Sujata's bowl, and the lute string.
Six years of austerity had reduced him to a skeleton who could feel his spine through his stomach, and he was no closer. A village girl offered him milk-rice and he ate it; his five companions walked off in disgust at the backsliding. A passing musician's remark supplied the image the tradition kept — a string too slack will not sound, a string too tight will snap. He ate, recovered, sat down under the tree, and woke by morning.
This is the hinge of the whole biography and it is usually skipped. Six years of extreme austerity — the texts describe him eating a single grain of rice a day and being able to touch his spine through his belly — produced nothing, and the middle way was arrived at empirically, as the conclusion of a failed experiment. The five companions who left in disgust are the same five he sought out at Sarnath to teach first, and the reason the first sermon opens by defending the middle way is that they were the ones who had to be won round. Sujata, who fed him, gets a name in the record, which for a village woman in that literature is unusual.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.