AN UNHEARD-OF CONCEPT BEFORE GOTAMA BUDDHA'S DISCOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT
This discovery was not the secret of Awakening, Vipassana Absorption nor the plethora of core philosophical theories of what we now call Buddhism. It was the access to a Meditation that was profound and different than any form of anterior meditations. It allowed him, after advancing upon the traditional Brahminic Jhana meditations and suffering austerities for many years, to deny these and return to this early meditative experience, passing an important mental frontier that actually forms the base of all True Buddha Dharma Meditations and our advanced Chan Contemplations.
This meditative experience took place long before the important meditation under the Bodhi Tree and is generally overlooked by Buddhist groups as an insignificant event. Yet it was sufficiently important for Buddha himself to refer to it personally on many occasions.
In the Pali Canon we find little written about the early life of Buddha, which makes it all the more important to understand those events that have been recorded, cutting away all the superstition and dogma which might cloud the truth. After six years of useless austerities in search of Truth and liberation and after developing and perfecting the eight jhanas taught by his two teachers, he returned and developed that first meditation that he experienced under the roseapple tree as a youth.
This took place at the traditional plowing festival (wappa mangala) at the agricultural village near Kapilavastu conducted by his father Sudhodhana. This traditional festival was an auspicious sowing of seeds in which the king and his ministers took part in this first sowing. Gotama, it is supposed, had taken part and was resting beneath a roseapple tree. He sat and planned entering the first four Jhanas. Fortunately he did not procceed in a normal way and at a certain point he varied his access, perhaps even by accident, so it was this discovery that is the important interface that allowed advances in the perfection of the end of knowledge in the present life and world.
Various commentaries, and there are many, give his age of that time between sixteen and twenty-nine years. After revewing these documents I am inclined to believe that twenty-nine years is the most likely age at this time, despite the fact that it destroys the romantic image of this prince accomplishing such a prodigious task at a young age.
With this as a historical focus we will look at this precious moment during Gotama's meditation, but first we will give a background vision of the human afferent pathway and show where meditation has its effect.