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Psychologist and Dharma teacher Mal Huxter writes about Buddha’s awakening and how his teachings spread around the world and still help people today to find freedom from suffering.

Finding Freedom From Dukkha

The term “Buddha” refers to an awakened one. The aim of Buddhism is to wake up to the realities of life and death in order to find freedom from dukkha. Dukkha is the Pali term used to describe the Buddha’s first truth. Dukkha is often translated as suffering, but it is better to consider it as un-satisfactoriness. It can be gross such as our struggles with mental torment, severe illness and death, or it can be subtle, such as not getting what we want exactly how and when we want it.

Essentially, Buddhism is about reducing and uprooting the root causes of dukkha: greed, ignorance and hatred. The teachings of the Buddha invite us to see and realise awakening for ourselves, as no one else can do it for us. A traditional Buddhist approach to meditation is experiential and offers broad and flexible applications of skills in order to ease suffering and wake up to freedom.

Read more: Explore the Four Seals of Buddhism as foundational principles of the Buddhist path.

The Life Of Siddhartha Gautama

Around 2,600 years ago the man who was to become the Buddha, was born in the town of Lumbini near the current Nepalese-Indian border. His name was Siddhartha Gautama and he was the son of a leader of one of the many small kingdoms in northern India at that time.

Siddhartha excelled in the arts and sciences and led a life of luxury, protected and sheltered from life’s difficulties. Siddhartha enjoyed all the pleasures that life had to offer until he was 29 years old. Around that time, he was exposed to four circumstances, which were later understood as messages.

The first was seeing someone very old, the second was seeing someone stricken with illness and the third was seeing a corpse. He was deeply disturbed by what he saw and confronted by the realisation that all beings are subject to these realities. The fourth sight was that of a wandering monk or seeker of spiritual freedom.

Seeing a homeless wanderer seeking the truth inspired him to leave his comfortable existence in search of a resolution for the human suffering that he had become aware of. That night, Siddhartha left his life of comfort and his family to seek an end to suffering and became an ascetic.

Buddha’s Awakening Under A Tree

He studied with the prominent meditation teachers of the time and mastered all the techniques on offer, yet he felt that these techniques did not satisfy. Siddhartha followed the teachings of ascetics and mistakenly believed that the way to freedom was to completely deny bodily needs and any pleasure. He practiced the extremes of austerity and self-mortification in the forests of northern India for six years.  Towards the end of this period, he almost died from emaciation and exhaustion.

Despite his strenuous determination, Siddhartha realised his efforts were futile and that these extremes of self-mortification were not the way to freedom. After some reflection, he decided to accept nourishment, cared for his body and changed the way he was seeking enlightenment.

He remembered a time when he was just a boy sitting under a rose apple tree. At that time, he had slipped into a very pleasant and absorbing, serene state of mind. As an adult, Siddhartha thought that this focussed state could be helpful to realise the freedom he sought, and he was right.

According to accounts, on the full moon night in May, just before his 35th birthday, Siddhartha sat comfortably under a Bodhi tree and began practicing mindfulness of breath and entered the same state of concentration he experienced as a boy. This meditation led to more refined states and eventually a series of insights. By dawn, according to historical accounts, he realised the four noble truths and the end of dukkha and became the Buddha.