The Buddha
Awakening to Life’s Meaning
Foundation • Module 3
Estimated time to complete: 60 minutes
Introduction
The previous modules introduced meditation as an investigative method and offered guidance for establishing daily practice. We explored what brings people to meditation—the search for something beyond temporary pleasant feelings or life satisfaction, toward what we called “existential happiness.” We discussed faithful practice, the investigative interest that approaches Buddhist teachings as testable hypotheses.
This naturally raises questions: Who investigated these matters first? What did they discover? And why should we trust their investigation was worth continuing?
This module examines the life of Siddhartha Gautama, who became known as “the Buddha”—meaning “the awakened one.” We’re examining him as someone who reportedly investigated the same fundamental questions about life, suffering, and meaning that we might be investigating ourselves.
Five videos trace his life chronologically, and we’ll explore themes between them.
What to watch for: The basic outline of the Buddha’s life. The four phases: privileged life, search, awakening, teaching. How the tradition presents him as human rather than divine. What “awakening” means in this context.
Video 1: The Buddha
Duration: 17 minutes
Who Was This Person?
According to Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama was born around the fifth or sixth century BCE in what is now Nepal, into a wealthy ruling family. The traditional narrative emphasizes that despite extraordinary privilege, he became troubled by fundamental questions about human existence after encountering old age, sickness, death, and a wandering renunciant.
At age 29, he left palace life to become a wandering mendicant, studying with renowned meditation teachers and practicing extreme asceticism for six years. After abandoning asceticism as ineffective, he sat under what became known as the bodhi tree, determined to understand the nature of suffering and its cessation.
According to the tradition, he underwent a transformative “awakening” when saw through the mechanism of suffering, understood dependent arising, and realized what Buddhists call nirvāṇa—the complete cessation of existential dis-ease. From that point, he was known as “the Buddha,” the awakened one.
For the next 45 years, he taught what he had discovered, gathered students, and established communities. At age 80, he died—an event Buddhism calls the parinirvāṇa.
The videos explore these phases in detail. What makes this relevant for meditation study isn’t the biographical details themselves, but what the story represents: a human being who investigated fundamental questions about existence and reportedly discovered something transformative that could be taught to others.
Historical Uncertainty and Teaching Stories
The Buddha’s biography comes through texts written centuries after his death. The basic outline—a person who lived around 2,500 years ago in India, who investigated suffering and is said to have awakened, who taught for decades—is historically grounded. But specific details, particularly extraordinary events, come filtered through communities telling stories to teach rather than document.
Buddhism doesn’t require us to resolve what’s historical fact versus teaching story. What matters is understanding what the tradition teaches through these narratives—about human potential, about investigation’s path, about awakening.
Some Buddhists read these stories as literal history, accepting that extraordinary events occurred as described. Others read them as symbolic teaching, with events representing inner psychological truths rather than external facts. Most practitioners probably don’t decide definitively but engage the stories as meaningful whether they’re literally true or not.
For meditation study, what matters isn’t nailing down precise historical or biographical details but rather understanding that Buddhism emerged from one man’s sustained investigation of existence and that millions of meditation practitioners across 2,500 years have been inspired to meditate by his life story, emulating the spiritual journey it describes.
What to watch for: The circumstances of Siddhartha’s birth and the predictions made about his future. The protected palace environment his father created. The contrast between external privilege and internal questioning.
Video 2: Birth & Early Life
Duration: 19 minutes
The Protected Palace
The story of Siddhartha’s early life emphasizes an interesting paradox: he had everything anyone could want, yet something was fundamentally unsatisfying. His father reportedly tried to protect him from any encounter with suffering—filling the palace with youth and beauty, removing anything old or sick or dying from his sight. But this protection only worked until the day Siddhartha left the palace grounds and encountered what had been hidden from him.
This narrative structure—privilege that fails to satisfy, protection that proves impossible to maintain—resonates with something many contemporary practitioners recognize. We might not live in literal palaces, but many of us in relatively wealthy, stable societies do experience something analogous: lives with enough comfort and security that it’s possible to avoid confronting fundamental questions about mortality, meaning, and the fragility of everything we rely on. Until something breaks through—an illness, a death, a failure, a moment of stark recognition that our security is temporary and conditional.
The tradition treats the four sights—old age, sickness, death, and a renunciant seeker—as awakening calls. They revealed what Siddhartha’s father had tried to hide: that everything we cling to will eventually be lost. Youth fades. Health fails. Everyone dies. The comfortable life his father constructed couldn’t protect him from these truths, and more importantly, it couldn’t address them.
The fourth sight—the wandering renunciant—showed an alternative: someone who had responded to life’s fundamental insecurity not by building better walls or accumulating more comfort, but by investigating directly whether there might be a freedom that doesn’t depend on controlling circumstances. This is what drew Siddhartha out of the palace: not just recognition of suffering, but the possibility that there might be a way to address it fundamentally rather than temporarily.
What to watch for: The teachers Siddhartha studied with and what each taught. The shift from meditation training to extreme asceticism. Why he abandoned asceticism. What he discovered under the bodhi tree.
Video 3: Search & Awakening
Duration: 18 minutes
What He Discovered
Buddhist texts describe in detail what the Buddha is said to have realized—the Four Noble Truths, dependent arising, the nature of identity, the arising and cessation of craving. We will discuss many of these topics in the subsequent floors of the palace of learning. But awakening itself isn’t something fully conveyed in concepts. It’s described as seeing reality directly, without the distortions our usual ways of perceiving impose.
In one framing: the Buddha discovered that we subconsciously assume that persons and things as having fixed, lasting, autonomous identities when they actually don’t. This misperception leads us to hope for permanence and control while fear impermanence and uncertainty—both of which create suffering. Seeing through this misperception eliminates the hope and fear, which eliminates the suffering—not because circumstances become perfect, but because the mechanism generating existential dis-ease has been understood.
In another framing: the Buddha discovered what we earlier called “existential happiness”—a fundamental wellbeing that doesn’t depend on circumstances being pleasant or on achieving particular goals. Not happiness in the sense of feeling good, but the complete absence of existential dis-ease, the dissolution of the sense that something is wrong or that we need to secure something we don’t yet have.
Whichever way it is framed, the tradition emphasizes it wasn’t an intellectual understanding that he came to conceptually. Rather, it was a direct perception of what was already in plain sight but missed due to his obscuring assumptions about what he was experiencing. The metaphor of waking from a dream captures this: when you wake from a nightmare, you don’t think yourself out of the fear; you simply see it was a dream all along. Similarly, awakening involves seeing through the appearance of fixed identities and recognizing reality beyond the dream of this life, which is full of distorting assumptions that obscure the way things truly are.
However we interpret this dream metaphor, what matters for meditation study is understanding that the tradition claims this recognition is possible through sustained investigation with appropriate methods.
What to watch for: Why the Buddha initially hesitated to teach. The first sermon and the Five Ascetics. How the teachings spread and the community developed. The role of skillful means in adapting teachings for different audiences.
Video 4: Teaching Others
Duration: 25 minutes
Why He Taught
According to the traditional account, after his awakening, the Buddha initially thought what he had discovered couldn’t be taught. Not because it was secret or restricted, but because it seemed too subtle, too counter to conventional ways of thinking, to be communicated effectively. The story says he sat under the bodhi tree for weeks, considering whether to even try to help others discover it for themselves.
What changed his mind was the recognition that people have varying capacities for understanding—what Buddhism calls “different levels of dust on their eyes.” Some people would grasp the teachings quickly; others would need more gradual approaches; still others might not be ready at all. But there were people for whom the teaching could make an immediate difference. This recognition motivated him to teach despite the difficulty.
The Buddha’s first teaching, traditionally called “the first turning of the dharma wheel,” was given to five ascetics who had been his companions during his years of extreme practice. He taught them the Four Noble Truths and the Middle Way between indulgence and asceticism. These teachings became foundational for everything that followed.
Over 45 years of teaching, the Buddha adapted his approach to different audiences. He taught householders differently than monastics, beginning students differently than advanced practitioners. This flexibility—what Buddhists call “skillful means” (upāya)—reflects a pedagogical principle: effective teaching meets students where they are rather than offering one-size-fits-all instruction.
The community that formed around the Buddha included monks, nuns, and lay followers. Different roles served different functions, but all were investigating the same fundamental questions. This community—known as the Saṅgha—became one of the Three Jewels of Buddhism (along with Buddha and Dharma), since the Buddhist path of investigation isn’t purely solitary but requires much support from others who are engaged in similar inquiry.
What to watch for: The Buddha’s final days and last words. What his death reveals about Buddhist views on impermanence and non-attachment. The transmission of teaching to the community.
Video 5: Death
Duration: 6 minutes
The Human Example
The Buddha is said to have died at age 80 from food poisoning. This detail matters. It means that he didn’t transcend death or vanish into light. He got sick and died, like any other human. His body was cremated, his relics distributed as living reminders or embodiments of the human potential for awakening.
Buddhism emphasizes the Buddha’s humanity because the point isn’t that he was ontologically special—that he had divine nature unavailable to others. The point is that he was human, investigating human questions, discovering something humans can discover. His awakening demonstrates what’s possible through sustained investigation of the truth beneath our surface-level experience of existence.
His final words, according to tradition, were: “All conditioned things are impermanent. Strive with diligence.” He began by teaching impermanence and suffering. He ended by reminding students that even he would pass away, that they shouldn’t rely on his presence but on their own investigation of the truth for themselves.
After his death, communities faced questions of how to preserve and transmit teachings. There was no written scripture yet—teachings had been memorized and passed orally. Different groups eventually wrote down different versions, leading to various textual collections that survive today. We don’t have direct access to exactly what the Buddha said; we have records filtered through communities with their own interpretations.
For meditation study, what matters isn’t resolving every historical question but understanding that Buddhism emerged from sustained investigation into existence, and that millions of practitioners across 2,500 years claimed to find greater meaning in their lives through applying the investigative methods found and explained in Buddhist meditation theory.
Questions for Reflection
These questions invite ongoing investigation rather than requiring immediate answers.
1. Privilege and Investigation Siddhartha had extraordinary material privilege, yet he left it all to investigate suffering. What does this suggest about the relationship between external circumstances and existential dissatisfaction? Can people living in difficult circumstances also investigate these questions, or does investigation require privilege?
2. The Four Sights What moments in your own life have functioned like the four sights for Siddhartha—breaking through comfortable assumptions and raising questions about mortality, meaning, or the fragility of security? How did you respond to those moments?
3. Awakening as Perfect Existential Happiness The Buddha’s awakening is described as complete freedom from existential dis-ease—what we called “existential happiness” that doesn’t depend on circumstances or achievements. Does this framing help clarify what meditation might be investigating internally? Or does it seem too removed from ordinary experience to be relevant?
4.The Human Example Buddhism emphasizes that the Buddha was human, not divine. Why might this distinction matter for understanding the goals of meditation practice? How does it change the significance of awakening to frame it as something humans can achieve rather than something reserved for special religious figures?
This module is part of Tarpa's Palace of Learning curriculum, a secular educational program exploring Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and contemplative practice. All content © 2025