The Buddha's Early Life
The pictures below are drawn from a traditional account of the Buddha's early life (Ashvaghosha's Buddhacarita), and depict some of the events that led him to renounce the world. The originals were block printed on rice paper in India, and were given to me by Prof. Allen Hauk, who taught at Carthage for many years.
According to tradition, the Buddha was born the forest grove of Lumbini, when his mother suddenly went into labor while traveling between palaces. She supported herself by holding onto the branch of a tree, and after the future Buddha was born, he immediately took seven paces to the East, and proclaimed in loud voice that this was his last birth, and that during this life he would attain full enlightenment. Other signs such as his horoscope (and the halo present here) marked him out from the beginning as a Great Being, and all of these are fairly common narrative devices to foreshadow a person's future greatness.
As a king's son, the Future Buddha lived a comfortable and carefree life. According to tradition, his father took great care to ensure that his life was a continual round of pleasure, and that he discovered nothing of life's harsh realities. His father was successful for many years, but one day the young prince went out for a drive, and saw for the first time an old man. His father's minions had carefully removed all the old and sick people from the streets, but according to the traditional story this old man was one of the gods, who had taken this form to awaken the young prince (Note: In Buddhist cosmology the "gods" are not the Supreme Being, but simply beings who live in the heavens as a result of their past good karma. They have superhuman powers of cognition and action, but their divine state is not permanent, and at some time in the future they will be reborn somewhere else). When the prince asked his charioteer what was wrong with the man, he was stunned to hear that everyone was subject to old age (which saps one's vitality and one's faculties) and that someday he too would have to contend with it. This vision of old age is the first of the so-called "Four Signs" that induced the Buddha to renounce his home to seek enlightenment.
The young prince went out for a drive on another occasion, and this time encountered a sick man (according to tradition, this was also one of the gods in disguise). The young prince was stunned to encounter illness, and to learn that this was an inescapable part of the human condition. This is the second of the "Four Signs" that induced the Buddha to renounce his home to seek enlightenment.
On the third occasion, the young prince saw a body being carried away to the cremation ground, and thus learned about death. As with the first two signs, he was shocked and unbelieving that this was part of the human condition, that he would die some day, and that worst of all, even though everybody knew that this was going to happen, everyone seemed to live in denial. As a story, one can compare the young prince's reaction to that of any person sheltered from life's harsher realities (although according to tradition he was in his mid-20s at the time, and thus much older than most). People tend to try to shelter children from these things, but sooner or later they learn about them, as they must.
In the early Buddhist writings, "old age, illness and death" stand as a shorthand for all of the life problems for which the Future Buddha was seeking a solution. This series of prints does not show the story's "Fourth Sign," a wandering "monk" who had left home to seek a solution to the problems of birth-and-death (as with the others, this was one of the gods in disguise). The monk's appearance not only foreshadows the Buddha's own imminent renunciation, but also his eventual success in transcending old age, illness, and death, through his eventual enlightenment and nirvana.
