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the golden meditating figure of the Buddha is looking out from the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park across the River Thames. It's one of the most intriguing sights of London. All my life. I've gone past it on. I wonder how many people ask, Who was this man with his coils of hair sitting so serenely we see the Buddha reproduced everywhere in holiday brochures of the exotic Far East In chill out bars, you might have one in your living room like me, a carved wooden head I bought on impulse at a street market because of the serenity of his smile. What is it about that smile? A gift of a friend? The stone Buddha sits czars in prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers through snow, icy rain, the rite of spring flowers. He gazes forward to the city in the distance, always the same bountiful smile upon his portly face. Why don't I share his one minded happiness? The pear blossom, the crimson peddled magnolia, filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia and yearning. He's laughing at me. Isn't he seasons wheeling? Despite my photographs and notes, my desire to make them pause is that the lesson that Stasis this holding on is not life. Now I'm smiling, too. The late cherry. It's soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter the trillium. It's three peddled white flowers, exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall. Peter Pereira's Garden Buddha inspires questions for him, too. When I read my childhood comics about ancient Indian history, the Buddha stood out from all the other figures. His storey seemed a fairy tale in reverse. Here was a true life handsome Prince Siddhartha, who walked out of his fairy tale to strive for self discovery. I want to look at what that means until something of his journey. Let's start at the beginning. Sometime around 563 BC, longed for son and heir was born in a place called Lumbini in present day Nepal. His name was Siddhartha. He who accomplishes his goal on the SAGES, predicted that he would be either on all powerful world emperor or a perfectly enlightened world teacher. His royal father had a solid ambition that his son should rule the world so he could not imagine any use for a perfectly enlightened being. Siddhartha became a top student, a powerful athlete under accomplished prince. Yet he showed a special gentleness and nobility that worried his father. He was wet tow, a beautiful, a noble go Yash holder, and the young couple live blissfully for 10 years in a continuous round of pleasure in one storey. They make love so enthusiastically that in their absorption they fall off a pavilion roof on land, softly in a flower bed without taking notice. Eventually, Yashoda gave birth to a beautiful boy. Siddhartha was proclaimed. Crown Prince on the date of his coronation was set from Robert Thurman's introduction to Buddhism in a revolution. Historians agree that Siddhartha grew up in the city of couple of US two on DH. He was to roam widely, mainly around the Ganges Valley. He was born in the Shakya clan in what by all accounts, sounded like a hugely comfortable life in a sophisticated city. He waas according to the holy texts, the sutras Ah, handsome prince capable of leading a crack army or a troop of elephants. The Buddhist scholar Donald Lopez recounts the famous storey of how Siddhartha is comfortable, veneer cracked. The prince was so content in his shelter domain that he seems not to have become curious about the outside world for 29 years. Only then did he ask his father to allow him to take a chariot ride through the city. His father initially refused, but eventually relented, but not without first sending out his troops to remove all the sick, old and ugly people from the royal route and stationing musicians in the trees to serenade the prince as he rode. Somehow, one old person escaped the soldiers scrutiny, standing bent and wizened as the prince passed by. Not knowing what this wass that stood before him, the prince asked his charioteer to explain. He was told that this was an old man. The prince asked whether this old man was the only one in the world or if there were others like him. When he was told that everyone would all one day become old and bent, the prince reacted. The text report like a bull. When lightning strikes in the meadow, the prince summoned up the courage for three more trips beyond the palace walls. On the first, he saw a sick person. On the second, he saw a corpse being carried to the cremation ground. On the third, he saw over enunciate beneath a tree absorbed in serene meditation, having been exposed in turn to the existence of old age sickness and death on the fact that there are those who seek a state beyond them. He went to his father and asked permission to leave the city and retired to the forest. His father refused and offered his son anything if he would stay. The prince asked that his father promised that he would never die, become ill, grow old or lose his fortune. His father applied that these things were beyond his powers. Oh, look a big big time. Well, uh, Vinny pick. Pick our national time. Follow the model of a modern ache. It's our ladders. He's looking a a pickle. Tarsem tithe Barlow tight about They should modern a key. Charl Odysseas Wait owner Deirdre Takata, a Bengali song of yearning and spiritual discovery from the classic Indian film version of Siddhartha, starring Shashi Kapoor. So at the age of 29 Siddhartha leaves the gilded life of the palace forever. There is an extraordinary power to this riches to rags storey andan that walking away from a wealthy home. You can sense the appeal centuries on to those in the West choosing and escape from conformity. We might call it a lifestyle choice. We're here, from the Beat writer Jack Kerouac on how the Buddha image spread to the West later. But let's focus on that moment when Siddhartha walks away in the middle of the night, fearful of kissing his sleeping wife and infant son, Rahul Er, in case they wake the idea of seeking some inner meanings who study and retreats had long been integral to life in India. It still is today, but for a crown prince and father said hearthat, tow, walk away from family to become an aesthetic may have bean a revolutionary act. But it was also one which, reading about his abandonment of his family, has troubled me all my life, no less now that I am apparent myself, like other aesthetics in ancient India in the forest, he tried it first, the pursuit of physical penance. I'm looking now at one of the famous images of the emaciated Buddha, making the body suffer to free the mind, as described in Picchu, Nana, Molly's The Life of Buddha. According to the parley cannon, the first and core texts of Buddhism written down 200 years after his death. I thought, Suppose I take very little food, say a handful each time, whether it is bean soup or lentil soup. And as I did so, my body reached a state of extreme Emaciation. My limbs became like the jointed segments of vine stems or bamboo stems. Because of eating so little, my backside became like a camel's hoof. The projections of my spine stood forth like coded beads. My ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old ruthless bar said hard. There's extremes of physical endurance impressed other SAGES who, the texts tell us, had started to flock to watch him. And they were shocked when, after six years, said Har Adar rejected the asceticism of physical pain because he felt it would not bring about a spiritual break through. He settled for a middle way, avoiding both asceticism on luxury, to reach his goal, nirvana or enlightenment. All the sucrose and his biographers agree. He settled under a tree near Borgia, in modern Bihar, and vowed not to move again until he gained enlightenment, ignoring endless ways of temptation, enlightenment? It's like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle, an inch wide, the whole moon and the entire sky. I reflected in one dewdrop on the grass. Enlightenment is like the moon by the Japanese poet priest Duggan, the actual bells outside the Maha Body temple, built where the Buddha achieved his great breakthrough, used at the beginning of Ronald Corpse classical response to the Buddhist teachings. The storey of this moment went to Tara Tha the prince became the Buddha, meaning the enlightened one has always been tricky for me to get my head round to mean Advanta sounded suspiciously like a magical cure in our age, obsessed with both pleasure and perfection. But can we in the West understand what it meant for Siddhartha? The former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong has mused on it, too, in her recent biography of the Buddha, What do the new Buddha mean when he claimed to have reached Nirvana on that spring night? He had wanted to wake up his full potential is a human person not to be wiped out Nirvana did not mean personal extinction. What had been snuffed out was not his personality but the fires of greed, hatred and delusion. As a result, he enjoyed a blessed coolness and peace by tapping out the unhelpful states of mind. The Buddha had gained the peace which comes from selflessness. It is a condition that those of us who are still enmeshed in the craving of egotism, which makes us hostile towards others and distort our vision cannot imagine. Nirvana does not given awakened person trancelike immunity but an inner haven which enables a man or woman to live with pain, to take possession ofthe it, affirm it and experience a profound peace of mind in the midst of suffering. Good, good. So at the heart of Buddhism were declared and recorded the most important teaching of all four noble truths that he taught in his first ever sermon. In a deer park outside the holy city of Varanasi, Duka usually translated a suffering or anguish the cause of suffering the end of suffering on DH, the path to end suffering hard lessons for our Western ears. No. Ironically, it was Western Empire Building in the East that introduced Buddhist ideas to Europe, and you can hear it here in Wagner's Parsifal, the composer was planning on writing a major work about the Buddha's life. Before he died in 18 83 Parsifal has been described as his most Buddhist of works. Ideas of compassion became increasingly important to Wagner as he wrestled with conflicting themes of love and renunciation. Another son of German empire, Hermann Hesse, was fascinated by India. His parents had been missionaries there, yearning for inner peace as he battled with mental illness and marriage. Breakdown has had dabbled in the Vogue ish spiritual philosophies. Before discovering Buddhism, His novel said Harta marked a breakthrough as he explored the spiritual struggles of a youth growing up while the historical Buddha was still alive, Siddhartha learned something new on every step of his path, for the world was transformed, and he was enthralled. He saw the sun rise over the forests and mountains on DH, set off the distant Palm Shore. At night, he saw the stars in the heavens on the sickle shaped moon, floating like a boat in the blue. In previous times, all this had bean nothing to Siddhartha, but a fleeting and elusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracised from the thoughts because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side. He saw and recognised the visible, and he sought his place in this world. He did not seek reality. His goal was not on any other side. The world was beautiful when looked at in this way, without any seeking so simple, so childlike. Hess's book was written after the horrors of the First World War and found a new audience in the fifties and sixties, when a different Postwar generation was building a counterculture. Jack Kerouac, with his n sensibility, was to help popularise Buddhism within the Californian hippie movement. He also wrote a biography of the Buddha Wake Up in 1955. In it, he viewed the Buddha's enlightenment as an urgent reaction to the madness of the world of the senses exploding at that time with new drugs, a consumer culture wanting you to buy, buy, buy onda, Cold War brewing conflict in distant lands such as Vietnam, Buddha accepted food both good or bad whatever came from richer, poor, without distinction and having filled his alms dish. He then returned back to solitude, where he meditated his prayer for the emancipation of the world from its beast, your grief and incessant bloody deeds of birth and death, death and birth. The ignorant, gnashing, Screaming wars. The murder of dogs, the histories follies. Parent meeting child, child tormenting child lover ruining lover Robert rating. *** leering, cocky, crazy wild blood louts moaning for more blood lust, utter salts running up and down, simple minded among channels of their own, making simpering everywhere. One monstrous beast raining forms from a central glut all buried an unfathomable darkness, crowing for Rosie Hope that can only be complete extinction at base, innocent and without any vestige of self nature, whatever for. Should the causes and conditions of the ignorant insanity of the world be removed, the nature of its non insane, non ignorance world would be revealed. Like the child of dawn entering heaven through the morning in the Lake of the Mind Toys by Herbie Hancock. Incidentally, an American Buddhist, the hippie idea of dropping out seems to trace a direct line to Buddha, and there were plenty of broken homes when people chose to discover themselves, leaving behind families and responsibilities. But hang on a minute. I want to connect it back to the life of the rial man who did that? What happens when a prince walks away from his kingdom? Siddhartha may have bean reconciled eventually to the wife and child he abandoned. But how to truly follow the ideas of the Buddha remain a challenge, especially to those in the West. For an ex monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Stephen Bachelor, the transformation of the prince said that the into an enlightened being remains a vital storey for today. Prince said. Artist dilemma still faces us today. We, too, in your ourselves in the palace is off. What is familiar and secure we to sense there is more to life than indulging desires and warding off fears. We too, feel anguish most acutely when we break out of are habitual routines on witness ourselves, hovering between birth and death, our birth and death. Everyone collaborates in everyone else's forgetting. Parents seek to repair. There are spring for life. Social and political institutions are there to benefit the living, not the dead religions largely offer consolation. In one way or another, we managed to avoid the questions that existence raises treating birth and death as physical events in time and space. They become isolated, fax. Problematic but manageable, kept at a distance from the here and now, where we are safe getting through the day. No matter how expert we manage our lives. How convincing an image of wellbeing we project. We still find ourselves involved with what we hate and torn apart from what we love. We still don't get what we want. True, we experienced joy, success, love, bliss. But in the end we find ourselves once more prone to anguish. Okay. Acceptance by Ryuichi Sakamoto from Little Buddha, The Hollywood film exploring the life of Siddhartha. If we're looking for modern princes and kings there surely in the world of sports, I will never forget hearing the rugby player Jonny Wilkinson on the radio a few years ago, discussing how Buddhism had transformed his attitude to life on toe winning the trick was learning through all those injuries to see that everything is impermanent, he once said. So if you get used to that now, you'll get more fulfilment out of what you're doing. So my life's become more about internal fulfilment than an external tick in a box or a cup to hold up or a player of the year award. The Historical Buddha. The former Prince Siddhartha died near Cu Cynara at the age of 80 after 40 years of teaching the stepping stones to enlightenment that Buddhist teachers maintain today the combination of morality, meditation and wisdom. His death is eloquently described by the Vietnamese monk. Take not Han. With music from the great American composer and Buddhist Philip Glass. The Buddha look quietly over the community and then said Monks, listen to what I now say. If that is both, that is death. Be diligent in your efforts to attain liberation. The Buddha closed his eyes. He had spoken his last words. The earth shook. Sal blossoms fell like rain. Everyone felt their minds and bodies tremble. They knew the Buddha had passed into nirvana. They lit torches. Sounds of chanting echoed impressively in the dark knight, as everyone placed his full awareness on the words in the sutras. After a lengthy recitation, venerable Anna Rhoda gave a dharma talk. He praised the Buddha's attainments, his wisdom, compassion, virtue, concentration, joy and equanimity. Venerable and under recounted beautiful episodes from the Buddhist life throughout the night, the two venerable took done speaking, the 500 vehicles and the 300 les disciples listened quietly as torches burned down. New ones were lit to take their places until dawn broke. The most remarkable legacy of said parathas journey of self discovery lies away from India in the global march and transformation of Buddhist teachings to Tibet, China and Japan, north and throughout Southeast Asia and now in the West, where it's followed in monasteries and meditation centres across Europe and America. The Buddha was originally represented by the image of his absence to footprints, an empty throne, a tree or a pillar. Figurative statues only started to appear in the first century a D. As a new culture grew up around this new faith. I'm sure the young Siddhartha would find it strange how many thousands more statues off him have bean created like the one in my sitting room Precisely because he waas a teacher, a prince who walked away from being an emperor. So what do you see when you look now at a statue of the Buddha. Still an exotic, inscrutable smile or a piece of decorative art Or a question E. I leave you with a poem by the 13th century Zen monk Die Kaku. Whether you are going or staying or sitting or lying down, the whole world is your own self. You must find out whether the mountains, rivers, grass and forests exist in your own mind or exist outside it. Analyse the 10,000 things I sic them Minute Lee on. When you take this to the limit, he will come to the limit less. When you search into it, you come to the end of search where thinking goes no further on. Distinctions vanish when you smash the citadel of doubt, then the Buddha is simply yourself.