Worldy pleasures

Author: * Ningyo Minamoto - 11 Posts on this thread out of 660 Posts sitewide.
Date: May 19, 2004 - 05:33

The King was increasingly worried as he recalled the hermit’s prophecy and tried in every possible way to cheer the Prince and to turn his thoughts in other directions. The King arranged the marriage of the Prince at the age of nineteen to the Princess Yashodhara. She was the daughter of Suprabuddha, the Lord of Devadaha Castle and a brother of the late Queen Maya.

For ten years, in the different Pavilions of Spring, Autumn and the Rainy Season, the Prince was immersed in rounds of music, dancing and pleasure, but always his thoughts returned to the problem of suffering of human life. “The luxuries of the palace, this healthy body, this rejoicing youth! What do they mean to me?” he thought. “Some day we may be sick, we shall become aged; from death there is no escape. Pride of youth, pride of health, pride of existence – all thoughtful people should cast they aside. If he looks in the right way he recognizes the true nature of sickness, old age and death, and he searches for meaning in that which transcends all human sufferings. In my life of pleasures I seem to be looking in the wrong way.”

Thus the spiritual struggle went on in the mind of the Prince until his only child, Rahula, was born when he was 29. This seemed to bring things to a climax, for he then decided to leave the palace and look for the solution of his spiritual unrest in the homeless life of a mendicant.

~~adapted from The Teaching of Buddha, ed. Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, Tokyo~~
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