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Benares. His father, of the Gautama line, ruled a small kingdom and claimed his throne as a
member of the hereditary warrior class. Hereditary classes, today's caste system, had been
imposed on India by conquerors from an area around the Caspian Sea in about 1500 BCE.
Calling themselves Aryans (“noble people”), these conquerors descended on India to cre-
ate a society organized on four hereditary classes. At the apex were Brahmins, the priestly
class, guardians of the sacred rituals. Next were Kshatriya, the warrior class, keepers of
civil order and defenders of government and political boundaries. Beneath the Kshatriya
were Viasya, the caste of farmers and artisans. And near the bottom of the social ladder
were Shudra, consigned forever to serve as peasants and laborers. Siddhartha's rejection of
hereditary castes, which forbade intermarriage and precluded social advancement, would
become a foundation of his teaching.
SIDDHARTHA'S EARLY YEARS
Great men and women often attract biographers' embellishment. Think of George Wash-
ington and the cherry tree. The story is told that Siddhartha's upbringing resulted from
a soothsayer's prophecy that the young prince would renounce his throne to become a
seeker of wisdom and a social reformer. To foreclose that future, his father distracted
Siddhartha by giving him palaces and 40,000 dancing girls. When he left the royal grounds,
guards swept the roads clear of the sick, the dying, the crippled, and the aged so that Sid-
dartha would not see the poverty and disease stalking the countryside. “Every year the
river flooded the (Ganges) valley, destroying overnight crops wrung from a harsh earth;
yearly too the monsoons came, spawning famine and drought and spreading their leav-
ings—dysentery, cholera, and countless other ills.”
[175]
An early embellishment recounts Siddhartha's visit to his father's harem. There he sees
old and aged crones among beautiful women. Why and how, Siddhartha ponders, do we
age, and why do we suffer? Siddhartha is now in his twenties, and his life is embellished
with the legend of the Four Passing Sights. Despite the best efforts of his guards, the first of
the forbidden sights to assault his eyes was an old man “bent in body, leaning on a staff and
side, a corpse. On a fourth side, he saw a monk “with shaven head, an ochre robe and (beg-
ging) bowl,” thus making the prince aware of an alternative lifestyle—withdrawal from
of suffering and unhappiness. At age twenty-nine, Siddhartha slips away from his lovely
young wife and their beautiful child (yes, the king has given him the jewel of the kingdom
for a bride). And thus Siddhartha begins his journey toward a life of contemplation, teach-
ing, discovery, and enlightenment.
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