As soon as he had mulled over the details of that childhood experience, Gotama became convinced that his hunch was correct. This was indeed the way to Nibbana. Now all he had to do was prove it. What had produced that mood of calm happiness that had modulated so easily into the first jhana? An essential element had been what Gotama called “seclusion.” He had been left alone; he could never have entered the ecstatic state if his nurses had distracted him with their chatter. Meditation required privacy and silence. But this seclusion went beyond physical solitude. Sitting under the rose-apple tree, his mind had been separated from desire for material things and from anything unwholesome and unprofitable. Since he had left home six years before, Gotama had been fighting his human nature and crushing its every impulse. He had come to distrust any kind of pleasure. But, he now asked himself, why should he be afraid of the type of joy he had experienced on that long-ago afternoon? That pure delight had had nothing to do with greedy craving or sensual desire. Some joyful experiences could actually lead to an abandonment of egotism and to the achievement of an exalted yogic state. Again, as soon as he had posed the question to himself, Gotama responded with his usual, confident decisiveness: “I am not afraid of such pleasures, “ he said. The secret was to reproduce the seclusion that had led to his trance, and foster such wholesome (kusala) states of mind as the disinterested compassion that had made him grieve for the insects and the shoots of young grass. At the same time, he would carefully avoid any state of mind that would not be helpful or would impede his enlightenment.

He had, of course, already been behaving along these lines by observing the “five prohibitions” which had forbidden such “unhelpful” (akusala) activities as violence, lying, stealing, intoxication and sex. But now, he realized, this was not enough. He must cultivate the positive attitudes that were the opposite of these five restraints. Later, he would say that a person seeking enlightenment must be “energetic, resolute and persevering” in pursuing those “helpful,” “wholesome” or “skillful” (kusala) states that would promote spiritual health. Ahimsa (harmlessness) could only take one part of the way: instead of simply avoiding violence, an aspirant must behave gently and kindly to everything and everybody; he must cultivate thoughts of loving-kindness to counter any incipient feelings of ill will. It was very important not to tell lies, but it was also crucial to engage in “right talk” and make sure that whatever you said was worth saying: “reasoned, accurate, clear, and beneficial.” Besides refraining from stealing, a bhikkhu should positively rejoice in taking whatever alms he was given, expressing no personal preference, and should take delight in possessing the bare minimum. The yogins had always maintained that avoiding the five prohibitions would lead to “infinite happiness,” but by deliberately cultivating these positive states of mind, such exstasis could surely be redoubled. Once this “skillful” behavior became so habitual that it was second nature, the aspirant, Gotama believed, would “feel within himself a pure joy,” similar to if not identical with the bliss that he had felt as a boy under the rose-apple tree.

This almost Proustian recollection was, according to the texts, a turning point for Gotama. He resolved from then on to work with human nature and not fight against it-amplifying states of mind that were conducive to enlightenment and turning his back on anything that would stunt his potential. Gotama was developing what he called a “Middle Way,” which shunned physical and emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism (which could be just as destructive) on the other. He decided that he must immediately abandon the punitive regime that he had followed with his five companions, which had made him so ill that there was no way he could experience the “pure joy” that was a prelude to liberation. For the first time in months, he took solid food, starting with what the texts call kummasa, a soothing milky junket or rice pudding. When the five bhikkhus saw him eating, they were horrified and walked away in disgust, convinced that Gotama had abandoned the struggle for enlightenment.

But this, of course, was not the case. Gotama must have nursed himself slowly back to health, and during this time he probably started to develop his own special kind of yoga. He was no longer hoping to discover his eternal Self, since he was beginning to think that this Self was just another one of the delusions that held people back from enlightenment. His yoga was designed to help him become better acquainted with his human nature, so that he could make it work for him in the attainment of Nibbana. First, as a preliminary to meditation, came the practice that he called “mindfulness” (sati), in which he scrutinized his behavior at every moment of the day. He noted the ebb and flow of his feelings and sensations, together with the fluctuations of his consciousness. If sensual desire arose, instead of simply crushing it, he took note of what had given rise to it and how soon it faded away. He observed the way his senses and thoughts interacted with the external world, and made himself conscious of his every bodily action. He would become aware of the way he walked, bent down or stretched his limbs, and of his behavior while “eating, drinking, chewing, and tasting, in defecating, walking, standing, sitting, sleeping, waking, speaking and keeping silent.” He noticed the way ideas coursed through his mind and the constant stream of desires and irritations that could plague him in a brief half-hour. He became “mindful” of the way he responded to a sudden noise or a change in the temperature, and saw how quickly even a tiny thing disturbed his peace of mind. This “mindfulness” was not cultivated in a spirit of neurotic introspection. Gotama had not put his humanity under the microscope in this way in order to castigate himself for his “sins.” Sin had no place in his system, since any guilt would simply be “unhelpful”: it would imbed an aspirant in the ego that he was trying to transcend. Gotama’s use of the words kusala and akusala are significant. Sex, for example, was not listed among the five yama because it was sinful, but because it would not help a person reach Nibbana; sex was emblematic of the desire that imprisoned human beings in samsara; it expended energy that would be better employed in yoga. A bhikkhu refrained from sex as an athlete might abstain from certain foods before an important competition. Sex had its uses, but it was not “helpful” to one engaged in the “noble quest.” Gotama was not observing his human nature in order to pounce on his failings, but was becoming acquainted with the way it worked in order to exploit its capacities. He had become convinced that the solution to the problem of suffering lay within himself, in what he called “this fathom-long carcass, this body and mind.” Deliverance would come from the refinement of his own mundane nature, and so he must investigate it and get to know it as intimately as an equestrian learns to know the horse he is training.

But the practice of mindfulness also made him more acutely aware than ever of the pervasiveness of both suffering and the desire that gave rise to it. All these thoughts and longings that crowded into his consciousness were of such short duration. Everything was impermanent (anicca). However intense a craving might be, it soon petered out and was replaced by something quite different. Nothing lasted long, not even the bliss of meditation. The transitory nature of life was one of the chief causes of suffering, and as he recorded his feelings, moment by moment, Gotama also became aware that the dukkha of life was not confined to the major traumas of sickness, old age and death. It happened on a daily, even hourly basis, in all the little disappointments, rejections, frustrations and failures that befall us in the course of a single day: “Pain, grief and despair are dukkha,” he would explain later, “being forced into proximity with what we hate is suffering, being separated from what we love is suffering, not getting what we want is suffering.” True, there was pleasure in life, but once Gotama had subjected this to the merciless scrutiny of mindfulness, he noticed how often our satisfaction meant suffering for others. The prosperity of one person usually depends upon the poverty or exclusion of somebody else; when we get something that makes us happy, we immediately start to worry about losing it; we pursue an object of desire, even when we know in our heart of hearts that it will make us unhappy in the long run.