The Path of Light - Rendered for the First Time Into English Fromt He Bodhicharyavatara of Santi-Deva, a Manual of Maha-Yana Buddhism #232950

About a hundred miles north from Benares, on the border of Nepal, where the plain of the Ganges begins to rise to the uplands at the edge of the mighty Himalayas, lies a little region which was once the home of the Sakyas, a class of Kshatriyas, or men of the warrior caste. To Suddhodana of Kapila — vastu, a nobleman of the Gautama family of this tribe, was born about 560 b.c. A son Siddhartha. When he grew up Siddhartha likewise married and begot a son, Rahula by name. And then, when he was about twenty-nine years of age, as tradition relates, Siddhartha became weary of the world and the flesh. The ghastly riddle of Life — Life with its endless vicissitudes of phantom pleasure and ever-renewed pain — was ceaselessly pressing itself upon him, as it has pressed itself upon so many thousands of other Hindus, and he could find no rest in his father's home. So he left the world, to become a wandering beggar-student, in the hope of finding the key to the great mystery in the teachings of some master of philosophic lore. But none of the teachers whom he met could satisfy the hunger of his soul, and the severest mortifications of the flesh brought him no light.