We have the assurance that as a youth, Gautama, like Jesus, exhibited a
serious mindedness and an insight into matters spiritual, which astonished
and dumbfounded his hearers, and the sages who gave him respectful
attention.
Some accounts even go so far as to state that at the very moment of his
birth the young prince was able to speak, and that his words ascended "even
to the gods of the uppermost Brahma-world."
Divesting the traditions that surround the birth and early life of the
world's great masters, of much that has been interpolated by a designing
priesthood, we may yet conclude that a certain seriousness, and a deep
sympathy with the sorrows of their fellowmen, would naturally characterize
these inspired ones, even while they were still in their early youth.
It is evident that the young Prince Siddhartha was subject to meditation
and that these meditations led at times to complete trance.
It is reported that one day while out riding in all the pomp and
accoutrements of the son of a ruling king, he was visited by an angel (a
messenger from the gods of Devachan), and told that if he would lessen
the sorrows of the world that he must renounce his right to his father's
kingdom and go into the jungle, becoming a hermit, and devoting his life to
fasting, prayer and meditation, in order to fit himself for the work of
preaching the "way of liberation," which consisted of, first of all, to
take no life; be pure in mind; be as the humblest, which latter admonition
found little favor with the world of his personal environment where caste
was and still is, a seemingly ineradicable race-thought.
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