Siddhartha Gautama's Four Passing Sights

Buddhism is a religion that originated in India and was founded around the late 6th century B.C.E. The religion was founded by a renouncer by the name of Siddhartha Gautama, later to be recognized by the title of Buddha, meaning enlightened one. Buddha’s long journey to enlightenment included many accounts that helped shape this religion that held dominance for several centuries. Siddhartha Gautama was born into a kshatriya family around 560 B.C.E where upon his birth, it was predicted that he would become a great king unless he saw the Four Passing Sights (a sick person, an elderly person, a corpse, and a holy man). Through the efforts of his father, Siddhartha was shielded from the idea of pain and suffering and lived a privileged childhood full of luxuries. As he began to mature, Siddhartha gradually witnessed the Four Passing Sights. These Four Passing Sights, which his father tried so hard to protect him from, opened Buddha’s eyes to
After his first attempt was not successful in finding answers, he tried a new second idea which was for him to become an ascetic. Joined by five other monks, Gautama began a long six years of practicing severe asceticism in which he searched for any means that were unpleasant or caused him harm to fully understand his question of the miseries of life. Despite this six-year process of some of the most severely recorded asceticism in history which included sitting in awkward and painful positions for hours and starvation that led him to being so thin that he could feel his backbone when he touched his stomach, Gautama did not find the answers and enlightenment that he was searching for and had to find another way in which he could truly understand the reasons for suffering and misery in the human