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Updated: June 2, 2025
No connected account of his renunciation of the world has been found in the Pitakas but people are represented as saying that in spite of his parents' grief he "went out from the household life into the homeless state" while still a young man. Accepted tradition, confirmed by the Mahâparinibbâna Sutta, says that he retired from worldly life when he was twenty-nine years old.
It is stated incidentally that his parents regretted his abandonment of worldly life and it is natural to suppose that they may have tried to turn his mind to secular interests and pleasures . His son, Râhula, is mentioned several times in the Pitakas but his wife only once and then not by name but as "the princess who was the mother of Râhula ." His separation from her becomes in the later legend the theme of an affecting tale but the scanty allusions to his family found in the Pitakas are devoid of sentimental touches.
Can this account be regarded as in any sense historical, as being not perhaps the Buddha's own words but the reminiscences of some one who had heard him describe the crisis of his life? Like so much of the Pitakas the narrative has an air of patchwork.
That teaching as presented in the Pali Pitakas is marked by its negative and deliberately circumscribed character. Its rule is silence when strict accuracy of expression is impossible, whereas later philosophy does not shrink from phrases which are suggestive, if not exact.
For there is truth at the bottom of the saying that Gotama was born to be either a Buddha or a universal monarch: he would have made a good general, if he had not become a monk. We are perhaps on firmer ground when we find speakers in the Pitakas commenting on his calm and bright expression and his unruffled courtesy in discussion. Of his eloquence it is hard to judge.
When in words which have as strong a claim as any in the Pitakas to be regarded as old and genuine he describes the stages by which he acquired enlightenment and promises the same experiences to those who observe his discipline , he says that he first followed the thread of his own previous existences through past æons, plumbing the unfathomed depths of time: next, the whole of existence was spread out before him, like a view-seen from above, and he saw beings passing away from one body and taking shape in another, according to their deeds.
The question, does the Tathâgata, that is the Buddha or perfected saint, exist after death, which is the phraseology usually employed by the Pitakas in formulating the problem, belongs to the class of questions called not declared or undetermined , because they do not admit of either an affirmative or a negative answer.
In one hymn the poet invokes, together with many Vedic deities, all manner of nature spirits, demons, animals, healing plants, seasons and ghosts. A similar collection of queer and vague personalities is found in the popular pantheon of China to-day . Thirdly, various deities who are evidently considered to be well known, play some part in the Pali Pitakas.
His appearances on earth are rarer and more weighty, and sometimes he seems to be a personification of whatever intelligence and desire for good there is in the world . But in no case do the Pitakas concede to him the position of supreme ruler of the Universe.
Yet it would seem that according to the psychology of the Pitakas an ordinary human being is an aggregate of the skandhas and nothing more. When such a being dies and in popular language is born again, the skandhas reconstitute themselves but it is expressly stated that when the saint dies this does not happen. The Chain of Causation says that consciousness and the sankhâras are interdependent.
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