The king's men saw this, and went and told him what had happened. Hearing what his messengers said, the king quickly left the city, and approaching the Bodisat, was so pleased at the mere sight of his dignity and grace, that he offered him all his kingdom.
The Bodisat said, "In me, O king! there is no desire after wealth or sinful pleasures. It is in the hope of attaining to complete enlightenment that I have left all." And when the king gained not his consent, though he asked it in many ways, he said, "Assuredly thou wilt become a Buddha! Deign at least after thy Buddhahood to come to my kingdom first."
This is here concisely stated; but the full account, beginning, "I sing the Renunciation, how the Wise One renounced the world," will be found on referring to the Pabbajjā Sutta and its commentary.
And the Bodisat, granting the king's request, went forward on his way. And joining himself to Āḷāra Kāḷāma, and to Uddaka, son of Rāma, he acquired their systems of ecstatic trance. But when he saw that that was not the way to wisdom, he left off applying himself to the realization of that system of Attainment.[1] And with the intention of carrying out the Great Struggle against sin, and showing his might and resolution to gods and men, he went to Uruvela. And saying, "Pleasant, indeed, is this spot!" he took up his residence there, and devoted himself to the Great Struggle.[2]
- ↑ Samāpatti.
- ↑ The Great Struggle played a great part in the Buddhist system of moral training; it was the wrestling with the flesh by which a true Buddhist overcame delusion and sin, and attained to Nirvāna. It is best explained by its four-fold division into 1. Mastery over the passions. 2. Suppression of sinful thoughts. 3. Meditation on the seven kinds of Wisdom (Bodhi-angā, see 'Buddhism,' p. 173); and 4. Fixed attention, the power of preventing the mind from wandering. It is also called Sammappadhāna, Right Effort, and forms the subject of the Mahā-Padhāna Sutta, in the Dīgha Nikāya. The system was, of course, not worked out at the time here referred to; but throughout the chronicle the biographer ascribes to Gotama, from the beginning, a knowledge of the whole Buddhist theory as afterwards elaborated. For to our author that theory had no development, it was Eternal and Immutable Truth already revealed by innumerable previous Buddhas.
