To one driven as he was to the conclusion that existence was a burden rather than a blessing, death, according to the belief in which he had been nurtured, could afford no relief; but hope seemed to dawn for him as he thought of the happy yellow-robed sages who, freed from his horror, were tranquil and dignified, abstracted alike from pleasure and pain. So after a period of irresolution and struggle, in the very prime of his manhood, he stole away from his wife and his new-born child, and cast in his lot with the forest recluses. Having lived some time with them, and having found that their ascetic discipline failed to satisfy his aspirations, he left them, and joined two philosophic Brahmans, who taught him the science of meditation in its lower and higher degrees. Though he had profited so much by their instruction and discipline that he rose in six years from being a disciple to a teacher, he confessed that he had not found by their methods the imperishable and permanent quietude which he coveted. So, abandoning all his disciples, he withdrew into solitude, and plunged into fasting so rigorous that he nearly destroyed himself; then, finding that the secret of deliverance was not thus to be obtained, he returned, amid the contempt of his former companions, to a more genial mode of life. Then, all alone in the jungle, its manifold discomforts, the memories of home, and the fruitlessness of all his endeavours, assailed him with the force of a temptation to desist from the quest; but rallying all his powers for one supreme effort, he eventually, under a banyan-tree at Bohimanda, triumphed—awoke as one before whom all illusion had vanished, and who by no divine illumination, but by his own personal energy, had attained to knowledge of the causes of all things, and had at last become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.