The man who ran away from home
A question, before any of this
What would have to happen for you to walk out of your entire life?
Take the question seriously for a moment, and make it harder than it wants to be. Do not imagine a bad marriage, or a job you hate, or a diagnosis. Assume the life is good. Assume you are healthy, well liked, comfortable, and — this is the part that matters — assume you are enjoying it. What would have to happen then?
That is exactly the situation in the story you are about to read. A young man with an unusually good life, who is not depressed, not oppressed, not in any trouble whatsoever, and who is described as delighted by his own morning, leaves. And the strange thing — the thing worth a week of your attention — is that nothing happens to him. He sees three ordinary sights that everybody sees. Then he goes home and starts packing.
This is the founding story of Buddhism, and you can hold it however you like — as biography, as legend, as a poem about someone's twenties. It was written in Sanskrit about five hundred years after the man died, by a poet named Aśvaghoṣa, and carried into Chinese in the early fifth century. You are reading two chapters of it.
Those are the only three words in this session you might not already have. There will not be a list like this every week.
The storyTwo chapters, in order — read them before anything below
The first is three rides out of the city. The second is a fourth ride, and what he does about it. Chinese on the left, English on the right — ignore the Chinese unless you want it.
Sorrow
The king has the roads swept clean of every old, sick and broken body before letting his son ride out. It does not work.
Read it →Leaving the City
A man plowing a field, a tired ox, and the first thing the prince sees that nobody arranged for him.
Read it →Come back when you have finished both. The rest of this page assumes you have.
Three momentsPlaces worth stopping — not lessons, just places
1 · He asks the same question three times, and gets the same answer
The prince let out a long sigh, and asked the charioteer further: "Is it only he alone who grows old in this way, or shall we too, in time, come to this?"
The charioteer answered again: "Even you, most honored one, have your share in this; as time passes, the body changes of itself, and this is certain to come — beyond any doubt at all. Among the young and vigorous, not one fails to grow old; the whole world knows this, and yet goes on seeking its pleasures all the same."
He asks it about the old man. A few pages later he asks it about the sick man — "Is it only this man who falls ill, or must everyone else come to this as well?" And then about the corpse — "Does only this man die, or does the whole world come to this as well?" Three times, the same question, in the same words. Three times, yes.
Now notice what the charioteer is actually doing. He is not delivering news. He is not a teacher, he has no doctrine, and he is plainly embarrassed to be answering at all — the first time, the text says he "hesitated in his heart, not daring to answer with the plain truth." What he tells the prince is something any adult in that kingdom could have told him.
And then he adds the line that makes this a story rather than an anecdote: the whole world knows this, and yet goes on seeking its pleasures all the same. Everybody already knows. Knowing is not the thing that is missing.
2 · The one thing nobody arranged
"By the roadside he saw a man plowing, turning up the soil and killing the worms and insects within it; and at this his heart was moved to sorrow and pity, a pain that pierced him more sharply than any thorn."
"He saw, too, the plowman himself — worn and toiling, his form gaunt and haggard, his hair disheveled and streaming with sweat, dust caked thick upon his body. The plowing ox, too, was spent with exhaustion, its tongue hanging out, its breath coming in short, urgent gasps."
Here is a detail almost every retelling of this story leaves out, and it changes everything. The old man, the sick man, the corpse and the wandering monk are all gods in disguise. The poem says so plainly each time — a god of the Pure Abodes, taking a shape, positioning himself at the roadside, visible to nobody in the procession but the prince and his driver. Four staged encounters, each one arranged for an audience of one.
The plowman is not. Nobody conjured him. He is a man doing his job on an ordinary afternoon, with a tired animal and worms in the furrow, and he has been there every single day of the prince's life, a few miles from the palace.
And it is this — not the corpse, not the wanderer — that makes the prince get down off his horse, send his companions away, sit under a tree by himself, and think for the first time without anyone prompting him. If you want one sentence for what changed in this man, it is not that he was shown something. It is that he finally saw something that had not been put there for him.
3 · The sentence where he turns the problem around
"To endure this great suffering throughout one's whole life without ever perceiving it for what it is, and yet to feel aversion at seeing old age, sickness, and death in others — this itself is the deepest affliction of all."
"I now seek the supreme Dharma, and ought not to be like the rest of the world — bound myself to old age, sickness, and death, and yet turning around to despise these very things in others."
Read that first sentence twice, because it is not saying what a first pass suggests.
The obvious reading is that he is upset about old age, sickness and death. He is — but that is not what he calls "the deepest affliction." The deepest affliction is the combination: carrying the thing yourself, not noticing that you are, and then recoiling from it when you meet it in somebody else.
Which is to say: the problem he identifies is not the old man by the road. It is his own flinch on seeing him. He caught himself doing something — recoiling from a person on the grounds of a condition he shares — and decided that reflex was the actual disease. Everything he does for the rest of his life comes out of that one observation.
A small thing worth carrying: his father's plan was to sweep the roads. Not to lie to him, not to argue with him — simply to arrange that he never see it. It is a completely reasonable plan, it is what love often looks like, and everyone reading this has done it for somebody.
One thing to tryThis week · takes no time at all · nobody needs to know
The king's whole strategy was to clear the road. This week, notice yours.
You do not have to look. This is important, and it is the opposite of what a self-improvement exercise would ask. Do not open the letter. Do not have the conversation. Just note, in one line, that you looked away, and what from.
At the end of the week, read the list. The prince's road was swept by someone else, on the grounds that he loved his pleasures too much to bear the sight. Yours is swept by you. The question the story leaves open is not whether the sweeping works — it is what is on the road anyway.
Five questionsClick an answer for immediate feedback · nothing is recorded
One question, left open
What have you already seen that you have not yet let mean anything?
We began by asking what would have to happen. The story's answer is: nothing. Nothing happened to him. He saw three things every person in that kingdom had seen a hundred times, and a man plowing a field. The only difference was that he let them land. So the honest version of the question is not what would have to happen to you. It is what has already happened, and what you have decided it does not mean.
Session 2 · The father who never stopped waiting
This week's story is usually told as a heroic departure. Next week is the other half of it — the palace he left, the people in it, and what happened when, years later, he came back. It is a much shorter read, and a considerably harder one.