According to Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha “Sid” Gautama was a prince born into the Shakya clan around the 5th or 6th century BCE, in Lumbini, which is now modern-day Nepal. His father, Suddhodana, was a chieftain or a king. His mother, Maya, died shortly after his birth. Sid was raised in luxury in Kapilavastu, sheltered from suffering, and trained in princely duties like hanging around the palace and wearing nice clothes. He married Yasodhara, and they had a son, Rahula. Despite Sid’s privileged life, he grew restless, seeking meaning beyond material comforts, which led him to renounce his royal life at around age 29, to pursue spiritual awakening and a lot of walking and to rediscover suffering.
His wandering took him from Nepal to India where, at age 35, he determined to sit under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, which is now Bihar in modern-day India. He sat there for 49 days, meditating, hoping to attain enlightenment, and to become the Buddha; although he had no idea who or what the Buddha was. When he awoke, his assistant Ananda, seeing Siddartha’s round belly, reasoned he must either be the Buddha or a sumo wrestler. Since they weren’t in Japan, Ananda chose the former.
Ananda’s astute powers of observation and deduction notwithstanding, the Buddha recognized his transformation as a result of five key insights:
- Four Noble Truths: He came to understand the nature of suffering (it hurts), its cause (he was sitting on a protruding root of the Bodhi tree), its cessation (he asked Ananda for a pillow), and the path to liberation (he finally stood up).
- He freed himself from ignorance, attachment, and aversion by freeing himself from delusion (he’d thought the root would make a comfortable seat).
- He gained three forms of knowledge:
- Recollection of his past lives (he’d never sat on a root before).
- Karmic insight about the ways in which actions (sitting on roots) shape existence (pain).
- Liberation from the cycle of samsara (determining not to sit on roots in his next lives).
4. Inner Certainty: The Buddha’s awakening was not an external validation but an internal realization that he’d been nuts to sit on that root.
5. Verification Through Teaching: He taught his disciples to spare themselves the pain of sitting on roots, encouraging them to carry camping chairs should they decide to stop and sit under trees.
After his enlightenment, he wrote no texts; that is, he taught orally and didn’t record his teachings. Ananda did the best he could to write out the Buddha’s teachings after his death (the Buddha’s), but between his carpal tunnel syndrome and The Great India Ink Shortage, the works were left incomplete. In fact, the first written records of the Buddha’s teachings were not created until several centuries after his death.
Those written records led to the establishment of four principal schools of Buddhism
- Theravada (The School of the Elders), which emphasized individual liberation through ambulatory devices like canes, walkers, and crutches.
- Mahayana (The Great Vehicle), which focuses more on mechanized devices like electric walkers, mobility scooters, and stair lifts.
- Vajrayana (The Diamond Vehicle) is an extension of Mahayana, emphasizing bling, on the theory that it’s better to look good than to feel good.
- Navayana (The New Vehicle) is a modern school, focusing on EVs in support of green energy (हरित ऊर्जा).
During his meditations, however, the Buddha was particularly preoccupied by one thing. And the reason he sat until the very last second of those 49 days is that he wanted to enlighten himself about why an enterprise called International House of Pancakes could call itself such a thing when it had no restaurants in India.
It took time, but thanks to the insatiable curiosity and the tireless persistence of the Buddha, the first IHOP restaurant in India opened on June 4, 2017, in CyberHub, Gurgaon, India. To this day, in honor of the Buddha, the restaurant gives coupons to each of its patrons for discounts on camping chairs.
