Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Amy Miller presents the Four Sights, the pivotal spiritual crisis that awakened Prince Siddhartha to suffering. In his late twenties, sheltered in his palace, he ventured out and encountered sickness, old age, death, and a wandering mendicant—experiences unknown to him until that day. Struck by the reality that these afflictions would befall him, his loved ones, and all beings, he resolved to find an end to suffering and abandoned his princely life. Miller traces his seven-year search through extreme asceticism with five fellow seekers, his near-fatal starvation, and the pivotal moment when a boatman’s words about tuning a stringed instrument revealed the Middle Way. A woman then offered him nourishing milk rice, restoring his strength to reach enlightenment. Accessible to newcomers as foundational Buddhist narrative.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1.05 The Four Sights – Copy.mp3
UUID: a44bce1d-5dd7-4253-a699-29aa5d727828
Teacher: Amy Miller
Collection: Nutshell no details (Amy Miller)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~612
So at one point in his life, when he was approximately in his late twenties, he went out of the kingdom with some servants. And in one day, he saw four things he had never quite experienced before, four different beings. He saw a sick person, an old person, a dead body, and he saw a wandering mendicant, a spiritual being, like a monk. He never saw these things before, so it really impressed him. And he asked his attendants about them.
So when he saw the sick person, and he said, what is this? The attendants, not sure how to proceed, looked at each other. And they said, this is a sick person. And they explained this would happen to him. This happens to people.
And he couldn’t believe. He had never really witnessed sickness before. And then he saw an old person and asked them the same question. And they said, if if you live quite a while, you’ll become old, as will your father, your wife, your son. So he couldn’t believe.
So it’s quite shocking. And when he saw the dead body, it really startled him that this would happen to him and his loved ones and his friends and the whole kingdom, that they would die in what looked like a terrible way, full of suffering. And the Buddha saw also the religious person, the spiritual person. And this interested him. What’s this person doing?
And what was the point? What were they searching for? What were they wandering about for? What were they learning? So he returned to the kingdom with this new knowledge and looked at all about him, the exquisite palace and the grounds and all the life he had, and couldn’t bear to see it in its suffering falling into decay.
So from this beginning of renunciation, he basically decided he had had enough of that life and had an attitude to give it up and left the palace grounds, compelled to find an end to the suffering. He felt that there had to be an end to it. He couldn’t bear to live anymore in the current life that he had and had to go out and find an end to the suffering. So several years passed, about seven years, the Buddha tried various practices. He met some teachers in India.
He met other people seeking the truth. And finally, the Buddha and some disciples, particularly five main disciples, found that a path of very austere asceticism, starving themselves, eating maybe one rice grain a day was the way to end the suffering, was the way to reach a very high level of meditative absorption that may help you overcome your suffering. So after doing this for a period of time, the Buddha was so weak it was very hard to practice. So basically, at that point, he was sitting by the river, and a small wooden boat floated by with a musician in it who was tuning his stringed instrument. And the musician said, for the instrument to play perfectly, the instrument can be tuned neither too tightly nor too loosely.
So the Buddha took this as a message that the path lay in the middle way, in a balance. And the balance was between having everything he had as prince Siddhartha and from starving himself. Both of those paths were not going to lead him to an end of suffering. And at that point, a maiden appeared who offered the Buddha a beautiful milk rice porridge. It had special qualities, and when he ate it, it gave him all the energy that he needed to continue his path to enlightenment.