The renunciation is the hinge of the biography. Everything before it is preparation; everything after it follows from it. The tradition calls the departure the mahabhinishkramana, the great going-forth, and it became one of the most frequently depicted scenes in Buddhist art — the horse Kanthaka with its hooves muffled, the sleeping household, the gates opened, the prince riding out.

It is also the episode where the canonical and the legendary accounts diverge most sharply, and where the divergence is most instructive.

The four sights #

The familiar version comes from the later biographies. Suddhodana, warned by the prophecy that his son might renounce the world, keeps him insulated from anything that might prompt it. On four excursions outside the palace, the young man nevertheless encounters:

  • An old man, bent and failing, and learns that ageing comes to everyone.
  • A sick man, and learns that health is not owned.
  • A corpse being carried to the cremation ground, and learns that he will die.
  • A wandering renunciant, calm amid the others, and sees that there is a response available.

Each sight is met with the same exchange: Siddhartha asks his charioteer Channa what he is looking at, and receives the answer that this is the common condition, his own included. The first three establish the problem; the fourth supplies the form of the solution.

The structure is doctrinally exact. Ageing, sickness, and death are three of the standard illustrations of dukkha in the first noble truth, and they recur as a fixed formula throughout the canon. The four sights are that formula turned into a story.

They are almost certainly not history. The early discourses do not contain them, and a version of the same sequence is told of a previous buddha, Vipassi, in the Mahapadana Sutta — which suggests the episode circulated as a template for buddha-biographies generally rather than as a record of a specific afternoon.

What the early canon says instead #

The Ariyapariyesana Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 26) gives the Buddha’s own account, and it contains no sights, no charioteer, and no palace escape:

He describes himself as young, black-haired, in the prime of life, and says that while his parents wept he cut off his hair and beard, put on the ochre robe, and went forth from home into homelessness. The reasoning he gives is the distinction between the noble search and the ignoble one: being himself subject to birth, ageing, sickness, death, sorrow, and defilement, he had been seeking things that were also subject to all of these. He decided instead to seek what is not.

This is an argument, not an epiphany. It is the same argument as the Sukhamala Sutta’s reflection on the intoxications of youth, health, and life. The early Buddha renounces because he has thought something through.

The two accounts should not be harmonised. What the later version adds is drama, a villain (the protective father), and the visual vocabulary that made the story transmissible to people who could not read.

The departure #

The legendary account is specific and visually rich. Siddhartha is twenty-nine. On the night he decides to leave, he looks in on the sleeping women of the household and sees them slack-jawed and drooling — a scene the texts dwell on, and which functions as a set-piece meditation on the foulness of the body and the impermanence of beauty. He goes to look at his wife and newborn son, decides not to wake them lest he be prevented from leaving, and departs with Channa on the horse Kanthaka.

Mara, the personification of death and of everything that binds beings to samsara, appears for the first time here, offering him universal sovereignty within seven days if he will turn back. He refuses. Mara will shadow him until the awakening and after it.

At the river Anoma he cuts off his hair with his sword, exchanges his clothes for a hunter’s, and sends Channa back with the horse and the ornaments. The horse, in the more sentimental versions, dies of grief.

The six years of searching #

What follows is the part of the story that does the most doctrinal work, because it eliminates the two available alternatives to the middle way.

The two teachers #

He goes first to Alara Kalama, and masters his system — described as culminating in “the sphere of nothingness,” a formless meditative attainment. Alara offers to make him co-leader of the community. He declines, on the ground that the attainment does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, peace, direct knowledge, awakening, or nibbana, but only to rebirth in the sphere of nothingness.

He then goes to Uddaka Ramaputta, whose system culminates in “the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception,” a still subtler state. He masters that too, is offered leadership of the whole community, and declines for the same reason.

The episode is remarkable for what it concedes. It grants that these teachers had real attainments, that their methods worked, and that the future Buddha learned them fully — and then says that meditative refinement, however deep, is not itself liberation. The formless attainments were retained in Buddhist practice as the four arupa jhanas, discussed in The Jhanas Explained; what was rejected was the claim that reaching them finishes the job.

The austerities #

He then joins five companions and undertakes severe self-mortification in the forest at Uruvela. The Mahasaccaka Sutta describes it in the first person and in unpleasant detail: breath-retention practices producing violent headaches and the sensation of the skull being split; fasting to the point where his spine could be felt through his abdomen, his scalp shrivelled, and his body hair fell out at a touch; the skin of his belly touching his backbone.

He concludes that no one has endured, or could endure, more severe austerities, and that they have not produced “any superhuman distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones.” The method does not work.

The rejection matters in context. Severe asceticism was a mainstream and prestigious technique among the sramana movements — the Jains, in particular, built a whole soteriology on it — and dismissing it was a substantive position in a live argument, not a concession to comfort.

The recollection and the middle way #

At this point he recalls a childhood episode: sitting in the shade of a rose-apple tree while his father worked, he had entered spontaneously into the first jhana, a state of pleasure “secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states.” He asks himself whether that could be the path, and answers that it could — and further, that there is nothing to fear in a pleasure that has nothing to do with sensuality or unwholesome states.

This is the discovery of the middle way, and the reasoning is precise. The problem with sense-pleasure is not that it is pleasant; it is that it is bound up with craving. A pleasure arising from seclusion and concentration is not. Asceticism had been rejecting pleasure as such, which was the wrong target.

Realising he cannot pursue this while starving, he accepts food. The five companions, disgusted, conclude he has given up and abandon him. He will meet them again at Deer Park.

Sujata’s offering #

The traditional account adds a village woman, Sujata, who offers him a bowl of milk-rice, mistaking him for the tree spirit she had come to propitiate. It is the meal that restores his strength before the awakening. He eats, throws the bowl into the river — where, in the legend, it floats upstream — and goes to sit beneath the pipal tree.

The episode is minor and persistent, and it does something useful: it puts a layperson, and a woman, at the point of the story where the ascetic project fails and the middle way begins.

What the renunciation means #

The tradition has never treated the renunciation as a recommendation that everyone leave home. The Vinaya requires parental consent for ordination — a rule the commentaries connect directly to Suddhodana’s grief — and the canon is full of teaching addressed to householders who are plainly not expected to go forth.

What the episode asserts is narrower and harder: that the problem is not solvable within the terms of ordinary life, because ordinary life is organised around securing things that cannot be secured. Renunciation in the literal sense is one response. The Eightfold Path in daily life is the tradition’s account of what the same insight looks like for someone who stays.

Common questions #

How old was he when he left? Twenty-nine in the traditional account, with six years of searching before the awakening at thirty-five. The numbers are schematic and should not be pressed.

Did he really abandon his family? The texts say so plainly, and the tradition has not hidden it. The later literature works hard to soften it — Yasodhara is given foreknowledge, or is said to have taken up ascetic practice herself in his absence, and both she and Rahula eventually join the order. Whether the softening is historical memory or apologetic is not recoverable.

Why did the five companions leave him? Because accepting food looked like abandoning the practice. They had committed to austerity as the method, and from inside that commitment the middle way is indistinguishable from failure of nerve. Their return at the first sermon is the tradition’s answer.

Were Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta real? Most scholars think so. They appear only in this context, they are credited with real attainments, and the Buddha is shown learning from them and failing to improve on their systems — none of which a later inventor would have much reason to construct.

Sources & further reading #

Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (trans.), The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom, 1995) — for the Ariyapariyesana Sutta (MN 26) and Mahasaccaka Sutta (MN 36), the two primary first-person accounts. Bhikkhu Nanamoli, The Life of the Buddha According to the Pali Canon (Buddhist Publication Society, 3rd ed. 1992), chs. 2–3. Johannes Bronkhorst, The Two Traditions of Meditation in Ancient India (Motilal Banarsidass, 2nd ed. 1993) — on what the Buddha was rejecting and what he kept. Richard Gombrich, What the Buddha Thought (Equinox, 2009), chs. 4–5 — on the renunciant milieu and the argument against asceticism. John S. Strong, The Buddha: A Short Biography (Oneworld, 2001), ch. 4.