The Four Sights

On the journey, he caught sight of some old men. "Who or what are they, Channa?" "They are old Siddhartha, old age withers away life, it destroys memory, beauty and strength, it happens to us all" Channa explains. Siddhartha also saw sickness, he saw a person in pain. Siddhartha further questioned Channa about what he saw. Channa explained "no-one reaches the moment of death without falling sick at least once". Finally Siddhartha saw a dead man and asked, "What is Death?". "Death", said Channa, "comes to every one in every family. When the body becomes old and stiff like wood, it has to be burned like wood".

Siddhartha is confronted with the sights of old age, disease and death. It cannot be that he literally saw these sights for the first time. In twenty odd years of life, and in ancient India at that, it is impossible that he never had so much as a cold, or witnessed that the people around him changed, with their hair growing whiter, bodies growing frail, or that older loved one's died and disappeared. What is being portrayed here is the sense that he is finally seeing and understanding these things for the first time, realising them, fully experiencing them. Life is strange, birth is strange, aging is strange, illness is strange, and so unfair; and finally there is death, the most unfair thing of all. He is struck by the irrationality of it; the cruelty of it...to just have a life cut off and ended. It's all pretty bizarre.

He saw all of these sights and they affected him greatly, but Siddhartha resolved to find an answer why life is like this.

Siddhartha is having an intense experience of the existential fact of impermanence, of the inescapable truths that life is about old age, disease and finally death. He is having an experience of Dukkha, a sense of limitation, frustration, and this is the fundamental starting point of the Buddhist path.

The Buddha's Experience of Dukkha

There is not a satisfactory translation for the word Dukkha. One translation is "suffering", and another is "unsatisfactoriness", and yet another is "anguish". But there is no good English equivalent; it is one of these words we should simply adopt into English - like another Indian word Dharma.

H. G. Wells called the Buddha's sense of Dukkha "a fine mind seeking employment". Siddhartha was basically BORED, frustrated with life. Dukkha is a sense of limitation, frustration; things never go quite the way you want. You just get everything perfect, and something happens to spoil it. The wonderful holiday ends, the relationship cools, it rains on your day off. It is a longing that there should be more to life than this!