Chapter III : Trial of Asceticism

Chapter III : Trial of Asceticism

• Gautama had given a trial to the Sankhya and Samadhi Marga. But he had left the Ashram of the Brighus without giving a trial to Asceticism.
• He felt he should give it a trial and gain experience for himself so that he could speak authoritatively about it.
• Accordingly Gautama went to the town of Gaya. From there he reconnoitred the surrounding country and fixed his habitation at Uruvela in the hermitage of Negari, the Royal Seer of Gaya, for practising asceticism. It was a lonely and solitary place on the banks of the river Nairanjana for practising asceticism.
• At Uruvela he found the five Parivrajakas whom he had met at Rajagraha and who had brought news of peace. They too were practising asceticism.
• The mendicants saw him there and approached him to take them with him. Gautama agreed.
• Thereon they served him reverently, abiding as pupils under his orders, and were humble and compliant.
• The austerities and self-mortification practised by Gautama were of the severest sort.
• Sometimes he visited two but not more than seven houses a day and took at each only two but not more than seven morsels.
• He lived on a single saucer of food a day, but not more than seven saucers.
• Sometimes he had but one meal a day, or one every two days, and so on, upto once every seven days, or only once a fortnight, on a rigid scale of rationing.
• As he advanced in the practice of asceticism his sole diet was herbs gathered green, or the grain of wild millets and paddy, or snippets hide, or water-plants, or the red powder round rice-grains within the husk or the discarded scum of rice on the boil, or the flour of oilseeds.
• He lived on wild roots and fruit, or on windfalls only.
• His raiment was of hemp or hempen mixture of cerements of rags from the dust-heap, of bark, of the black antelope's pelt either whole or split down the middle, of grass, of strips of bark or wood, hair of men or animals woven into a blanket, or of owl's wings.
• He plucked out the hair of his head and the hair of his beard, never quitted the upright for the sitting posture, squatted and never rose up, moving only squatting.
• After this wise, in diverse fashions, be lived to torment and to torture his body—to such a length in asceticism did he go.
• To such a length in loathliness did he go that there became accumulated on his body the dirt and filth for years till it dropped off by itself.
• He took up his abode in the awesome depths of the forest, depths so awesome that it was reputed that none but the senseless could venture without his hair standing on end.
• When the cold season brought chill wintry nights, then it was that in the dark half of the months he dwelt by night in the open air and in the dark thicket by day.
• But when there came the last broiling month of summer before the rains, he made his dwelling under the baking sun by day and in the stifling thicket bynight.
• In a charnel ground did he lay down with charred bones for pillow.
• Thereafter Gautama lived on a single bean a day—on a single sesamum seed a day—or a single grain of rice a day.
• When he was living on a single fruit a day, his body grew emaciated in the extreme.
• If he sought to feel his belly, it was his backbone which he found in his grasp ; if he sought to feel his backbone he found himself grasping his belly, so closely did his belly cleave to his backbone and all because he ate so little.