing to fear from that pleasure, he began eating moderate
amounts of food so as to regain the strength needed to enter that
concentration.
It was thus that he entered the path to awakening. On the night of his
awakening, after attaining the fourth jhāna—a more stable and equanimous
state—he gained three knowledges through the power of his concentration:
The first two were knowledge of his own past lives and knowledge of how
beings die and are reborn repeatedly, on the many levels of the cosmos,
based on their kamma. The larger perspective afforded by this second
knowledge showed him the pattern of how kamma worked: intentions
based on one’s views and perceptions determined one’s state of becoming,
i.e., one’s identity in a particular world of experience.
By applying this insight to the intentions, views, and perceptions
occurring at the present moment in his mind, the Buddha was able to attain
the third knowledge of the night: the ending of the mental states that led to
renewed becoming. This was the knowledge that led to his attaining the
deathless.
26