6.2 — The Palace, the Four Sights, and the Leaving

The story as it is usually told: a prince is kept inside a palace where nothing unpleasant is permitted, because a prophecy said he would become either a great king or a great renunciate and his father wanted the first. At twenty-nine he goes out and sees four things he has never seen. He leaves that night.

The four sights: an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and a wandering ascetic.

Now the honest version, which is better.

What the earliest account says

In the oldest layer of the texts, there is no palace of total isolation and there are no four encounters on a road.

There is something more interesting: he tells it himself, in the first person, as a psychological observation.

He says, in substance: I was delicately brought up. I had every comfort. And it occurred to me — being myself subject to ageing, why do I look at another ageing person and feel repelled? Being myself subject to sickness and death, why do I recoil from a sick person, from a dead one?

And he says: when I considered this, all intoxication with youth, with health, and with life, entirely fell away.

That is the actual reported event. Not four encounters. A realisation about a category error he had been making his whole life — treating other people's decay as something happening to them.

Why this version is stronger

Because everybody has done exactly this and it is completely recognisable.

You know that you will get old. You do not believe it. You see an elderly person struggling and something in you files it under them, not under me in forty years. The Yaksha said the same thing in 3.10 — everybody watches others die and expects to be the exception — and it is the same observation from a different tradition.

The four sights version turns a universal error into a story about a sheltered prince, which is more dramatic and lets you off. You are not a prince and you have seen sick people, so the story is about somebody else.

The first-person version does not let you off at all.

The palace, read properly

And there was probably something like a palace, in the sense that matters.

He describes it himself: three houses for the three seasons, lotus ponds, attendants, the finest food, musicians, and — the detail that gives it away — being kept indoors during the rains so he would not be troubled.

That is not a prison. It is a very comfortable life among a leading family of a small republic, and the point is not that he never saw anything unpleasant.

The point is that comfort is an anaesthetic. A sufficiently pleasant life makes the facts about ageing and death abstract, not because they are hidden but because there is always something more immediate. You do not need a palace for that. A busy month does it.

And the escape is not from the palace. It is from the anaesthesia, which is why the leaving happens the way it does.

The night

The famous version: he looks at his sleeping wife and newborn son, does not wake them, and rides out with his charioteer Channa, cutting his hair at the river and sending the horse and the man back.

And the fact that has to be dealt with: he abandoned a wife and a newborn child.

This book will not smooth that over. Later traditions worked hard on it — Yashodhara is given a vision, or consent, or a previous-life arrangement. The early material does not soften it much. He left. Rahula was days old.

Judging the leaving

Three things, and they do not all point one way.

In his society, the arrangement was less brutal than it sounds. He left a wife and child inside an extended aristocratic household with wealth, status and many relatives. They were not destitute and not alone. The practice of a man leaving for the religious life was recognised, had a name, and happened regularly. It was not unusual and it was not illegal.

And it was still an abandonment, and 4.7 already made the general point: an explanation addresses the reasons, and the person left behind is not confused about the reasons.

And the story does not end there, which is the part usually missed. Both of them join him later. Yashodhara becomes a nun. Rahula is ordained as a boy and becomes a monk of the community. Mahaprajapati, who raised him, leads the campaign for women's ordination (6.11). His father comes and hears him teach.

The family he left reassembled around him, which is not a defence of the leaving and is a real fact about what followed.

What the leaving is actually for

The tradition's word is pabbajja — "going forth." And what it names is a specific and recognisable move.

He had a good life and a real problem, and the good life was preventing him from working on the problem.

Not because it was bad. Because it was absorbing. Every hour was accounted for, every comfort was available, and there was no space in which the question could be worked on.

And here is the general form, which is what makes this chapter useful to somebody who is not going to leave anything.

A sufficiently comfortable and busy life is not neutral with respect to your real questions. It actively prevents them. Not by forbidding them — by filling the space where they would occur. The person who says they will think about what they actually want once things calm down has made a category error, because things do not calm down, and the filling is not a temporary condition.

The Buddha's response was extreme and total. Yours does not have to be, and something has to be, or the question will not get worked on.

The practical minimum is unglamorous: unfilled time, regularly, with nothing to consume in it. No input. The question will arrive on its own within about twenty minutes, which is why almost nobody does this and why every contemplative tradition ever founded insists on it.

Channa and the horse

One small detail worth keeping.

He sends the charioteer and the horse back, and Channa does not want to go. The horse, in the tradition, dies of grief.

It is a sentimental detail and it is doing something. The leaving costs other people, and the story keeps the cost visible rather than making the departure clean. Even the horse is not spared.

Every significant departure in this volume has this shape. Rama's exile cost Sita, Urmila and a kingdom (2.3, 2.5). Krishna's leaving cost Vrindavan permanently (4.7). The Buddha's cost a wife, a son, a father and a charioteer.

None of these people were asked.

What to carry from this page

The realisation is not "people die." It is "I am the same kind of thing." You know the first and you do not believe the second, and the difference between those two states is the entire event described on this page.

Comfort is an anaesthetic and busyness is the delivery system. Neither is bad and both prevent the work.

Leave unfilled time with no input in it. Twenty minutes is enough for the question to arrive. That is the version of going forth available to a person with a job and a family.

And whatever you leave, somebody pays for it who was not asked. Do not tell yourself the departure was clean. None of them are.

Next: 6.3 — six years of doing it wrong, two teachers he outgrew, a body reduced to almost nothing, and the moment he remembered something from childhood that changed everything.